Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley

For a novel set partly in a Soho brothel, Hot Stew is an oddly bloodless affair. Tawdry characters drift in and out of each other’s lives but rarely seem to capture the author’s full imagination. Fiona Mozley’s first novel, Elmet, concerned a self-sufficient family living in Yorkshire and occupying ‘a strange, sylvan otherworld’, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. This second book is a decided change of tack.

The prose sometimes has an appealing vagueness:

“After the war, the concrete came, and parallel lines, and precise angles that connected earth to sky. Houses were rebuilt, shops were rebuilt, and new paving stones were laid. The dead were buried. The past was buried. There were new kinds of men and new kinds of women. There was art and music and miniskirts and sharp haircuts to match the skyline.

Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera

In his new book Empireland, the Times journalist and memoirist Sathnam Sanghera has made a serious attempt to examine the impact of the British Empire on modern-day Britain. Sanghera argues passionately that our identity has been shaped—mainly for the worse—by the Empire and that it is only by confronting this fact that we can move forward as a society. He quotes the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel: “If British people understood colonial history half as well as they understand the details of Henry VIII’s wives, Britain would be a different country.”

Sanghera has a journalist’s instinct for an eye-catching statistic. While the Empire at its height covered a quarter of the world’s land surface and governed nearly a quarter of the world’s population, it was maintained with the help of remarkably few staff—in 1899, only 1,500 officials were employed by the Colonial Office. Sanghera does not shy away from the horrors of the Empire, not least in describing the unprovoked invasion of Tibet in 1903, when one British lieutenant remarked: “I got so sick of the slaughter that I ceased fire, though the General’s order was to make as big a bag as possible.”

Slough House by Mick Herron

Mick Herron has been called ‘the John le Carré of his generation’ by the crime writer Val McDermid, and in the 11 years since the first of his ‘Slough House’ novels appeared they have become a best-selling phenomenon. Herron echoes le Carré’s horror at Brexit, which in this latest instalment is only referred to as ‘You-Know-What’. Slough House is, in fact, nowhere near the Berkshire town but an office building close to the Barbican, and no less drab for it. This is where a bunch of ‘slow horses’, spies who have blotted their copybooks in various ways, nominally work.

Herron has said: ‘Failures are more interesting than successes: they have all that regret, they act out, they feel thwarted and frustrated, not fun to live but great fun to write about.’ He certainly appears to be having great fun in Slough House, the seventh novel in the series, and his enjoyment is rarely at the expense of the reader’s. But he occasionally overdoes it in his portrayal of Jackson Lamb as the most flatulent and misanthropic of the slow horses.

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.

Love by Roddy Doyle

It is not clear at the outset of Roddy Doyle’s latest novel, Love, what kind of love he is aiming to explore – though the opening to this dialogue-heavy novel, in which two men meet in a Dublin pub, certainly zips along promisingly. Davy has returned from England to Dublin, where Joe still lives, to visit his elderly father. Davy is aware of self-consciously trying to blend in during this visit: “‘Shite’, ‘grand’, ‘Jaysis’ – I packed the words with my toothbrush when I was coming to Dublin for a few days.” Doyle, as ever, has much to offer about masculinity, love and family. That said, 327 pages is quite long for a novel where the main action is two men going for a drink, and one’s enthusiasm flags towards the end. The sheer relentlessness of listening to two men talk becomes wearing.

It also isn’t always clear which of them is speaking – which might be a fatal flaw in a novel that revolves around a single extended conversation, but Doyle has just about enough élan to pull it off.

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

Avni Doshi’s first novel, Burnt Sugar, has a memorable opening: “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure”. And its narrator, Antara, may be justified in this attitude, given that her mother later says to her, “I always knew that having you would ruin my life”. The novel has drawn praise – and gained a Booker Prize shortlisting – for its somewhat taboo exploration of being mothered and mothering. Antara is an artist in Pune; Tara is the mother, and she is losing her memory. Her daughter resents this because it means there is “no way to baste her in guilt” over the past. There is plenty Antara thinks her mother should feel guilty about: the period, for example, that they spent during her childhood living in an ashram and begging on the streets, before Antara was sent to a boarding school run by draconian nuns who made her hold her soiled bedsheets over her head in the gymnasium for everyone to see. Antara reflects, “the only reality that remains from that time are feelings and ideas, and whether I authored them or they were placed within me is impossible to know”.