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21st Century

Review

Nesting

by Henrietta Thornton

Even during her sly, vicious husband Ryan’s “good” moments, Ciara feels “part of her body (toe tips, ear lobes, the backs of her knees) is listening, tense, on high alert.” And in his bad moments, “The toppled chair. The smashed bulb. The broken handle. Her bones and blood.” She’s left before, but his rage at her absence was too dangerous to endure. But when she sees a new opportunity, she takes her two small daughters and flees. Here the reader will begin to understand the naivete of “why doesn’t she just leave?” (Why doesn’t anybody ever ask why he doesn’t “just” leave?). Dublin’s rental market is impossible, so Ciara and the children are homeless, forced to stay in a cramped hotel room provided by the city. Ciara, who is pregnant with her third child, has no job, at controlling Ryan’s insistence, of course. Her mother-in-law tells her that she’s going to hell for treating “poor Ryan-Patrick” this way. Child support is non-existent, and Ryan is determined to take full custody of the children even though he appears to hate them and has never lifted a finger to care for them. Watching Ciara claw her way out of this is a gripping view of endurance, terror, bravery and the small and large kindnesses that make her life bearable. The characters here are superbly drawn, the dialog spot on, and I can’t wait for more from this debut novelist.

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Review

Black River

by Brian Kenney

The village of Teetarpur, on the outskirts of Delhi, has been known for nothing for decades. Grittiness yes, but no crimes, no scandals. Until the unthinkable happens and an eight-year-old girl, Munia, is murdered, discovered hanging from the branch of a tree. Munia may have been shy, but she was much loved by her father, the widowed Chand, and the rest of her community. Part police procedural, part literary thriller, this beautifully written narrative brings rural India to life. The novel is told in the third person, with vivid characters richly developed and time that moves back and forth as we see Chand in his youth, living by the Yamuna, the black river of the book’s title. We follow local inspector Ombir Singh, under pressure from the rich and the political elite to resolve the killing, and Chand, calm on the exterior, but whose blood boils with revenge, not trusting the police. Roy is a journalist, and it’s tempting to attribute that to what makes this book so magnificently successful: the range of society, the moral complexity of many of the characters, and the terrifying brutality. Sure to be one of the best books of the year.

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Review

This Plague of Souls

by Henrietta Thornton

This dark, introspective work, which unexpectedly reveals a golden-hued motivation on the part of its main character, reads like Scandinavian noir. But this gem is by an Irish author and follows his Booker Prize-longlisted Solar Bones. McCormack brings us to the west of Ireland, home of Nealon, a man returning from prison, though at first all we know is that he’s been away. He finds his home unexpectedly empty, the electricity switched off, and his wife and child gone. Right away, he gets a call from a stranger who, in a tone so jaunty it’s sinister, congratulates Nealon on his homecoming and offers to tell him where his family is in return for a meeting. As Nealon whiles away the days—after firmly declining the meeting—in a strange limbo, contact with the stranger continues and the former prisoner finds that the motivations for his crime may come to light. West of Ireland weather sets the tone, as “a huge, bruised cloud moves across the sky, with leaden sheets of rain peeling from its underbelly.” But it’s the anonymous, yet intimate, comments from the needling stranger that keep the writing on its toes and Nealon facing “a massive cessation of all that passes for the run of things.” For fans of Donal Ryan and David Malouf.

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Review

The Centre

by Brian Kenney

London-based Anisa is a translator—she provides subtitles for Bollywood movies—but dreams of translating great works of literature. Her spare time is spent hanging out, talking politics, and complaining about her rather useless white boyfriend, Adam, himself a highly successful translator. In fact, on a trip with Anisa to visit her family in Karachi, Adam reveals that he’s also become fluent in Urdu, speaking it better than Anise. Anise goes into a tailspin. “This is shady as fuck.” There’s no way that Adam could become that fluent in years, never mind days. When she presses him for details, he lets her in on the Centre, where after thousands of dollars and ten days of study—living there, avoiding all contact with others, and listening only to your chosen language—you emerge completely fluent.

Skeptical but eager to give it a try, Anisa enters the Centre to learn German—and indeed, after several days of study she has a breakthrough. Along the way, she becomes close to Shiba, who manages the Centre and whose father was one of four men who, while Oxford students, developed this radical approach to language learning. But how radical is it? On a trip to New Delhi with Shiba, Anisa finally learns how the Centre works—and the discovery is shocking.This is a debut, but Siddiqi writes like a pro, slowly building the character of Anisa, so that when the big reveal is made, it’s all the more meaningful.

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Review

Red Queen

by Henrietta Thornton

Hyped as sweeping bestseller lists in Europe, and for good reason, this has all the velocity and thrills of Stieg Larson’s Millennium series but none of the eyeroll-inducing misogyny. “Antonia Scott allows herself to think of suicide no more than three minutes per day,” opens the book. She believes her life to be destroyed as her husband has been in a coma for years. Jon Gutiérrez is the latest disgraced Madrid cop forced by a mysterious character, who calls himself Mentor, to try to get Antonia back on the force. Jon’s between police partners, having left “the Cristiano Ronaldo of Scrabble,” his previous partner, at his last job. He doesn’t have a boyfriend at the moment either. That’s lucky, because it takes all his wiles to deal with Antonia, a woman who’s been trained to have superhuman recall and powers of deduction. She returns to work, and her odd-couple partnership with Jon is pitted against the sinister kidnapper of one of the richest women in Spain, who has left what may be religious symbolism at crime scenes and who drags the partners into some incredibly tense situations (and has an out-of-the-blue twist in store). Word lovers will relish Antonia’s asides that spring from her hobby of collecting expressive words, such as the Inuit Ajunsuaqq, which means to bite a fish and get a mouthful of ash, and the Wagiman murr-ma, searching for an object in the water with your feet. It’s all engrossing, and best of all, this is the first in a trilogy.

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