Second Place by Rachel Cusk

“I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris.” Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, “Second Place”, begins with this arresting recollection. At the end of the book a brief note informs readers that it “owes a debt to ‘Lorenzo in Taos’, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico”. It is not necessary to be familiar with this antecedent, however, to enjoy the oddly compelling (if intermittently baffling) story that Ms Cusk tells in the pages in between. 

Only ever referred to as M, the narrator is living happily with her second husband Tony “in a place of great but subtle beauty” in an unnamed country. It is 15 years after she encountered the devil (Jeffers, to whom she confides this hallucinatory experience, is her implied interlocutor throughout). Ms Cusk keeps the details of the landscape vague but the “woolly marsh” does not sound like New Mexico. M invites L, a painter and a friend of a friend, to stay at her “second place”, a cottage M and Tony have built on their land. 

The High House by Jessie Greengrass

Jessie Greengrass’s first novel Sight (2018) was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The narrator of that experimental book wove readings about major developments in medical history into her own decision to have a child.

Greengrass’s second novel, The High House, is part of the recent flowering of literary fiction by women exploring the climate crisis that includes Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, as well as Weather by Jenny Offill and Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee.

Although The High House is a story of familial bonds, the split narrative doesn’t initially make it easy to work out who is related to who. In the opening sections two women—Caro and Sally—recount their separate childhoods. Both are looking back to their early lives from the vantage point of a post-apocalyptic scenario, which has seen them form a makeshift family living at the High House, alongside Caro’s younger stepbrother Pauly, son of a climate scientist.

The Office of Historical Corrections

Danielle Evans, who published her 2010 story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self to great acclaim and has fans including Alicia Keys and Roxane Gay, has said she writes long, rather than short, stories – and this new collection certainly provides space to explore knotty subject matter.

In “Boys Go to Jupiter”, a picture of a white college student wearing a Confederate flag bikini goes viral. The image antagonises her black hallmate Carmen, who reposts it, and Claire – the bikini wearer – receives angry, supportive and even pornographic messages.

Carmen moves dorm for her own safety, but Evans writes the story from the point of view of Claire, showing the way in which a social media storm can develop its own momentum: “Her student account’s address has been posted on several message boards and #clairewilliamsvacationideas is a locally trending topic (Auschwitz, My Lai, Wounded Knee).”

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.