One book for now and three for later

The Other Wife, A Little Trickerie, Seduction Theory, Cleaner

I opened The Other Wife by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy (out 17 July) without much hope for it. It’s described as being about “race and class, love, nostalgia and mid-life reckoning” and it sounded like it might be a bit earnest. But it’s not, it’s brilliant. It was brilliant from page one and I couldn’t stop reading. I was due to fetch Kitty from school while I had ten pages to go so took the book with me and read the final bit on the way.

Our heroine is Susan, “Zuzu”, she’s nearly 40 and she reflects on her life as a domestic drudge to her unsupportive, neglectful wife, and wonders if anything could have been different. Sounds so dull, but it’s really, really so, so good. A small sample:

Agnes walked by dishes and trash cans all the time. Sometimes when she got home around ten she’d fry herself an egg and then leave the skillet on the stove, and if I decided not to wash it for her, it would sit there for days. Days. By the time I washed it, the anger I felt didn’t even make sense: it had taken me two minutes, it was just a frying pan. Think of the money she made for our family in two minutes at her desk.

I could write thousands of words about this book, but I will spare you. Anyway, loved it.

A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike (out now) is one of those strange books for me where I didn’t love it but I can see that it is a great book and will be hoovered up by many others. Briefly, the year is 1483 and 14 year-old Tibb Ingleby is orphaned when her mother dies in a barn after giving birth. Ingleby sets off roaming the Medieval English landscape trying to find something like a home.

The prose is heavily stylised, like this:

These woods all look the same, Ma, and I have found myself a bigger hollow so truly I am an owl now, except owls don’t cry and they don’t drink wine or charge for a fucking ether. I have been here since last night and now the sun has left again. My head is thumping still from that wine. I think the big-man has whacked a slice of wood against it for all that stealing I did think to do.

And it is the most tremendous feat to keep this voice up through the book, while also making it intelligible. Where it fell down for me, and I couldn’t finish it, is that it’s all just a bit right-on. Not woke, just right-on. One of Tibb’s first friends is a beautiful homosexual teenager on the run from his restrictive family; later she takes up with a jolly band of misfits and defends a lute player with a port-wine stain against yokels who say he is marked by the devil - and so on.

The problem is that I am a cynical person. I’m not proud of this, but it is a fact. And right on-ness makes my eyes glaze over a bit. But I know that one person’s right-on-ness is another person’s touching and life-affirming tale. So do please give this a look if you pass it in a bookshop.

I am very curious to know why Seduction Theory, a very clever and engaging debut by Emily Adrian is being released in the UK on the 12th August. I am not an expert on publishing, but I feel like that is a very dead time to release a book, denoting a lack of confidence when this is a really very good book. It’s not a big book, I suppose: it’s not a grand, sweeping, state-of-the-nation book.

It is, in fact, a meta book, and when I say that I mean that it is a book about a book. We are on campus at a university in America. Simone is a hot, successful tenured professor and Ethan is her hot lecturer husband. They have no children and seem to have a borderline mythical marriage where it’s still all just hot and sexy and no-one snipes at the other one about cereal bowls left next to the sink or underpants.

But. Although Ethan knows he has the hottest wife ever, he still has sex with his assistant, Abigail. And meanwhile, his wife, Hot Simone, starts a maybe? maybe not? non-physical affair with the some-time third person, some time first person narrator of the book itself. The bulk of the book ends up being the narrator’s MFA creative writing thesis, which is the imagined fallout between Simone and Ethan over his brief affair. She sees snippets of the situation, but not the whole picture, and fills in the gaps in the way that you might do, if you had a big, obsessive same-sex crush on your teacher.

If this all sounds confusing, it’s not. Adrian is extremely deft at making it very clear who is talking, why, when and so on. What I really admire about this book is that, Ann Tyler-like, Adrian is very skilled at creating intense drama and suspense over very small events. The Other Wife does this too, in fact. The last twenty pages of Seduction Theory I was ripping through like it was a thriller. Adrian makes us start to doubt the motives and, frankly, mental health of our narrator. We start on her side but at the end, do we like her as we see her exposing the fault-lines of this marriage, which surely ought to be considered private?

Please do consider a purchase. As usual, pre-order to ensure your place in heaven.

Cleaner by Jessica Shannon (out 28 August) is a bonkers, wild ride with our unnamed artist narrator, who is totally adrift in her mid-twenties and starts cleaning for a living because she can’t think of anything else to do. She falls in with a couple, Isabella and Paul and moves into their flat. Isabella promptly vanishes and what happens next is the whole point.

Cleaner is very funny, I laughed out loud a lot, and if you can suspend your disbelief a bit - (why does Paul never once mention that his live-in girlfriend has vanished?) - and just go with it, Shannon ushers in the most entertaining hot mess I’ve met for a long time.

Two more things:

1 I had a revelation about zit care. I had always dismissed holding an ice cube to an under-the-skin monster as time-wasting but I did it yesterday to an absolute carbuncle on my chin and it worked. The secret: do it for a long time. 60 seconds on, 60 seconds off, 5 times, twice. I thought this thing was going to rule my life for 10 days and then scar and it just went, overnight.

2 Bras! Dread. Gloom. My bosom is now completely out of control and I need a solution that is a) comfortable b) very controlling c) good under a t-shirt. I have been recommended the Bravissimo Millie. Is anyone familiar with her? Any and all suggestions gratefully received, in the handy box below or email me esther@onthespike.com if you are shy. Please, no underwire if that's even possible.