Tessa Hadley’s latest features in this week’s Literary Fiction reviews: Hum by Helen

HUM by Helen Phillips (Atlantic £16.99, 272pp)

Hum is available now

While the growing clout of big tech makes it a boom time for dystopian writers eyeing our digital future, U.S. novelist Phillips stands out with this feverish tale of a mother raising young children in a climate-ravaged city where machines all but rule the roost.

Having lost her job to an artificial intelligence program (which she trained), May signs up as a medical guinea pig in exchange for a much-needed pay cheque.

The plot kicks in when she splashes the money on three nights in an idyllic urban nature park – great for the kids, only May wants them to switch off and leave their devices at home . . . Not unreasonable, you might think, until a hazardous turn of events puts May in the crosshairs of public outrage for her choices. 

A gripping portrait of dilemma-laden parenting in the face of internet-era anxiety.

THE PARTY by Tessa Hadley (Cape £12.99, 128pp)

This chewy little novella from one of Britain’s most beloved writers is a smart bit of publishing ahead of the Christmas trade that fuelled the recent success of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These.

Set in bomb-damaged Bristol in the late 1940s, it follows Evelyn, studying French, and her older sister, Moira, a fashion student. 

When they pitch up at a party at a dockside pub looking for adventure, they’re drawn into the orbit of two seedy-seeming men who invite them to a second party out of town a few days later.

As ever with Hadley, the tale turns on a pent-up thirst for experience and escape that threatens to arouse feelings of regret once sated. 

Hadley treats her abiding theme with sympathy, sustaining our interest throughout with her typically attentive eye for class friction and generational strife amid post-war flux.

SAVAGE THEORIES by Pola Oloixarac (Serpent’s Tail £10.99, 304pp)

Argentine writer Oloixarac made a splash in English a few years back with her novel Mona, a splenetic book-world satire about a prize-nominated Peruvian author at an awards ceremony in Stockholm.

Now comes Savage Theories – actually her first novel, but belatedly available in the UK in a translation by the novelist Roy Kesey.

Set in Buenos Aires amid the psychological wreckage of life under the junta, the livewire narrative toggles between the sexual escapades of two different women, one a philosophy student who is stalking an academic, the other a filmmaker whose father fled 1930s Poland.

To be sure, it’s more tangled than Mona, not to mention dauntingly omnivorous in its frame of reference, but the novel keeps us rapt with the winningly devil-may-care energy brought to its slantwise take on the fallout from Argentina’s bloody political history.