Paperbacks

A Possible Life

Sebastian Faulks

Hutchinson, £12.99

Starting at the end of Sebastian Faulks’s wonderfully intricate but exceedingly readable new novel might seem to make more sense than beginning at the beginning. The book is a bit like life: it takes the passage of time and the accumulation of experience for its reasons to become clear. Made up of five apparently unconnected stories, the novel winds its way from a second World War death camp, through a childhood in a Victorian workhouse, to a scientist working in Italy in 2029, and on to the sad tale of a French servant, finishing with a love song. There are common themes, however: freedom and imprisonment, war, books, the beauty of cricket, the Madonna, and monocularism – as in being one-eyed. The possibility of human existence as a shared consciousness, communal and endless, is intrinsic to the tales, and the last line of the last story is startling but optimistic: “We’re all in this thing, like it or not, for ever.” Claire Looby

Hope: A Tragedy

Shalom Auslander

Picador £7.99

Solomon Kugel, paranoid self-loather and relentless anthropomorphiser, flees the city with his wife, his beloved son and his wretched, ailing mother (who constantly talks of how she suffered in the Nazi concentration camps despite the fact that she was never in one). They decamp to a farmhouse in rural Stockton, New York, in an effort to escape history and begin life anew. But Kugel’s troubles are only beginning. As he lies in bed one night he hears a tapping coming through the vents of his house. Convinced it is some lunatic arsonist, he follows the noise to the attic, where he discovers a thought-to-be dead, well-loved historical figure hiding like some emaciated anchorite. For Kugel things swiftly go from bad to worse. Shalom Auslander is masterful in how he examines the legacy of the Holocaust and the meaning of historical consciousness through a biting gallows humour without undermining the novel’s tender heart. This first novel is hilarious, irreverent and brilliant. Michèle Forbes

Noon

Aatish Taseer

Picador, £7.99

Aatish Taseer’s novel tells the story of Rehan Tabassum and his travels, both physical and emotional, between New Delhi and Pakistan. New Delhi is the home of his unmarried, wealthy mother; Pakistan is the home of the father he never knew. Rehan’s journey begins on a train as he moves south from Kashmir. Issues of national identity, religion, class, family and language are explored but with no real elan, and the casual reader may well struggle with the regional politics and their importance to the protagonist’s life. His situation might have been characterised in this country as a case of love across the barricades. Unfortunately, the book never shakes off the shackles of a ponderous plot and prosaic writing: “Mirwaiz’s eyes grew wide with an apology.” Do eyes grow wide in apology? There is also something quite cold about the dialogue; the characters speak to the reader but do not engage. Pól Ó Muirí