Tag: fantasy

Reading round-up: late May

30th May 2013 / / 0 Comments

Notes on some of the books I”ve read recently:

Caroline Smailes, The Drowning of Arthur Braxton (2013). A properly wonderful tale of water nymphs living in a northern English swimming baths, and the boy who falls for one of them. The clash between timeless magic and the modern, rather mundane, setting is amusing at times; but a deeper sense of something genuinely strange and dangerous also emerges. Smailes tells a coming-of-age story with an atmosphere all its own.

Richard C. Morais, Buddhaland Brooklyn (2012). Seido Oda is dispatched from his monastery in Japan to set up his sect’s first temple in America – Brooklyn, to be precise. Once there, Oda finds a ragbag of individuals who mean well, but who aren’t the kind of Buddhist he is used to. This is an engaging tale of different cultures meeting, as both Oda and the Brooklyn Buddhists find that they can learn from each other.

Gila Green, King of the Class (2013). A few years hence in Israel, Eve has a decision to make about her relationship when her fiancé Manny embraces religion. A decade later, she faces new pressures when her son goes missing. Green’s debut examines issues of identity, faith and love, as it moves between character-based drama and mystery-thriller.

Peggy Riley, Amity & Sorrow (2013). Amaranth,  one of the wives from a fundamentalist cult, flees the cult’s compound with her two daughters, Amity and Sorrow. One of the girls responds well to the outside world; the other longs to return. Riley goes back to examine how and why Amaranth joined the cult, and what led to her leaving; as well exploring the lives and feelings of her three protagonists in the present. All adds up to an insightful and multi-faceted character study.

Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (2007). When I was a child, I read a lot of Gyles Brandreth’s books of obscure facts and puzzles (his Word Box was very nearly one of my choices for Simon’s My Life in Books feature). Now Brandreth has written a series of murder mysteries starring Oscar Wilde as the detective; this (my reading group’s latest choice) is the first, and sees Wilde’s journalist friend Robert Sherard as narrator, and Arthur Conan Doyle in a supporting role. Brandreth’s novel is quite the romp, with Wilde becoming a Sherlock Holmes figure; but it feels too much as though the cards of the mystery are being stacked up to be revealed at the ed, making the journey that bit less involving.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Naomi Alderman

9th May 2013 / / 1 Comment

I heard Naomi Alderman read from her novel The Liars’ Gospel at an event in 2012. It is a mystery to me why I’ve not yet got around to reading the book, because I thought Alderman’s excerpt was superb – visceral (literally so, as it described the ritual sacrifice of a lamb) and evocative. Her story in the Granta anthology, ‘Soon and In Our Days’, is very different, but just as good.

We join the Rosenbaum family at their home in Hendon for Passover. As the father of the household recites the verses that call forth the Prophet Elijah, down comes Elijah, fiery chariot and all, saying, ‘Happy Passover to you. Have I missed much?’ What follows is a comedy of misunderstanding (‘What is “Yogacizing”? And “The 30-day Body Cleanse?” Some sort of ritual bath?’) and situation (how are the Rosenbaums going to look after those fiery horses?) that made me laugh out loud. Alderman’s straight-faced tone makes the story, but she also captures how the locals’ rather English reserve rubs up against Elijah’s directness. Great stuff, which further underlines that I ought to read more of Alderman’s work.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Reading round-up: late April

25th April 2013 / / 0 Comments

Rebecca Wait, The View on the Way Down (2013). On the day of Kit Stewart’s funeral, his brother Jamie left home unannounced – and the Stewarts are still feeling the repercussions of Kit’s death five years on. Over time, we learn that Kit took his own life following depression; but Wait keeps her main focus on the rest of the family, in a way which suggests that they never fully understood what Kit was going through. And the novel truly shines in showing the myriad little cracks and frictions running through the family as a result of what they haven’t told each other. This is a quietly powerful novel, and a strong debut for Rebecca Wait.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925). I first read The Great Gatsby a couple of years ago and, for whatever reason, it didn’t really click with me. I don’t know why that might have been, because this time I really enjoyed it. Fitzgerald introduces Jay Gatsby as a vastly wealthy and charismatic figure, then proceeds to reveal the shallowness and fakery underneath. The dissection of the upper echelons of Roaring Twenties society is so concise and precise; and the way Fitzgerald balances one’s sympathies for his characters is marvellous. I re-read this for my new book group, whose general consensus was that The Great Gatsby is indeed great. And I say the same.

Jim Bob, Driving Jarvis Ham (2012). This novel is narrated by the old friend, ‘manager’ and occasional chauffeur of one Jarvis Ham, a semi-lovable eccentric/loser with unfulfilled dreams of stardom. Jarvis’s friend has been reading his secret diaries, but the two of them won’t be keeping secrets much longer. Driving Jarvis Ham is an absolute joy to read: there’s such a strong voice, with the narrator’s sharp eye and dry humour. But, in between all the laughs and the lovingly scrappy illustrations lurks something rather more sinister, that gives the novel a real edge. It’s a winning combination.

G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen (2012). Jobbing teenage hacker Alif honours the wishes of his love Intisar (who’s now betrothed to another) to remove himself from her life, by creating a  program that can detect Intisar (and hide Alif from her) to an impossibly sophisticated degree. Doing this ruptures the boundary between the worlds of humans and djinn; so, when Intisar gives Alif a book written by djinn that encodes the secrets of reality, Alif finds himself straying between worlds – and being pursued. There are some nice ideas in this debut novel, and a good deal of brio in its telling. But Alif himself is a frustratingly flat character, and there’s a sense that the political issues touched on by Wilson stay in the background, and slide by Alif’s adventures rather than confronting him. Still, Alif the Unseen is promising,and it’ll be interesting to see where Wilson goes next.

Success and secrets: Will Storr and Beatrice Hitchman

14th March 2013 / / 0 Comments

Will Storr, The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone (2013)
Beatrice Hitchman, Petite Mort (2013)

Killian Lone used to be one of the world’s greatest chefs (he tells us this from beyond the grave, so you can guess how well that turned out). His fascination with food began as a child, learning recipes from his Great-aunt Dorothy, one of whose ancestors was burnt at the stake for (it is said) producing food that drove people mad. Killian went on to study catering at college, and displayed such a rare talent that his teacher was able to land him a six-week placement at King, the restaurant of his idol, celebrity chef Max Mann – something unheard of for a lad of Killian’s background.

Max Mann had a reputation as the ‘Gentleman Chef’, who never let an apprentice go; Killian soon discovered why – Mann could wield silence where others might resort to threats. Just about the only bright spot amid the seemingly relentless hazing was Killian’s fellow-apprentice Kathryn, who would eventually become his wife. And Killian would go on to greater success as head chef of a rival kitchen, once he’d uncovered the true secret of his family’s cooking – but, like I said, you know how well it turned out…

Perhaps the scenes that most stand out most in Will Storr’s first novel are those depicting the ritual humiliation of Killian in the kitchens of King (such as the time Mann and his underling give Killian conflicting instructions over quality control, then alternately berate him for doing the ‘wrong’ thing). These scenes are excruciatingly vivid; Storr says in his closing note that they’re based on factual accounts, which only makes them seem more extraordinary. The author paints other emotions in similarly broad strokes, which can sometimes feel overly unsubtle (from the way Killian builds up his rosy preconception of Max Mann, it’s all too obvious that the chef will turn out to be a bastard), but is nevertheless always engaging.

But what really makes The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone shine for me is the way that Storr parses Killian’s ambition through his use of the Lone family secret. We’re so focused on the helping hand Killian gets that it takes a while to realise that he’s become like Max Mann. It’s a very effective way of showing someone being corrupted, unawares, when power goes to his head, because it puts the reader in the same position as Killian.

***

The protagonist of Petite Mort, Beatrice Hitchman’s debut, dreams of making it in another world whose outward glamour may mask a darker reality: the world of early cinema. Adèle Roux’s life changes in 1911, when she first sees a moving picture, and is caught by the allure of its female lead, known as Terpsichore – more than that, she wants to be her. Two years later, Adèle journeys from her provincial village to Paris, determined to become an actress; she does end up working for Pathé, but as a seamstress.

Yet, as we learn from a parallel plot-line, Adèle did indeed become a star, of sorts. In 1967, a journalist named Juliette Blanc seeks to interview her about her 1914 film Petite Mort, never seen and thought destroyed, until a print turned up with a scene missing. Back in the 1910s, we read, a special effects pioneer named André Durand plucked Adèle from her costuming work, gave her a job – and embarked on an affair with her. Adèle became the assistant of Durand’s wife:  none other than Terpsichore – and a ménage à trois soon develops.

Petite Mort is a novel of masks and secrets, whose protagonists have all been able to reinvent themselves: Adèle the village girl; André the boy from a Louisiana orphanage; Terpsichore the girl of noble birth, sent away at the age of six after being involved in a riding accident – each, to an extent, can leave their past behind in the film world. The theme of secrets carries through to the plot, which revolves around the mysterious print of Petite Mort. Hitchman juggles a good number of individual plot strands; but, whatever she’s writing about at any given point, the pages always demand to be turned.

Despite the hooks of the plot, though, the true heart of Petite Mort is perhaps the relationship between its three main characters As in Storr’s novel, we have a portrait of ambition and power, but this time mediated primarily through the changing balance of its characters’ relations. It’s a technique that leaves you wondering just how this will all end. Both of these books also leave me wondering where their authors will go next – and keen to find out.

“Nowhere is exactly as you think it’s going to be”

31st January 2013 / / 9 Comments

Sam Thompson, Communion Town (2012)

Communion Town has a quote from China Miéville on the front. That’s handy, because it is just the sort of book I could imagine having a quote from China Miéville on the front – which is to say that it’s a speculative novel  (collection?) which is intensely about the city and the experience of urban life. In some ways, it is a conceptual opposite of Hawthorn & Child: where Keith Ridgway’s novel is all about thwarting and denying story, Sam Thompson’s debut is built on the premise that everyone has their own story – and, in a city, they all jostle up against one another.

So, we have ten stories/chapters, all set in the same fictional city (unnamed – Communion Town itself is one particular district, but the name also signals the idea of disparate people coming together in a single place). It’s a non-specific city, but feels less like a bit of everywhere thrown together than like a version of London whose reality has been stretched and twisted: there’s a metro rather than a Tube, and olive groves in the surrounding countryside, but the whole patchwork atmosphere of the place is very reminiscent of London. Thompson has a knack for coming up with evocative place names – Sludd’s Liberty, Cento Hill, Rosamunda – that further enhance the sense of untold stories taking place out of sight.

But what of the stories within sight? The first, entitled ‘Communion Town’, has echoes of Miéville in its tale of two asylum seekers interrogated by an unknown agency, a terrorist plot by a group called the Cynics, and talk of ‘monsters’ beneath the city streets. This is the first of many perceptual ambiguities in the book, and I have to say it’s one of the most harrowingly effective that I’ve come across in some time. Depending on what you interpret the ‘monsters’ to be, the implications of the ending range from uncomfortable to downright shocking.

Then we move to the second chapter, ‘The Song of Serelight Fair’, and suddenly we’re in a different world – or, rather, the same world, but filtered through the perspective of such different characters that it might as well be different. This is more of a love story, in which a student moves into the circles of a girl from a more privileged background, and soon finds himself out of his depth.  But, again, there’s that added fantastic dimension, this time waiters who appear and behave like automata, right down to having music emanating from their chests. Are they mechanical? People forced to wear costumes? Or – perhaps most chillingly – is this the way that the privileged set perceive those lower in the social order?

So the book continues, with each chapter providing a different window on this city, making the place anew in the process. ‘The Significant City of Lazarus Glass’ is a distilled golden-age detection, in which the city becomes a web of riddles and outlandish crimes – that’s if it isn’t just a giant memory palace. ‘The Rose Tree’ is a tall tale told down a café, which paints the city as a place of dark corners, where strange transformations await the unwary. ‘The City Room’ tells of a bright (though possibly haunted) childhood world, where the city of Thompson’s book may or may not be a boy’s home-made model.

Like, I suspect, many people, I first heard of Communion Town when it was longlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize. I hope that won’t be the last we hear of this fabulous kaleidoscope of a book – that its full story has yet to be told.

See also

  • Nina Allan’s review of Communion Town for Strange Horizons
  • Aishwarya Subramanian’s review at Practically Marzipan
  • Maureen Kincaid Speller’s review for WeirdFictionReview.com

January in Japan: Yoko Ogawa and Natsuo Kirino

25th January 2013 / / 8 Comments

Yoko Ogawa, Hotel Iris (1996/2010)
Translated by Stephen Snyder

Seventeen-year-old Mari is working at her mother’s hotel when a middle-aged man and a prostitute are thrown out for rowing and disturbing the other guests. Mari is drawn to the man, and starts to see him regularly; he tells her that he’s a Russian translator – the heroine of the novel he’s working on is even named Marie. The two enter into an intimate, masochistic relationship – which, naturally enough, can’t last forever.

Hotel Iris is a quiet book, and all the more powerful and disturbing for it. So thoroughly does Ogawa create the viewpoint of Mari as she’s drawn into the translator’s orbit, it’s a real jolt to be reminded that this man’s intentions are questionable at the very least. But what makes the novel particularly challenging to consider is that Ogawa is clear on the affair’s positive consequences for Mari, as well as the negative ones: it gives her an escape from being put-upon by her mother, however dangerous it might turn out to be. Hotel Iris is an uncomfortable read, in the best possible way.

Natsuo Kirino, The Goddess Chronicle (2008/12)
Translated by Rebecca Copeland

The latest title in the Canongate Myths series is inspired by the Japanese myth of Izanami and Izanagi – which isn’t a story I know, so inevitably I’m going to miss out on something here. But the intriguing thing for me is that The Goddess Chronicle is written by Natsuo Kirino, and at first glance seems quite different from a gritty urban novel like Out. But look closer, and similarities emerge: both books focus on female characters who try to escape a system designed to hold and define them.

Our narrator is Namima, whom we first meet as a servant of the goddess Izanami in the Realm of the Dead; Kirino’s novel is the story of how she got there. Namima is born on a tiny island, granddaughter of its spiritual leader, the Oracle. It’s a hereditary position, though Namima’s older sister Kamikuu is destined to become the next Oracle – and it’s not until Kamikuu takes over that Namima learns her preordained role as the Oracle’s sister: to watch over the island’s graveyard for the rest of her life, with no human contact. Namima tries to escape the island with the boy she loves – but tragedy strikes, and she finds herself in Izanami’s realm.

A number of stories overlap in The Goddess Chronicle. There’s Namima’s childhood on the island, which has a measured clarity tempered with a touch of strangeness. There is Namima’s sojourn in the world of the living as a wasp, a fine ‘be careful what you wish for’ tale. And there is the story of Izanami and her brother/lover/enemy Izanagi, which now has Namima as a witness. Their story provides a point of comparison and contrast with Namima’s own. All is wrapped up in clean prose that gives this engaging novel a mythic feel of its very own.

January in Japan is a blog event hosted by Tony’s Reading List. Click here for the index of my posts.

Finding a way out: Andrew Kaufman and Viola Di Grado

14th January 2013 / / 3 Comments

Andrew Kaufman, Born Weird (2013)
Viola Di Grado, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (2011/2)

I enjoy fantastic literature in all its forms, but to my mind there’s a unique elegance to works that bring the lightest touch of fantasy to the mundane, and do it well. It takes a fine hand to make that slight supernatural element feel essential but not inadequate. Andrew Kaufman has that sort of hand, and his new novel Born Weird might be his most fully achieved work yet.

When the Weird siblings were born, their grandmother Annie gave each a blessing: Richard would keep safe; Abba would have hope; Lucy wouldn’t get lost; Kent would win a fight; and Angie would always forgive. As is so often the way, though, these ‘blessings’ turned out to troublesome. Now, Annie Weird knows that she is about to die, and instructs Angie to bring her brothers and sisters together in the hospital at Annie’s moment of death, when she will undo her work.

Born Weird then becomes a novel about being trapped in your family’s shadow, which manifests in a very tangible way for the Weirds. Angie is angry with her grandmother in the hospital at first, but forgives her as soon as she’s down the corridor – not because she wants to, but because she can’t help it. Likewise, the other Weird siblings have been constrained in some way as to what they could do or who they could be – by both mundane and supernatural phenomena. The dexterity with which Kaufman moves back and forth across that line is a delight to behold.

The author also deploys humour and eccentricity with great effect. When Angie unites with her sister Lucy, she is struck by the latter’s bizarre haircut. We soon find out where it comes from: Nicola, the Weirds’ mother, has dementia, and believes herself to run a hair salon in her care home; her children may be customers, but she no longer knows them. This is the flipside of the supernatural: an all-too-real fantasy world from which there will be no return.

The Weirds’ lives may have a thread of magic, but their familial frictions (and joys) are very much grounded in reality. Born Weird is alive to the strengths and limitations of both approaches, and balances the two wonderfully.

***

Viola Di Grado’s first novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (translated superbly by Michael Reynolds), also has a protagonist who feels trapped by her family situation, and, though there’s nothing overtly supernatural about it, the book has a hallucinatory quality all its own. Our protagonist is Camelia Mega, a young Italian woman who has lived in Leeds ever since her journalist father brought the family over to England a decade earlier – the same father who subsequently left to live with his mistress and then died in a car accident.

Camelia feels stranded in Leeds, and has the sense that winter just drags on and on:

Leeds winters are terribly self-absorbed; each one wants to be colder than its predecessor and purports to be the last winter ever. It unleashes a lethal wind full of the short sharp vowels of northern Englishmen but even harsher, and anyway, neither one of them speaks to me. (p. 9)

Whether it really is always winter in this version of Leeds is beside the point, because Camelia’s perception is what counts here. That paragraph I’ve quoted shows how fluidly her narration slides between the outside world, her inner world, and ruminations on language itself. Camelia has woven herself a kind of net out of language, and she can’t get out – she keeps comparing things to her father’s accident, as though she can’t bring herself to move on from it.

There is a glimpse of light on the horizon, though, in the shape of Wen, a boy from a local clothes shop who takes it upon himself to teach Camelia Chinese. This is a different kind of language for Camelia, where a word can change its meaning entirely depending on the tone in which it’s spoken. This gives her a sense that she can look at (and be in) the world differently, though Camelia doesn’t necessarily find it easy to let herself do so.

The Chinese system of writing with ideograms is also an ironic companion to the way Camelia communicates with her mother Livia: after her husband’s death, Livia became mute; she and Camelia now communicate via looks – though it’s not clear how much of it is really two-way, and there is the sense throughout that Livia mother is living her own life beyond her daughter’s knowledge, which contributes to Camelia’s sense of lacking control. Di Grado paints an incisive portrait of a character caught between holding on and letting go, unsure which is worse.

My BSFA short fiction nominations

10th January 2013 / / 2 Comments

Midnight tomorrow is the deadline to submit nominations for this year’s BSFA Awards. I sent mine in yesterday, with a view to suggesting things that might otherwise be overlooked. I won’t go over the novels I nominated, because they’re mostly covered elsewhere. But coming up with  short fiction ideas made me dig further into my reading from last year, and it might be a little more interesting.

I’m aware that most of these will be long shots (though you never know…); I’ll probably be the only person in the BSFA who’s read some of them. But I can highlight stuff all the same; so here, in no particular order, is what I nominated:

‘Countless Stones’ – Lucy Wood

I couldn’t neglect my favourite book of short fiction from 2012, so here’s a story from Diving Belles. ‘Countless Stones’ is probably the strongest fantasy story in the collection (some of the tales have a lighter fantastic touch than others), and it really illustrates Wood’s approach to combining the supernatural and mundane, as her protagonist treats turning to stone yet again as just another inconvenience, no worse than having to deal with an ex-partner.

‘Black Box’ – Jennifer Egan

This is the story from the New Yorker‘s science fiction issue that was also serialised on Twitter. We had a good discussion about it on the blog last summer. It’s a flawed story, but also an interesting one, and I thought it should have a chance to be considered.

‘The Lonely Hunter’ – John Grant

John Grant is a friend, but I nominated this novella (published as a stand-alone volume by PS) because of how much I enjoyed its blurring of reality and fiction.

‘How We Ran the Night’ – Keith Ridgway

A story/chapter from Hawthorn & Child. I couldn’t call the book as a whole speculative fiction, for all that it shares some of the same sensibilities. But this particular piece toys with the idea of a fantastical society of wolves living in London, and is worth attention in its own right.

‘Ghost in the Machine’ – Christopher Parvin

There are a number of sf stories in the latest Bristol Prize anthology, but I decided to limit my nominations to one story per book, and this is it. I found Parvin’s take on the idea of robots living alongside humans amusing – and its collage structure works well, too.

‘Switchgirls’ – Tania Hershman

This piece from Still is particularly short, but carries emotional heft and is nicely ambiguous.

‘The Kendal Iconoclasm’ – Paul Rooney

One of a handful of fantastic stories from Rooney’s collection Dust, this weaves horror out of characters’ awareness that they’re in a story and can’t escape.

Before I finish, a note on one of my non-fiction nominations. John Mullan’s dismissive attitude towards science fiction is well documented, but I nominated him for his Guardian Book Club series on Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons. This nomination wasn’t entirely frivolous: when he’s focused on analysing the book, Mullan’s critique is engaged and engaging. Yet there’s still the odd swipe at the genre; the shifts in tone are quite bizarre. But, for all that, I thought the articles were worth acknowledging.

The BSFA Award shortlists will be published next week – I look forward to seeing what’s on there.

Book notes: Ian Sales and Simona Sparaco

17th November 2012 / / 3 Comments

Ian Sales, Adrift on the Sea of Rains (2012)

Colonel Vance Peterson and colleagues are stranded on their moon base, trying to find a way home. Well, not ‘home’ exactly, because the Earth they knew has been destroyed in nuclear war. Rather, the crew of Falcon Base are using a piece of mysterious Nazi technology to reveal alternate versions of Earth from branching points in history, in the hope that one will be hospitable – and that they’ll be able to travel there.

What I knew in advance about Ian Sales’ fiction was that he was interested in combining a literary approach with proper hard science; I think he’s pulled that off in this novella. He gives a sense of the technicalities of space travel and life on Falcon Base (part of the alternate Apollo program sketched out in the book’s extensive glossary), as well as evoking the desolation and psychological effects of being isolated as Peterson’s crew are.

Most interestingly for me, Sales plays the literary and scientific idioms against each other. The accoutrements of living in space stand for restriction (for example, anger is not so easily expressed when you’re in low gravity and can walk only as well as Velcro slippers allow), but those technical terms also represent the astronauts’ comfort zone, the sphere where they know what they’re doing – and this is what ultimately turns against them. Sales has three more novellas planned in his ‘Apollo Quartet’ – I look forward to seeing where they head.

Simona Sparaco, About Time (2010/2)
Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis

Svevo Romano would seem to have it all, for a given value of ‘all’ – looks, money, career success, the pick of attractive women to string along or use for one night stands. It may not be commendable behaviour, but it suits Svevo just fine, thank you very much. And then he starts to experience mysterious jumps in time: he’ll miss important work meetings when a couple of hours pass in a moment; or his sleep will be disrupted when morning comes too early. Svevo addresses his story to Father Time, as he tries to find a way out of this spiral.

About Time is an amiable morality tale that works neatly at the metaphorical level as well as the literal – think of Svevo as letting his playboy lifestyle get out of hand, and the effects are much the same as if time really is speeding up for him. But I can’t escape the feeling that it’s all a bit too simplistic – that the characterisation of Svevo veers too close to caricature, and that the moral provided by the solution to Svevo’s predicament feels too obvious . I would be interested in reading more of Simona Sparaco’s work, but About Time is a little too unambiguous for my taste.

Book notes: John Grant and Sam Hawken

5th November 2012 / / 1 Comment

John Grant, The Lonely Hunter (2012)

Full disclosure: John Grant is a friend – but I knew his fiction first of all, and this novella from PS Publishing is as good as ever. Our narrator is one Emil Martenson, a writer recalling how he first met his wife Natalie. At the time, she was married to Danny Lerner, a best-selling American novelist living in luxury in France. The much less successful Emil had taken on a commission to interview Lerner – which was interrupted by the latter’s untimely death. It wouldn’t be until many years later that Emil would meet Natalie again and discover the truth about the erratic shape of Lerner’s career; why he veered so dramatically between long periods of being withdrawn and bursts of passionate articulacy; and the real reason for Lerner’s death.

As a murder mystery, The Lonely Hunter plays the game with its red herrings and twists. But Grant’s novella is about more than that: Emil is open about the fact that he has changed some of the identifying details of his tale, and muses over the differences between real life and fiction. This is what I think is at the heart of The Lonely Hunter: individuals creating stories about themselves and others, to the extent that they become fictional characters, of a sort – and you’ll close the book wondering exactly where the boundaries between reality and fiction lie.

Sam Hawken, Tequila Sunset (2012)

At the start of Tequila Sunset, Flip Morales is released from prison and returns home to El Paso, Texas – but he can’t leave his gangland past behind.

Soon he is reluctantly caught up in one his gang’s drug trafficking operations while also acting as a police informant. Two further protagonists are police officers investigating the gang’s activities: Cristina Salas in El Paso, and Matías Segura over the Mexican border in Ciudad Juárez. As the big job goes down all three characters find their lives at risk and their close relationships tested to the limit.

Sam Hawken pitches the tone of his second novel just right: this is a book that deals with violent and brutal subject matter, but it never feels gratuitous or sensationalist. Each narrative thread is anchored in everyday concerns: Flip’s trying to make good in work and life; Cristina’s concern for her young son; Matías’s relationship with his wife.

The sense you get is of people doing what they can in the face of social issues almost too great to comprehend. Hawken makes the point that the gang is greater than its individual parts: that if someone’s removed there will always be another to take their place. Even as Tequila Sunset resolves, you know there’s more out there that we haven’t even seen, that the story Hawken tells is part of a much broader canvas of events. The novel is a thrilling ride, but it also makes you appreciate the seriousness behind it.

(This review also appears at We Love This Book.)

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