On Friendship by Andrew O'Hagan

When I interviewed Andrew O’Hagan ten years ago about his Booker longlisted novel The Illuminations, the most striking thing that he said was:

Friendship is more important than almost anything. I always thought it was a sort ofdeliverance, having a good friend, that they would bring a generosity and an unprejudiced eye to your ambition, your hopes and your thoughts in a way that family can’t always do. I mean what is family but a lovable collection of prejudices, some in your favour and some not?

Although I agreed with him, I was intrigued that someone who was both a parent and a sibling would feel this way.

Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian

There is a fine tradition of campus novels that stretches from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) through Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (2024). Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory, her fourth novel for adults, shows the author’s awareness of her predecessors in the genre. One of its main characters even regards Pnin (1957), a campus novel by Vladimir Nabokov, as his comfort book.

Ethan, the character in question, feels he needs comfort because he has cheated on his wife with their secretary. He is married to Simone, and the two are goodlooking creative writing professors at Edwards University in upstate New York. Adrian herself taught creative writing at Sewanee, the University of the South.

Breasts by Jean Hannah Edelstein

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a British-American journalist and the author of a 2018 memoir entitled This Really Isn’t About You, which was about her dating life, the death of her father and her discovery that she had Lynch syndrome – which predisposes her to some cancers, as it had her dad. There is a sickening inevitability that her Breasts is at least partly about her being diagnosed with breast cancer. Yet, this is an uplifting volume, as well as a short, sharp shock.

The three sections of the book, ‘Sex’, ‘Food’ and ‘Cancer’, mean that readers will know what’s coming. But before the final section, Edelstein writes perceptively about adolescence, her first bra and being made to feel even by her schoolteachers that she and her female classmates ‘walked around in our flagrant, provocative teenage bodies day in and out. If men regarded them as invitations – well, had we tried hard enough to stop them?’

Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof

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 by Anne Tyler

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.