The Bones Of Grace by Tahmima Anam (Canongate, £8.99)
The ancient fossilised whale skeleton sought by marine palaeontologist Zubaida was at a stage in its development when it was both a land and marine animal. She can identify with that. A Bangladeshi, Zubaida was adopted, has no knowledge of her true ancestry and doesn’t have the same loyalty to Bangladesh as her adoptive parents. Nevertheless, she returns there to marry a childhood sweetheart, despite having fallen in love with an American man at Harvard. She’s caught up in a turmoil of historical forces, and somewhere in the midst of that she’s hoping to find herself. In this exploration of home and identity, Anam rises above occasionally heavy-handed symbolism and delivers some breathtaking imagery, such as a vast beach on which old ships are broken up and where Zubaida is set on the path to reclaiming her identity. This eerie salvage yard and the primeval whale skeleton give Zubaida’s journey of self-discovery a real sense of scale.
The Drinker by Hans Fallada (Melville House, £8.99)
The unfortunate Hans Fallada spent much of his life in prison, psychiatric hospitals or in rehab. Mentally unbalanced, he stole to finance his morphine habit and once killed a friend in a duel. Writing, too, was a compulsion for him, and he could turn out a novel in a frenzy of activity. The Drinker was written, in code, in a Nazi-era asylum in 1944, where he had been institutionalised after threatening his estranged wife with a gun. It’s a strongly autobiographical novel about a businessman named Erwin Sommer who loses a client, can’t admit it to his wife, drinks away the couple’s savings and is finally talked into staging a burglary of his own house. It’s not the most convincing fiction, but it’s a very arresting memoir, not short of pathos: a stark depiction of a vain and arrogant man witnessing his own descent into the abyss with self-righteous incomprehension. The Nazi regime, never referred to directly, lurks menacingly at the fringes.
Tales Of Persuasion by Philip Hensher (4th Estate, £8.99)
This fine short story writer weighs in with a new collection of 10 more, in which various characters delude themselves about who they are, painfully gain some perspective and have to learn how to live with the hand they’re dealt. Among his cast of characters is a gay London journalist who looks forward to welcoming an African visitor to his home only to find out that “Timothy” is a woman, a writer who fears the smoking ban has robbed him of his talent and an old lady who mistakes her old folks’ home for a spa and believes Silvio Berlusconi is a regular visitor. Both Hensher’s virtues and vices are displayed here. These are intelligent, observant, often witty stories, all very skilfully written. But he also has a tendency to let his tales run on far longer than they should, an ironic flaw to find in the compiler of The Penguin Book Of The British Short Story.
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