Money to Burn

Money to Burn (Penge på lommen, 2020) is the first in a projected seven-novel series by the Danish poet and novelist Asta Olivia Nordenhof. The author has already given the next six books their titles, and the second, Djævlebogen (2023), a huge hit in Denmark, will appear in the UK this autumn as The Devil Book. The endeavour as a whole has been described as “the most ambitious literary project of the 2020s” by the Danish broadsheet Jyllands-Posten.

Translated into English by Caroline Waight, Money to Burn is certainly original. The characters are unmoored and the narrative’s grip on reality is loose. From the outset a sense of the uncanny prevails. “I was being pursued”, says the narrator, “but it was more than that – my pursuer had stepped inside me and was peering back out at himself.”

Three Days in June

In Three Days in June, Tyler’s 25th novel, Gail Baines is not having a good day. An assistant headmistress, she is expecting to be promoted when the headmistress asks to speak to her. Instead, her boss suggests she finds another job, citing – to Gail’s surprise – her lack of people skills. It is the day before Gail’s daughter’s wedding and, shortly after she returns home early, her ex-husband Max turns up unexpectedly, hoping to stay with her. He has not even brought a suit with him for the wedding, but he has brought a cat that needs rehousing. He is too laid-back for Gail’s liking, but the two rub along amicably enough during the rehearsal and actual wedding of their only child, Debbie.

Tyler’s work has been compared to Elizabeth Strout’s, but it’s hard to imagine Gail saying anything like ‘She’s so nice, Christopher, it makes me puke’, as Strout’s heroine Olive Kitteridge says to her son of his new wife. Tyler is often praised for her subtlety, but in this novel I feel she has taken it too far: the plot is quiet to the point of near stupor.

Sweat by Emma Healey

Emma Healey’s first novel, the bestselling Elizabeth Is Missing (2014), was narrated by an elderly woman losing her memory. Her second, Whistle in the Dark (2018), told the story of a 15-year-old girl who goes missing for four days and returns refusing to speak about what happened. Sweat again focuses on a woman in peril. Cassie, the narrator, is a personal trainer who left her controlling boyfriend, Liam, two years before the start of the novel.

They initially met when Cassie attended his bootcamp classes; Liam now turns up at the gym where Cassie works, seeking to take advantage of an offer of half-price personal training sessions for those with disabilities. Liam is claiming to be blind; and though Cassie, who is assigned as his trainer, is unsure of how impaired his sight really is, she decides to pretend to be someone else and perhaps wreak some kind of revenge on him.

Tell Me Everything

For her 10th novel, Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout has returned to familiar ground: characters from her earlier books, such as Bob Burgess, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, feature again. But whereas Strout has written novels centred on each of these figures to great success, only in this novel are they finally brought together.

In Crosby, a fictional town in Maine, the lawyer Bob Burgess takes on the defence of an apparently guileless man whose mother, Gloria Beach, has been murdered; the son has become the main suspect. Gloria Beach had been nicknamed “Bitch Ball” by local people, but as always with Strout, there’s more to the dead woman’s story than is initially obvious. Burgess fears for the accused, an isolated man who doesn’t own a mobile phone and whose main occupation appears to be painting pregnant women in the nude.

Wife by Charlotte Mendelson

Charlotte Mendelson has been described in The Times as a ‘master at family drama’, and her previous novel, The Exhibitionist (2022), contained in Ray Hanrahan one of the most odious fictional husbands ever. Mendelson clearly has an appetite as well as talent for writing awful spouses. In her latest novel, Wife, Penny Cartwright is if anything even worse.

This is the story of a lesbian relationship that sours. The book begins at the marriage’s end, but in its slightly confusing structure it leaps back to the beginning and then forward again. In fairness, these time- jumps are clearly signalled and I think the sense of bewilderment they nonetheless create is intentional. Although the narrative is in the third person, this is really an account of what happened from the point of view of Zoe Stamper, Penny’s wife, who has been thoroughly gaslit, so the sense of the reader being on the back foot beside her feels deliberate.

The claustrophobic bullying in the marriage is so well done that I found it nausea-inducing.

I Will Live by Lale Gül

Ik ga leven, an autobiographical debut novel by 23-year-old Lale Gül, was first published in Dutch in 2021. On release, it became an immediate bestseller – yet Gül received death threats and ended up ostracised by her family. Now that the book is appearing in translation as I Will Live, Anglophone readers can see why.

Gül’s novel tells the story of 20-year-old Büsra, who’s living what she describes a “schizophrenic” existence as a young Muslim woman in Amsterdam. She was born in the Netherlands, but her family are what she calls “Euroturks”, and visit their relatives each summer in the Turkish village from which her parents hail. At home, Büsra fights these “begetters”, who insist she wear a headscarf and distinguish herself from unbelieving women who’re like “fruit without a peel, lollies without a wrapper”.

Her illiterate mother acts as the enforcer, throwing (for example) a wedge shoe at Büsra’s face for a small perceived transgression. Büsra’s brother, Halil, in contrast, has “all the freedom to manoeuvre he wants”.