‘Atmospheric and assured’: The Literary Fiction you should read now – TWIST by Colum
TWIST by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury £18.99, 256pp)
The fragile undersea cables that carry our means of communication are the metaphorical subject of this novel, narrated by sometime journalist Anthony Fennell.
Commissioned to write about how breaks in these essential digital highways are repaired, he joins a mission led by charismatic engineer and diver John Conway. But Conway is not all he appears, and his sudden disappearance at sea forces Fennell to re-evaluate everything.
McCann flexes his muscles here as both a storyteller and (occasionally too obtrusively) a stylist, constructing a cleverly plotted yarn with shades of Heart Of Darkness.
The deliberately cypher-like character of Conway didn’t entirely convince me, but there’s no doubting the timeliness of Fennel’s meditations on both the wonder and toxicity of our instantly connected world.
DREAM COUNT by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4th Estate £20, 416pp)
It’s been 12 years since the celebrated author of Americanah last published a novel, and the good news is that it’s been worth the wait.
Set between the US and Nigeria, this is the story of four interconnected women navigating midlife friendship and heartbreak, duplicitous exes and ticking biological clocks, each strand forming a rich and compelling narrative in its own right – satisfyingly crafted, but not overdetermined.
However, it is the experience of Kadiatou, whose dreams take her from Guinea to New York, that is the novel’s riveting centrepiece. As the author’s afterword explains, her character’s experience is based on the case of Nafissatou Diallo, a maid engulfed in a media frenzy after she accused French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault.
While Kadi’s ordeal is hard to read, Adichie’s empathy, humanity and formidable skill returns to her the dignity she has been denied – and elevates all four into transcendently memorable everywomen.
GREATER SINS by Gabrielle Griffiths (Doubleday £16.99, 352pp)
It’s 1915, and in a remote Aberdeenshire community the young men who aren’t off to war are bringing in the harvest. But when local woman Lizzie, wife of a rich landowner, unearths a preserved woman’s body from the depths of a peat bog, other, long-buried things also begin to surface.
As a sense of foreboding grows, superstitious beliefs run riot and misfortune turns to tragedy. The bog woman serves as a focus for suspicion, blame and mistrust.
But it is the very human failings of Lizzie and Johnny, the dandy-like wanderer with a dark past to whom she is drawn, that Griffiths is most interested in delving into.
Ultimately an unconventional love story between two flawed protagonists, this is an atmospheric and assured debut.