Fiction

Farewell to Eden, Sebastian Faulks’s 18th novel, is a timely masterpiece; a riveting story of war and lost love across two scarred terrains: postwar Britain and Palestine in 1946. It’s a profound meditation on morality, faith and music. And a murder mystery to boot. It’s 1951 and we meet the solitary Philip Deval, an ex-army man with a degree in philosophy. London’s ‘shrapnel scars’ and paucity of work push him to take a job at a school called Witchelm. On his first night, smoking in bed, he murmurs a peculiar thought aloud: ‘Christ, how long can I get away with this?’ Clues snake through the novel to reveal an ingenious denouement. Faulks flashes back to Palestine in 1946.

Bea should be elated: her sweet and loyal boyfriend Jake has just proposed, with the family ring, over dinner. Instead, she feels numb and distant, retreating into anthropological analysis of her new role as the bride-to-be. She soon discovers that Jake’s mother is poised to make the engaged couple a generous gift to help with wedding expenses, but it comes with an unspoken condition. Lorraine wants her pushy goddaughter Millie, Jake’s ex-girlfriend, included in the bridal party. Millie is all fake hair and barbed comments, beneath which a pulse of obsessive longing for Jake throbs audibly.

Anita Brookner, at 80, knew that, were any biographer to delve too deeply into her private affairs, her literature would be ruined. The work was one thing, matters of the heart quite another. In both of her distinguished careers, first as an art historian, then as a so-called ‘lady novelist’, she had found it advisable to keep her authentic self at one remove from her storied accomplishments, and she saw no reason for this division – the personal set apart from the sombrely professional – not to endure beyond her death. She determined, therefore, to thwart any attempt at biography by, wherever possible, erasing all evidence of her existence beyond the collections held in university archives and the fading recollections of contemporaries, family and friends.

Gabriel Dax, the hero of William Boyd’s latest spy thriller, is one of literature’s reluctant spies: good, solitary men who would happily continue pursuing their hobbies if only their beastly handlers would let them. In Dax’s case, his day job is as a travel writer – which allows Boyd to regularly indulge his evident affection for the florid turn of phrase. On the very first page of Cold Sunset, the third novel in the series, Dax describes the Pacific, admired from 1960s Santa Monica, as ‘slate-grey, mouse-grey, dirty dishwater-grey’, and even ‘zinc, ash, pewter’. To Boyd’s credit, the novel can be read as a standalone, but it’s probably best enjoyed after books one and two.

In 1957, Russell Ryan, an American is holidaying alone in Austria. There he meets a young woman called Hermine Braunsteiner. They fall in love and Russell takes Hermine back to America where they marry and set up home in the suburbs. All goes well until 1964, when a New York Times journalist knocks on the door and tells Russell that Hermine is a former concentration camp guard. In writing this novel, Angharad Hampshire is drawing on the couple’s real-life story, and the reader is captivated from the outset. What exactly did Hermine do? How will Russell react to the accusations against her, and can he ever forgive her? Hampshire writes in short chapters, weaving together scenes from past and present, moving fluently between Austria, Germany and the US.

Anthony Quinn’s deliciously dark, theatrical-set murder mystery Curtain Call announced the former film critic as a popular novelist of the first rank after his earlier books failed to receive the appreciation they deserved. Since then he has published seven books, wildly varying in style and settings, but featuring a core cast of characters. Memorable among them is the James Agate-inspired figure of the portly, bibulous, louche theatre critic Jimmy Erskine – surely one of the great literary creations of modern times. Erskine reappears in The Millionaire Waltz and is given many bon mots, but he is not the protagonist here.

A typical adolescent, Jack Fristensky is consumed by uncertainty about who he is, his place in the world and, of course, his burgeoning sexuality. Less typically, he must also contend with his mother’s suicide and his father’s subsequent admission to a mental hospital. Effectively orphaned, he is sent to live with his mother’s ‘mad, mysterious family’ – his grandparents, Aunt Rose and three uncles, Theo, Haulie and JJ, the last of whom is only two years his senior. All the characters are richly and idiosyncratically drawn.

In his mid-forties, Miles Krzelewski is a graduate student who makes Saul Bellow’s Herzog look like an academic overachiever. After 14 years and 11 changes of subject – including Rabelais’s monsters, Chekhov’s early humour and Tolstoy’s train journeys and farming techniques – he has yet to complete his doctoral thesis. When his wife, Kate, a respected Milton and Blake scholar, is offered a one-year visiting professorship at a rural Vermont college, Miles is thrilled, convinced that a pastoral life will afford him the inspiration he needs for his latest project – a study of Russian peasant folklore. Together with their children, 12-year-old Wesley and nine-year-old Olive, plus their dog, Giuseppe, they undertake the long journey from their Californian home.