Category Fiction

Rebecca Lowman narrates a superb, claustrophobia-inducing plunge into a relationship descending from bad to worse

Halfway through Liars, the story of a new relationship that becomes a marriage, our protagonist, Jane, is asked by a neighbour: “Why are you with him?” It’s a question that has been on the listener’s mind for some time.

Jane’s partner, John, lies about his feelings, his financial status, where he is going and where he has been. He is chaotic, lazy, resentful, entitled and given to getting drunk and spending money he hasn’t got. At the start of their marriage, Jane’s career as a writer and academic is on the up, while John – a visual artist and aspiring film-maker – has hit a professional wall. Time and time again, he insists they move cities for better work opportunities, which soon puts a spanner in his wife’s working life. It comes as no surprise that, after their son is born, Jane is left to do the parenting while her husband absents himself from his responsibilities.

Available via Picador, 6hr 7min

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An intimate soiree builds to a horrific climax in this visceral novel about a young woman tasked with hosting a meal for her fiance

Literature loves a dinner party. From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to more recent offerings such as Sarah Gilmartin’s The Dinner Party and Teresa Präauer’s Cooking in the Wrong Century, an intimate soiree provides the perfect recipe of claustrophobia and choreography into which a novelist can sink their teeth. The preparations are usually unduly stressful, the guest list dynamic unpredictable, the quantity of alcohol borderline obscene – in short, as a device it has all the ingredients for total, delicious carnage.

The latest entrant to this literary Come Dine With Me is Viola van de Sandt, whose debut The Dinner Party centres on Franca, a shy young woman from the Netherlands tasked with hosting a meal for her English fiance Andrew and his two male colleagues. To make matters more challenging, it is the hottest day of the year, the menu is rabbit (despite Franca’s vegetarianism) and her sous chef is their often violent pet cat.

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The author of The Employees goes back to 17th-century Denmark for an intensely poetic portrait of everyday sorcery and female solidarity

On 26 June 1621, in Copenhagen, a woman was beheaded – which was unusual, but only in the manner of her death. According to one historian, during the years 1617 to 1625, in Denmark a “witch” was burned every five days. The first time this happens in Danish author Olga Ravn’s fourth novel, the condemned woman is “tied to the ladder, and the ladder pushed into the bonfire”. Her daughter watches as she falls, her eye “so strangely orange from within. And then in the heat it explodes.”

The child is watched, in turn, by a wax doll who sees everything: everything in this scene, and everything everywhere, through all space and all the time since it was fashioned. It sees the worms burrowing through the soil in which it is buried; the streets of the world in which it was made. It inhabits the bodies that walked those streets: “And I was in the king’s ear, and I was in the king’s mouth, and I was in the king’s loose tooth and in the quicksilver of his liver, and did hear.”

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A student navigates troubled relationships at age 19 and 25, as he comes to terms with mental health difficulties

“The best way to make sense of life,” Derek Owusu believes, “is to write about it.” His semi-autobiographical debut, That Reminds Me, was an attempt to understand how he came to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder: a condition marked, among other things, by intense emotions, self-destructive impulses, fear of abandonment, black-and-white thinking, and an unstable sense of self. The novel, written in an elliptical and densely poetic style, offered an illuminating, if harrowing, account of alienation, addiction and self-harm, through the story of K, an alter ego whose early childhood, like Owusu’s, was spent in foster care. It won Owusu the Desmond Elliott prize in 2020, and announced him as an idiosyncratic talent; in 2023, he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Owusu now turns again to the subject of BPD, this time exploring the complexities and contradictions of living with the condition. His narrator, Marcus, is 25 when the book opens. An English literature student of Ghanaian heritage, he is at a speed dating event when he meets San. San is strikingly beautiful, and she grabs his attention right away: “So, yes, I was in love again, losing balance, stumbling towards an earlier phase of my life.”

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The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery; The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr; The Good Nazi by Samir Machado de Machado; Bluff by Francine Toon; The Token by Sharon Bolton

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery (Viking, £16.99)
The first novel for adults by award-winning children’s author Montgomery is a locked-room mystery set in 1910 on a remote tidal island off the Cornish coast. At Tithe Hall, Lord Conrad Stockingham-Welt is busy instructing his servants to prepare for the apocalyptic disaster he believes will be triggered by the imminent passage of Halley’s comet. The labyrinthine house is a nest of secrets and grudges, harboured by both staff and family members, who include an irascible and splendidly foul-mouthed maiden aunt, Decima. When Lord Conrad is discovered in his sealed study, killed by a crossbow bolt to the eye, she co-opts a new footman to help her find the culprit. With plenty of twists, red herrings and a blundering police officer, this is a terrific start to a series that promises to be a lot of fun.

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