‘Powerful, demanding, rewarding’ : The best Literary Fiction out now – THE PERSIANS by
THE PERSIANS by Sanam Mahloudji (4th Estate £16.99, 384 pp)
Mahloudji, who lives in London, but grew up in Los Angeles after leaving Iran during the Islamic Revolution, makes her debut with this slick and hefty family saga that shuttles between Tehran and the US.
It follows three generations of women from a wealthy Iranian family as they each wrestle with dislocation and discontent in their surroundings at home or abroad. We start in the 2000s with a larger-than-life set piece during the clan’s winter family get-together in
Aspen, where Bita, a law student, has to bail out her outrageous auntie, Shirin, an events planner who finds
herself implausibly charged with attempted prostitution.
Meanwhile, buried secrets bubble to the surface as we see how Shirin’s mother, Elizabeth, still in Iran, sacrificed her cross-class love for the sake of wagging tongues.
A big and bubbly American novel that sets out to complicate simplistic narratives about migration while keeping a twinkle in its eye.
ANOTHER MAN IN THE STREET by Caryl Phillips (Bloomsbury £16.99, 240 pp)
Another Man in the Street is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Phillips was shortlisted in 1993 for the Booker Prize, the same year he was named on Granta’s prestigious once-a-decade list of best young British novelists alongside Alan Hollinghurst and Hanif Kureishi. His new novel, circling a group of characters in Notting Hill, is unashamedly downbeat, spanning decades in an episodic story that is so quietly done it’s almost told off-stage.
At the centre is Victor, the son of a sugar cane cutter, who sets sail from St Kitts with hopes of becoming a journalist in London. But the English reality is not what he envisioned as he gets caught up with Ruth, the secretary of a dodgy slum landlord who has more than a passing resemblance to Peter Rachman.
All the while Victor is blotting out his harsh treatment of a lover back in the Caribbean. Moving from Windrush to the London Olympics, the deftly slender storytelling gives the characters an unusual solidity as their relationships fizzle out in disconnection and loss.
QUARTERLIFE by Devika Rege (Dialogue Books £22, 416 pp)
This structurally ambitious first novel unfolds in Mumbai, India, during the rise of Hindu nationalism in 2014.
It opens conventionally enough, as short sections alternate between the lives and loves of the central trio.
There’s Naren, an investment banker who returns home from a spell on Wall Street in search of financial opportunity. There’s Amanda, his white American university friend, a photographer out to document the lives of slum dwellers.
And there’s Naren’s filmmaker brother, Rohit, with whom Amanda becomes entangled. But then Rege widens her net in a broader social panorama of caste and class, producing a kind of omnivorous oral history as the prospect of violence comes to the boil amid the political tumult.
Powerful, demanding, rewarding.