Books of the Week

Emily Fridlund

Linda, 15, lives with her mum and dad - at least she thinks they're her mum and dad - in the rundown cabins of an abandoned commune, out in the icy, forested, lakeside wilds of northern Minnesota. She's left to her own devices most of the time, and out of school - where she is labelled 'freak' or 'Commie' - she lives a semi-feral existence of solitary mooching and tramping and kayaking and dog-walking and fish-gutting. Relief from this bleak existence appears in the form of the Gardners, an apparently normal nuclear family - mum, 4-year-old boy and mostly absent dad - who take up residence in a cabin across the lake. Linda gets to know mum Patra and son Paul, becoming their long-term babysitter. In her desperation to be wanted, to be welcomed as part of something, she becomes a sort of benign stalker of the family. And she also overlooks their increasingly odd behaviour when Paul falls ill and his condition worsens; ignoring his condition, indeed, becomes the price of acceptance into the family... The chilling plot is only part of the mesmerising power of this assured and striking debut. Fridlund deftly builds atmosphere and evokes a sense of place, generates a terrible sense of foreboding, and creates a cast of characters of utterly credible complexity. Haunting and compelling, here is a first novel from yet another great new American novelist.

Hame

Annalena McAfee

Mhairi McPhail flees her crumbling marriage in New York by moving with her daughter to the tiny Scottish island that her grandparents left decades earlier, ostensibly to write a biography about its late nationalist poet, Grigor McWatt. Former literary editor McAfee's second novel is a clever patchwork blanket of narratives, combining Mhairi's story, excerpts of McWatt's unpublished Fascaray Compendium, passages of Mhairi's biography of the poet and his 'translations' of famous English poems into Scots. Questions of home ('hame'), identity, social acceptance and the importance of family form the core, as Mhairi struggles to accept her own shortcomings while eking out information about the mysterious poet - against the backdrop of the Scottish referendum. It's very convincing, despite being entirely fictional, but McAfee's ambitious choice to structure her book like a research project undermines its tension - so by the time the denouement finally arrives, it's hard to work up much enthusiasm.

The Coroner's Daughter

Andrew Hughes

Abigail Lawless always had a curious mind and it is a thirst for fascinating facts her doting father is always eager to feed. But when Abigail, the daughter of the coroner of Dublin in 1816, begins to dig into his business, there are sure to be dangerous consequences. As she goes deeper, drawing those around her into peril in the process, she encounters the seedier side of the Irish capital. Not forgetting she is the daughter of a well-to-do member of society, where dressing to be the belle of the ball is more regularly under the microscope of public scrutiny than the lives of the temporary residents of her father's workrooms. As she investigates the secrets of a young mother who killed her own child, Abigail is brought to the attention of a mysterious religious sect with growing popularity and influence in the city. Andrew Hughes has already won acclaim for his debut novel, The Convictions Of John Delahunt, and with The Coroner's Daughter, he will win more praise from lovers of forensic murder mystery.

Time Travel: A History

James Gleick

If you're expecting a rip-roaring ride through the wackily entertaining world of time travel films and TV shows, you could be in for a disappointment here. This book is more of a ride through the scientific and philosophical arguments about trying to define what time actually is, which takes some of the fun away, although science historian Gleick does sprinkle brief appraisals of some classic stories throughout the 313-page book. These include HG Wells' groundbreaking The Time Machine from 1895, a bit of Back To The Future, and Ray Bradbury's A Sound Of Thunder (a time traveller visiting the age of dinosaurs treads on a butterfly, producing the ultimate knock-on effect back in his own time). Thankfully, the American author, a time-travel sceptic, also deigns to squeeze in a summary of Doctor Who's Blink, the first one with the Weeping Angels, although they're not mentioned here. An interesting enough book, if you're after a bit of an intellectual run-through of the thoughts of the likes of Einstein, TS Eliot, and Vladimir Nabokov.