Barbara Kingsolver’s back…this week’s literary fiction: PARTITA by Barbara
PARTITA by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber £20, 352pp)
US writer Kingsolver is as close as any novelist gets to nirvana: she sends critics into ecstasy, yes, but her books fly off the shelves, too.
True, she struggled to match the success of 1999’s The Poisonwood Bible until her smash hit Demon Copperhead bagged prizes on both sides of the Atlantic three years ago, sending anticipation for her latest novel into the stratosphere.
Fans can breathe easy: despite some cheesy moments (the sex, mostly), Partita is ace.
We follow a small-town music teacher whose youthful promise as a pianist went awry after she crushed her hand. The buried regret stirs when an old flame re-appears, with the narrator long since married.
Sensationally plotted, it’s at heart a boldly grown-up take on how we make do and mend in the face of life’s left turns. Another bestseller, I suspect, and deservedly so.
THE FLOATING WORLD by Ben Eastham (Fitzcarraldo £14.99, 276pp)
15 years ago, art critic Eastham set up the now-defunct cultural quarterly The White Review with Jacques Testard – the brains behind the trailblazing indie publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, whose blue-jacketed paperbacks are a byword for bookish cool.
Now Testard is bringing out Eastham’s first novel, which might have risked looking like a vanity project were it not actually good.
It follows a widowed journalist on the payroll of a plutocrat plotting to turn an Aegean island into a bolthole for fellow one-percenters.
The narrator’s job is to help him plan an art exhibition – a task that prompts an uneasy reckoning with the circumstances of his wife’s death, as he ends up in the orbit of an undercover activist.
A consistently intriguing cocktail of zeitgeisty cultural satire and doomy dystopia keyed to present-day fears about politics and ecology.
THE COMETS by Eoin McNamee (riverrun £22, 224pp)
McNamee, best known for his 1994 novel Resurrection Man, about Ulster loyalist paramilitaries (and filmed in 1998 with James Nesbitt), has long written about the shadow side of life in Northern Ireland.
His new book harvests short stories from across his career to offer a series of eerie snapshots from the province and beyond.
A long-haul driver gets mixed up with a trafficked woman from Moldova. A bereaved young victim of domestic violence forms a dubious relationship at an arcade. Police hunt a girl in flight from the residential home where she was dispatched in her teens.
Tenderness glints amid the broken shards of McNamee’s bleakly astringent prose, sometimes laced with a hint of the supernatural as he grapples with the weight of historical bloodshed.
A haunting chorus of lonely voices in the dark.