The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam

After Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003) became a smash hit bestseller, novels with the word “wife” in the title began to proliferate, perhaps peaking with the publication of Jane Corry’s My Husband’s Wife (2016).

Tahmima Anam has now made her own contribution, with The Startup Wife.  Anyone who has read Anam’s previously published trilogy of novels tracing the chronicles of a family from the Bangladesh war of independence to the present day, will know not to expect a domestic thriller from her latest book, however. The word “wife” dangles in the title as an apparent warning, nonetheless.

Asha Ray, a talented computer scientist halfway through her PhD, is the wife. At a funeral, she meets again the man she had had a high school crush on, 13 years after she last saw him and they marry without ceremony two months later. Her new husband, Cyrus Jones, has magnificent hair, a dead mother and is “encyclopaedically brilliant”. He is also, his wife observes, “a little bit ghost”.

Come Again by Robert Webb

The comedian and actor Robert Webb has followed his well-received memoir How Not to Be a Boy (TLS, September 15, 2017) with a time-travelling novel, Come Again. Webb’s heroine is the forty-five-year-old Kate Marsden, an IT specialist whose husband has recently dropped dead from a brain tumour. Kate is plunged into overwhelming grief, and Webb is very good on her anger at those friends who wish to pull her out of it. She rails against anything that might cheer her up, not least “Lunch. Fuck off, lunch”.

Webb also makes a good attempt to inhabit a woman’s body, neither over-eroticizing his heroine nor exaggerating her basic bodily functions in an effort to make them sound authentic. Kate also reveals the mystery behind so-called women’s intuition, saying, “I call it paying attention. Women are interested in how funny men’s minds work because we might need that knowledge to survive. So we end up anticipating things and it looks like a magic trick”

Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas

It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of girls with eating disorders. It’s not that Thomas doesn’t take eating disorders seriously; she takes them so seriously that one of the girls dies. But there are few more vivaciously original novelists around today, and surely none of them is having as much fun while making serious points. Elsewhere, Thomas has written compellingly about her own orthorexia (or obsessive desire to control her diet); but this doesn’t mean that she is above lampooning the hysterical pronouncements of the diet-obsessed — not least that fruit, unless you pick it in the wild yourself, contains so much sugar that you may as well eat Haribo, which is nicer, after all.