Nostalgia and longing in the best literary fiction out now: RIPENESS by Sarah Moss, LET
RIPENESS by Sarah Moss (Picador £20, 304pp)
BACK in the 1960s, Oxford bound teenager Edith was dispatched to idyllic rural Lombardy to look after her elder sister Lydia, a ballet dancer in the final stages of an unplanned pregnancy.
In the present day, seventy something Edith is living comfortably on the wet west coast of Ireland, enjoying an on-off dalliance with a German potter. As one strand of Moss’s typically beautifully-crafted novel follows the ripening Italian summer, Lydia’s pregnancy and her adamantine intention to give the baby away, the other follows Edith in the autumn of her life, as she reflects on mortality and the state of the world she’ll leave behind.
Above all, it’s a meditation on belonging: Edith’s own Jewish mother, who lost her family to the Holocaust and found peace in a kibbutz; the Ukrainian ‘Good Refugees’ who are welcomed by Edith’s Irish neighbours; the African asylum seekers who are greeted with protests. As an outsider herself, Edith is well placed to observe it all, to thoroughly absorbing and moving effect.
LET ME GO MAD IN MY OWN WAY by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker £16.99, 320pp)
THIS hugely powerful third novel from the Booker-longlisted Feeney ostensibly follows university lecturer Claire in the wake of her victimised mother and tyrannical father’s deaths.
Blowing up her relationship with her solicitous boyfriend, she returns from London to the family home in Ireland, a place that, as the novel unfolds, we realise has been the scene of unspeakable horrors during the Irish War of Independence.
It’s only in the later stages of the novel that the two timelines coalesce, as Feeney excavates the overlapping oppression and violence of colonialism and patriarchy from a typically left-field angle. Questions of revolution, restitution and, perhaps, resolution swirl in the unsettled mix of this visceral, stimulating tale that is likely one of the most original you’ll read this year.
WHERE SNOWBIRDS PLAY by Gina Goldhammer (Hay Press £9.79, 264pp)
THE author’s own backstory here is every bit a match for her exotic plot, and in part its inspiration. A longtime personal assistant to Henry Kissinger, she was also caught up in the same 2000s insider trading scandal that embroiled US TV personality Martha Stewart.
The backdrop is Palm Beach in the 1990s, a world of ‘sculpted faces, sham marriages and designer-decorated homes’. Hannah and Philip are both English incomers, but only Oxford marine biologist Philip knows the shady family connection linking him to Hannah’s disabled son.
The glossily privileged milieu is sharply drawn, but elsewhere the execution is wanting, with slow-to-arrive intrigues out of focus and an ultimate descent into pure melodrama.