This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

Claire Messud’s fourth novel, The Woman Upstairs (2013), was notable for having a genuine twist – a reminder of how rare that is in literary fiction. Messud has nonetheless produced such a rarity again in This Strange Eventful History.

For her seventh novel, the saga of the Cassar clan, Messud has turned to her own family history. The novel reaches from Algeria, where her paternal grandparents were raised, to Connecticut, where Messud herself was born, and from 1927 to 2010. The Cassar family go to war, move continents, develop dementia and alcoholism, and marry or fail to: this is not a milieu in which remaining single is viewed as a dignified choice.

This Strange Eventful History is told in the third person: Gaston is the Cassar patriarch, and while he and his wife Lucienne consider their marriage to be “the masterpiece” of their lives, it contains a troubling secret.

Clear by Carys Davies

Carys Davies grew up in Newport, south Wales but her novels have been set in 19th- century Pennsylvania (West, 2018), contemporary Ooty in India (The Mission House, 2020) and now a small island off the north coast of Scotland in 1843. Her short stories have been set variously in the Australian outback and Siberia. She has said that when creating a fictional world, ‘I seem to require a certain kind of distance from my own life’.

On an island ‘between Shetland and Norway’, a man called Ivar lives in isolation, talking only to Pegi the horse, whom he calls ‘old cabbage and a silly, odd-looking person’. One day he finds a man naked and unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. Even after the man regains consciousness, he and Ivar do not share a common language, so communication between them is halting. The newcomer is John Ferguson, a church minister who has been sent to evict Ivar so that the land can be used solely by grazing sheep.

Monocle Podcast on Zadie Smith's 'The Fraud'

In more than two decades since Zadie Smith burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, White Teeth, her books, essays and short stories have continued to enjoy commercial and critical success. Her latest novel brings to life the story of the Tichborne case – one of the lengthiest trials in British history and one that enthralled Victorian England. I joined Robert Bound and Alex Preston to review Smith’s first exuberant foray into historical fiction.

We also made recommendations for further reading and watching.

The Autumn of the Ace by Louis de Bernières

The Autumn of the Ace begins in 1945, as the second world war ends, but both Louis de Bernières and his protagonist Daniel Pitt appear reluctant to leave warfare behind. Pitt is a flying ace, but so nervous about returning to civilian life that he argues against handing back his service weapon. Eventually he capitulates. During the war, he lost two toes after being tortured by the Gestapo but he nonetheless appears to prefer physical peril to the prosaic dysfunctionality of his family life. His mother and one of his daughters are dead, his marriage has disintegrated and he has fathered two children by his wife’s bohemian sister. His son Bertie (by his wife) refuses to speak to him, and this conflict forms one of the central dramas of the book.

Lists explaining how all the characters are related are included at the beginning, but these seem deliberately to echo the mind-bending experience of looking at the family tree of the Bloomsbury group. It is somehow easier to navigate the different connections by just plunging into the story.

Islands of Mercy by Rose Tremain

Rose Tremain has followed her masterly The Gustav Sonata with an altogether different novel. In 1865, Clorinda Morrissey, a 38-year-old woman from Dublin, arrives in Bath and sells a ruby necklace in order to set up Mrs Morrissey’s High Class Tea Rooms. Mrs Morrissey believes that ‘the future was going to be perfumed with raspberry jam and freshly baked scones and fragrant lemon cake’.

The tea rooms also, however, once open, become the scene of Jane Adeane — a highly skilled nurse — rejecting a proposal from Dr Valentine Ross, her colleague at her father’s surgery. Jane has achieved a near-mythic status as a nurse in Bath and ‘was described as “The Angel”, or sometimes as “The Tall Angel” or “The White Angel’ or, more frequently, as ‘The Angel of the Baths”’. Jane flees to London after Dr Ross’s proposal to stay with her unconventional aunt — an unmarried painter called Emmeline Adeane and is soon seduced by a married Italian beauty, Julietta Sims.

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue’s publishers might regard it as a mixed blessing that her latest novel is set during the 1918 flu pandemic. While she can’t be faulted for topicality, it seems unlikely that many people will want to spend more time than they need to thinking about a deadly virus. This would be a shame as, for the most part, The Pull of the Stars is a beautifully modulated historical novel. There is also the comfort – for most of us – of how much more likely we all are to survive the current emergency than anyone on the 1918 Dublin maternity fever ward, the setting for Donoghue’s 13th novel. For a small cast, the death count here is high.

As anyone who has read Donoghue’s internationally bestselling novel Room – inspired by the grotesque Josef Fritzl case – will know, she is quick to draw the reader in. After only four short sentences, we can already smell the “dung and blood” of the Dublin streets as nurse Julia Power cycles to work at an understaffed hospital in the city centre. Donoghue’s prose is visceral, and the sense of peril in the cramped, tiny ward is compelling.