LITERARY FICTION

LORI & JOE by Amy Arnold (Prototype £12, 120pp)

CUMBRIAN author Arnold won the Northern Book Prize for her debut, Slip Of A Fish, which also made the shortlist for the Goldsmiths Prize, an award for stylistically radical fiction.

Her new novel, also experimental in style, is a reminder that formal ingenuity need not lead to abstraction. At its best, it can vividly evoke the sensation of consciousness — what it’s like to think and feel.

Set in the Lake District in 1999, it centres on a woman who has just brought her husband his morning cup of coffee only to find him dead.

What does she do now? Put on her boots and go for a walk.

We follow her thoughts in undulating paragraphs that mirror the book’s landscape as her mind circles the memories of their long decades together — which, as we see, have also been decades apart.

Achingly tender as well as gutplummetingly sad, this is a novel about death that is also full of life.

MY NEMESIS by Charmaine Craig (Grove £12.99, 208pp)

CRAIG’S 2018 debut, Miss Burma, longlisted for the Women’s Prize, drew on her family lore for a wide angled saga of Burmese history.

Her new novel, shorter and more intimate, is a tense psychological thriller probing hot-button topics of race, class and motherhood.

What could possibly go wrong when Tessa, a married memoirist in New York, falls into flirty correspondence with Charlie, a married philosopher from Los Angeles?

At first, not a thing. Together with Tessa’s husband, a retired banker, and Charlie’s wife, Wah, they make a foursome who become fast friends as they meet up in one or other’s home city.

But the warm bond between the women soon curdles into rivalry when, at dinner, Tessa tipsily insults Wah, the author of a book about raising an adoptive Burmese daughter.

We hear Tessa’s side of the story in a propulsive confession that pins us to the page with the teasing sense that all is not as it seems.

TO BATTERSEA PARK by Philip Hensher (4th Estate £16.99, 304pp)

HENSHER, once shortlisted for the Booker prize, had said that his previous novel, A Small Revolution In Germany, would be his last.

Happily, his illustrious 30-year career continues with this richly strange four-part meta-fiction that opens during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. We first join the narrator, a Hensher-like novelist, enduring those shut-in days with his husband in South London.

Later, we follow the struggles of their neighbours, battling mental illness in one case and a no-good husband in another. We also see the narrator’s elderly mother, who is suffering from dementia, and visit a gang-ridden coastal town in a dystopian future.

One of Hensher’s finest novels, The Emperor Waltz, was a series of exercises in style, roaming widely in time and place. Here, he uses a similar technique to capture a moment in which such movement became all but impossible. Cool observation and crisp dialogue sustain the resulting fragmentary structure, a lockdown mosaic.