Hurry Down Sunshine
Michael Greenberg
Bloomsbury, £8.99
"On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad. She was fifteen and her crack-up marked a turning point in both our lives." Michael Greenberg grabs the reader with the opening sentences of a vivid, candid, loving but completely unsentimental account of his daughter Sally's psychotic breakdown one sunny summer afternoon in Greenwich Village. Beautifully and sparely written, it is unputdownable after that, as we follow a reluctant Greenberg to the Manhattan psychiatric ward where Sally is treated. Greenberg combines honest family memoir with an exploration of the nature of mental illness and the issues around it – are drugs, with their serious side effects, necessary? do psychiatrists know what they're doing? is the family to blame? Sally slowly recovers, with excellent help from her doctors and – although Greenberg doesn't say it himself – her loving, if fractured, family. Now in her 20s, Sally – who lives with her illness – agreed to the book and wanted her father to use her real name. It's important to know that. Frances O'Rourke
The Weight of a Mustard Seed
Wendell Stevenson
Atlantic, £9.99
In the aftermath of a totalitarian regime, the inevitable questions are, how did this come about, and why did an entire populace seemingly go along with it? Wendell Stevenson attempts to answer both these questions with this exhaustively researched account of one man's rise and fall in Iraq – a former general who believed loyalty to Saddam Hussein would preserve him. There are elements of Kapuscinski in these pages, harsh, instant truths from the mouths of those living and dying on the streets of Baghdad and Basra; there is the intimacy of family life; and the pressures of a society yoked under inflexible pride, appalling tyranny and a culture that is so complicated as to be almost indescribable. This is a profoundly sad book, illuminated with details that are built upon harsh truths. Chilling, compelling and empathetic, it deserves to be read. Laurence Mackin
Strangers
Anita Brookner
Penguin, £8.99
In mannerly and guarded prose, Brookner's 25th novel follows Paul Sturgis, a 70-year-old bachelor, who fears the solitude he has carved for himself now that he's retired. His walks around London and Sunday visits to his widowed cousin are lonely ventures, punctuated only by waves to casual acquaintances. But soon Paul becomes involved with two women at once – Sarah, his long-ago lover who deemed him "too nice" to continue dating, and Vicky, a woman 20 years his junior, whom he meets on a flight to Venice and who then follows him to London and comes to store her luggage in his flat. But Paul doesn't know the woman Sarah has become, and he doesn't particularly like the talkative Vicky either. Instead, these women are simply objects of longing for Paul – symbols of companionship rather than actual desire. Strangers is ultimately a novel about wanting to be, and to die, alone, but being afraid to do it. Emily Firetog
The Anatomy of Wings
Karen Foxlee
Atlantic, £7.99
“No-wheres-ville”, Australia: the funeral of 13-year-old Beth Day. Our narrator, Beth’s little sister Jenny, withholds the circumstances of her sister’s death, but there is in the air the unmistakable aftershock of something brutal. Thereafter, Jenny takes us back in time to the year before; with her we trace the slow-spun web that takes shape around Beth and her family.
Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers debut, this book explores typical domestic gothic territory. The plot, as it treads towards heavily signposted doom, feels rather familiar – but there is a kind of satisfaction in this. Many of the characters, too, read like archetypes (Nanna as the "white witch"; Beth, the golden-haired maiden; Jenny, the naïf). When venturing close to fairy tale, however, there is always the risk of sounding fey. The girlish innocence of our child narrator does nothing to temper this; moreover, at times it sits ill with the novel's deliberate, reaching prose. Claire Anderson-Wheeler
The Lieutenant
Kate Grenville
Canongate , £7.99
In 1786, an 11-ship colonial expedition left Portsmouth because George III “had formed the view that New South Wales was ideally suited to swallow the overflow from his prisons”. Within two years shackled prisoners and marines were addressed in Sydney Cove by their new Governor, monarch by proxy James Gilbert. The same day in 1788 on duty was 26-year-old Daniel Rooke, able to read in five languages, a war-experienced officer and “astronomer of the fairest promise”.
On a somewhat remote promontory Rooke created a working observatory and while enthusiastically recording planetary movements he was regularly visited by "natives". But though cordial relations with the "natives" was the authorities' frequently stated aim, neither Rooke nor they reckoned that the colony badly needed a linguist. To say that language and understanding are at this novel's moral core comes across as dry commentary indeed; in fact The Lieutenant is a fast, enthralling read, peopled with lively characters, derived from historical records. Kate Bateman
