Sarah Perry has followed her Victorian debut The Essex Serpent with Melmoth, which begins in near-contemporary Prague. It is easy to forget that the setting is 2016, however, not least because our heroine, forty-two-year-old Helen Franklin, has no interest in present-day pleasures. She views the Prague that tourists enjoy as “a stage set, contrived by ropes and pulleys”. In fact, she has no interest in pleasure of any kind and is governed by self-denial. Perry is skilled at suggesting a whole life in a phrase – Helen is introduced to us with “her neat coat belted, as colourless as she is, nine years worn”.
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Normal People, Sally Rooney’s extraordinary second novel has already been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 and at 27, she could be the youngest writer ever to walk away with the prize. Anyone who has read her first novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), will hardly be surprised as they will know that she writes with breath-taking fluency. She wrote 100 000 words of her first book in just three months, by often writing for 17 hours a day and prior to this was a European debating champion. This might partly account for why the dialogue in her novels is so startlingly good.
First Novels
Katharine Kilalea is a South African poet who has written a startlingly good first novel. OK, Mr Field (Faber, £12.99) is the haunting story of a concert pianist whose wrist is fractured in a train crash. On a whim, he uses his compensation money to buy a house that he has only seen in pictures. If that sounds dull, this might be because it is hard to convey the shocking accuracy of Kilalea’s prose, which, ultimately, is what makes this novel so riveting. The absolute correctness of the vocabulary she uses makes one realise how pretentious and unnecessary the language in much contemporary fiction is.
My Perfect Day: Sam and Sam Clark
The husband-and-wife team behind Moro love simple food, preferably eaten in working men’s cafés. For their fantasy day of eating they head to the Moorish lands that inspire their cooking...
First breakfast
We discovered a special ful cart when visiting friends in Cairo. Ful is made from dried broad beans, cooked overnight in a cylindrical pot, then served warm in a little bowl.
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
Jon McGregor is an audacious writer. In an age where narrative in the most popular works of art often proceeds at a breakneck speed, he has chosen to defy this. Reservoir 13 (2017) is his first novel for thirteen years and like his debut novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), it was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Reservoir 13 also won the Costa Novel Award for 2017. It managed this feat in spite of his use of the passive voice and the utter absence of dialogue in the novel.
Reservoir 13 begins with an apparent hook: a thirteen-year-old girl has gone missing in an unnamed Derbyshire village.
Towering Ambition
If you’ve ever wanted to spend the night in a Martello Tower erected to stop Napoleon landing on the Suffolk coast, or in a pink seaside villa that once belonged to author John Fowles, now is your chance.
Booking for the Landmark Trust’s five most popular properties – which include a miniature classical pavilion in Shropshire, a 13th-century castle in Warwickshire and a four-storey folly in Dorset – for the second half of 2019 opens to the public tomorrow. These renovated gems are some of the most startlingly quirky properties you could hope to rent.