Playing Games is Huma Qureshi’s fourth book and first novel. Born in the UK into a family of Pakistani heritage, her previous works include a memoir, How We Met, and a collection of short stories, Things We Do Not Tell People We Love, which featured women of Pakistani origin unable to communicate honestly with the people closest to them. Her memoir told the story of how, after trying Muslim-specific dating websites with no luck, she met and married her husband, a white Englishman who converted to Islam to be with her. Playing Games seems, on the face of it, a change of direction, barely touching on religion or cultural concerns. It focuses on two sisters in their early thirties living in north London: Hana, a married lawyer, and her younger sister Mira, who works in a coffee shop and lives in a crappy house share while trying to write her first play. Their mother, an art teacher, died 11 years ago, something both sisters are still wrestling with. Hana has fled from any kind of artistic endeavour and runs her life with obsessive control, while Mira is happy to pursue a larger dream.
Jungle House by Julianne Pachico
Jungle House is not the sultry tropical tale you might expect either from its title or from its vivid, palm-strewn dust jacket. Instead, Julianne Pachico’s third novel concerns AI. This is not immediately obvious, and although there is an appealing directness to the writing, it means that no time is spent setting the scene or allowing readers to get their bearings fully. I could have done with more explication of the circumstances in which a young girl, Lena, comes to live in an AI-controlled house.
At the book’s opening, Lena has her work cut out:
“There’s fishing and mushroom-gathering and swimming in the river. Five days a week are for exercise and two days are for rest. In the orchard there are bananas and guavas, grapefruits and limes.”
Lena has moved out of the main house and is living in the guest hut, or ‘caretaker’s hut’, as she calls it. She refers to ‘Mother’, who these days is ‘angry all the time’, and one could easily assume at first that she is referring to her own mother.
The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard
Jo Ann Beard has said that one of the stories in this collection, although she does not specify which, took her more than 20 years to write and that there was a gap of eight months – during which she was working on the piece five days a week – between two of its sentences. It is true that her writing is remarkably condensed, not least in ‘Cheri’, the story of a real woman who had a particularly hideous case of terminal cancer (exacerbated by the fact that all pain medication made her vomit). Cheri Tremble contacted Jack Kevorkian, a euthanasia expert sometimes nicknamed ‘Dr Death’, so that he could help her end her life. As she begins to die, Cheri, in Beard’s version, wryly reflects: ‘The fear of dying tonight is nothing… compared to the fear of still being alive tomorrow morning.’
Beard has barely been published in the UK, but her fans include Jonathan Franzen, Sigrid Nunez and Jeffrey Eugenides. Mary Gaitskill has called her ‘a kind of literary celebrity that very few people have heard of’.
Second Self by Chloe Ashby
Chloë Ashby’s thoughtful second novel focuses on fertility and the choices women in their thirties routinely face over motherhood. Cathy, the heroine, is married to Noah, who is around a decade older and has decided he doesn’t want children.
Mothers are everywhere in this book. There is Cathy’s best friend, her sister-in-law and her own widowed mother, Janey. Janey lives alone in Norfolk while Cathy – her only child – is in London; she appears to be slipping into dementia and this story line forms the other main strand of Second Self. Ashby implies that some of Cathy’s indecision over motherhood relates to the effective loss of her own mother to old age and disease.
Ashby writes with great fluency and is very confident in her evocations of Cathy and Noah’s middle-class milieu of Ottolenghi takeaways and almond bellinis. For all Cathy’s material comfort, however, this is not a smug novel, or a satire on smugness. There is plenty to fear here: infant mortality, Alzheimer’s, marital breakdown, ageing, death.
This Is Not About You
The journalist Rosemary Mac Cabe’s first book This Is Not About You appears – at least at first glance – to want to have it both ways because whilst the title addresses the men she has dated, warning them this book is not about them, the subtitle describes the book as “a menmoir”. I have a feeling that Mac Cabe would not argue with the idea that she wants things both ways or at least that she wants to live on her own terms as this memoir seems to be a reaction to having pandered to other people for far too long. She writes with appealing candour – which is perhaps why the book is dedicated “To my mum, who will hate this”.
Aside from a ‘Preface’ and ‘Epilogue’, there is only one other chapter, entitled ‘Beginnings’, which does not have the name of a man. All the other chapters, from ‘Henry’ to ‘Brandin’, are named after the man she happened to be dating at the time. This is far from a rose-tinted view of romance – she describes losing her virginity as “a little like the time I’d had a verruca frozen off in the doctor’s surgery: uncomfortable, but I had entered into this willingly.” It is notable that even the first time she had sex she lied about enjoying it, as she says it was important to her not to hurt a man’s feelings.
I, Julian by Claire Gilbert
Claire Gilbert considers Julian of Norwich to be the mother of English literature, and believes she should stand alongside Chaucer. What seems indisputable is that Julian was the author of the first work written in English by a woman. This rather wonderful fictional autobiography was published to coincide with the 650th anniversary of Julian first experiencing, in May 1373, the series of 16 visions she wrote about in Revelations of Divine Love. It comes garlanded with praise from, among others, Jeremy Irons and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.
In Gilbert’s account, Julian was just a child when she watched her father, a Norwich wool merchant, die in agony from the plague, and when her visions begin she assumes she too is dying of the pestilence – as her husband and daughter have done. Gilbert uses her own experience of cancer – in particular the dreadful constipation she endured as a result of the anti-sickness medication she was prescribed – to evoke Julian’s ordeal of bodily pain.
