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.

Intimations by Zadie Smith

Let’s get envy out of the way first. While many of us struggled to achieve anything during the first weeks of lockdown, barely baking a loaf of banana bread or completing a workout with Joe Wicks, Zadie Smith managed to write a whole book. It is a very slim book – 82 pages; six essays – but it’s a book, nonetheless. Anyone who feels piqued that this might be a money-spinner, though, should note that the author’s royalties are being donated to charity. Besides, Smith generously suggests that writing is simply something to do, no better or worse than baking, sewing a dress or completing “all the levels on Minecraft”.

These essays have been written from the standpoint of an impassioned reader. This is not new territory for Smith, who declared in an earlier collection of essays, Changing My Mind (2009), that: “Reading has always been my passion, my pleasure, and I am constitutionally drawn to any thesis that gives power to readers, increasing their freedom of movement.” 

Short story collections by Richard Ford, A. L. Kennedy & Maria Reva

Sorry For Your Trouble, Richard Ford’s 13th book of fiction, shows a writer still very much on song. The mainly male middle-aged protagonists of these nine stories seem often to be assessing their regrets but coming to terms with them. In ‘Second Language’, a man is enchanted by his glamorous second wife but able to accept when, after two years, she tells him (for no clear reason) that the marriage is over. Alongside multiple divorces, there are plenty of sudden deaths here — not least that of a wife who simply lays her head on her hands and stops breathing. A doctor later diagnoses cancer, but the conclusion is: ‘Dying was likely the only real symptom she’d experienced.’

The most disturbing story is ‘Displaced’, in which a vulnerable boy becomes desperate for friendship after the death of his father. His only mate is a jaded, older adolescent who, unprompted, kisses him when they go to a drive-in movie. The friend concludes the evening by saying: ‘You’ll kill and steal and break people’s hearts and fuck your sister and burn down houses.’

Books to Make You Laugh

The lockdown might be ending but there is still grim news on the television, so we’re reaching for a little light hearted distraction in the form of these comedic books.

The Hungover Games by Sophie Heawood

Anyone who has read Sophie Heawood’s journalism will know what a brilliantly original and perceptive writer she is, from the hilarious column she wrote about Valentine’s Day, to a mind-boggling interview with the actor Jada Pinkett Smith. Her first book gets off to a strong start: Heawood describes taking home a stranger she meets on an app, thinking about Jesus to make herself orgasm and then being interrupted by her small child whom her date has no idea exists. We held our breath as she recounts driving her friends back from Coachella whilst she is heavily pregnant and also unable to drive. She is open-hearted in describing her own dysfunctionality: at one point, she wanders into a house she likes the look of and proceeds to flick through an engagement diary she finds.

Interview with Tayari Jones

When I arrive at her publishers in Bloomsbury, Tayari Jones is in the middle of signing 5000 book plates which will be bound into the UK edition of her novel Silver Sparrow. Such are the demands on her since her novel An American Marriage won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

She is resolutely professional but also clearly somewhat up against it on this short UK visit. She actually wrote Silver Sparrow before An American Marriage but she has deep affection for the earlier novel – its characters are “my favourite people”, she says – which was published in the UK in March 2020.

The novel is about a bigamist called James Witherspoon who has two teenage daughters, Dana and Chaurisse, with different mothers. James lives with Chaurisse and her mother but visits Dana and her mother on a weekly basis – Dana knows about Chaurisse but Chaurisse initially has no idea Dana exists.

Come Again by Robert Webb

The comedian and actor Robert Webb has followed his well-received memoir How Not to Be a Boy (TLS, September 15, 2017) with a time-travelling novel, Come Again. Webb’s heroine is the forty-five-year-old Kate Marsden, an IT specialist whose husband has recently dropped dead from a brain tumour. Kate is plunged into overwhelming grief, and Webb is very good on her anger at those friends who wish to pull her out of it. She rails against anything that might cheer her up, not least “Lunch. Fuck off, lunch”.

Webb also makes a good attempt to inhabit a woman’s body, neither over-eroticizing his heroine nor exaggerating her basic bodily functions in an effort to make them sound authentic. Kate also reveals the mystery behind so-called women’s intuition, saying, “I call it paying attention. Women are interested in how funny men’s minds work because we might need that knowledge to survive. So we end up anticipating things and it looks like a magic trick”