Elizabeth Strout is back with a new novel: Read our review in this week’s Literary
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Viking £18.99, 208pp)
The great Strout had veered off course in her past few novels, which were a bit too folky for my liking. But she’s back on track with this short, standalone scorcher about a popular Massachusetts history teacher, Artie Dam, during the lead-up to the 2024 American election.
Dam feels estranged from his adult son Rob who, ten years ago, was involved in a fatal car accident and is consumed by thoughts of suicide.
A near-death boating accident conversely reawakens his will to live, but then Rob reveals a secret concerning Artie’s wife Evie, which forces Artie to readjust everything he thought he knew.
The reader’s perception is similarly in constant flux throughout this deceptively gentle novel as Strout folds in tiny devastating details that bring even peripheral characters into indelible focus.
A damning portrait of an ideologically lost America, and a brutal novel about the loneliness at the heart of every life.
Uprising by Tahmima Anam (Canongate £16.99, 208pp)
On an unnamed island off the coast of Bangladesh, a group of trafficked women service the men from the mainland under the gimlet eye of their madam, Amma, a former slave.
Their story is told through the eyes of their children, all girls (the boys are shipped off at birth), who know the same fate awaits but who also dream that they might be saved by the mysterious woman spirit who haunts the forest.
And then arrives Kusam, an educated girl sold by her parents who refuses to accept sexual servitude is her future and dares to imagine another way.
This stealthy novel, in which the children serve as a chorus, has the uncanny atmosphere of a fable, yet its premise – excellently executed in short scenes of shocking power – feels all too wretchedly plausible.
Fieldwork As A Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy (Octopus £16.99, 240pp)
Fieldwork as a Sex Object is available now
When an Indian woman living in London discovers a deep-fake sex video featuring herself has gone viral back home, eagerly shared among others by scurrilous ‘auntie’ WhatsApp groups, she pulls out all the stops to find out who is behind it.
Except the truth lies discomfortingly close to home.
Kandasamy’s polemic lays into a rapacious digital economy predicated on both the sexual exploitation of women and the medieval piety of militant moral crusaders with snarling, disaffected fury.
But it also feels like a poorly edited, strung together sequence of internet ramblings intent more on parading attitude than executing a coherent narrative. I found much of it unreadable.