Folk
Zoe Gilbert
Bloomsbury, £14.99
Zoe Gilbert’s debut novel conjures up a mythical island – Neverness – in which youngsters battle through mazes to secure kisses from local girls, a baby is born with a wing for an arm, strangers arrive in the middle of the night, and inhabitants fashion fiddles to play the music of their grief. Less a novel than a collection of interconnected stories – Gilbert is a former recipient of the Costa short story award – there are themes here of desire and longing, loss and mourning, and the rites of passage that must be undertaken to reach adulthood. Although the rhythm of Gilbert’s prose can occasionally feel uneven, Folk demonstrates a powerful sense of mythology, reminiscent of the late Angela Carter.
I Love You Too Much
Alicia Drake
Picador, £14.99
Paul, 13, lives in Paris’s affluent 6th arrondissement with his vain and self-interested mother, Séverine. His parents are divorced, his mother has a new baby with her young lover, Gabriel, and Paul’s workaholic, fitness-obsessed father, Philippe, shows little paternal interest. When Paul is befriended by rebellious new classmate Scarlett, he dares to believe his social isolation may be a thing of the past. But when he makes a shocking family discovery, his emotional world is thrown into turmoil. Drake’s characters are richly drawn and she writes insightfully about teenage angst, the superficiality of wealth, compulsive consumption and familial neglect in a coming-of-age novel that’s replete with evocations of adolescent loneliness and insecurity.
Exit West
Mohsin Hamid
Hamish Hamilton, £8.99 (paperback)
In a Middle Eastern city, two young people, Nadia and Saeed, fall in love amid political unrest and the gradual takeover of the city by militants. But Hamid’s Booker-shortlisted novel is no conventional love story. As mysterious black doors appear throughout the city, offering escape, Hamid builds a lyrical portrayal of the refugee crisis, merging magical realism with political commentary. Episodes of sexual assault, death, dehumanisation, violence and misogyny are dealt with in Hamid’s sparse and unsentimental prose, all the more affecting for its simplicity. Vignettes of parallel lives – two elderly men fall in love, a mute woman refuses to leave her home – provide a rich counterpoint in this exceptionally moving and powerful novel.
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