Hot skies and glamorous locations are just the thing for the never-ending season of drizzle and chills we’re experiencing in the UK, and Vanessa Walters’ adult debut The Lagos Wife (Hutchinson Heinemann, £16.99) transports the reader to a world of privilege, excitement and warmth.
Nicole has left her lively Jamaican family in south London to follow her Nigerian husband back home, figuring Lagos will be a better place to bring up their sons. But on arrival at his wealthy parents’ compound in an upmarket suburb, the sexy, cheerful, liberated Tonye becomes a very different man, in thrall to his domineering father. At least their boys Timi and Tari won’t face racism, but Nicole worries about the traditional values they might imbibe instead, especially concerning the lower status of women.
Then, one day, Nicole goes on a boating trip with friends and never returns; the Nigerian police seem disinclined to act and the family behaves as though nothing is wrong. Enter Nicole’s redoubtable aunt Claudine, determined to uncover her niece’s whereabouts. Moving between two timeframes, “before” and “after” the disappearance, The Lagos Wife is a gripping mystery, a portrait of an exhilarating but perilous city and a nuanced examination of clashing cultures.
From the frenetic bustle of a metropolis to the calm of an Oxford college and Rosalind Brown’s Practice (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99). Its premise — a student spends a day holed up in her room studying Shakespeare’s Sonnets — sounds almost comically elitist by today’s publishing standards. The very lack of action exerts a strange fascination as Annabel wrestles with the Bard, the day’s (non-)events are recorded in disconcerting detail. She stretches, breaks off for yoga, goes for a thoughtful walk, drinks many cups of coffee and therefore pees a lot (“the urine . . . catches on some small vulva fold”). Grimly we await the inevitable bowel movement — plop, splash, wipe.
These glimpses into Annabel’s interior life are intriguing, however; her anxieties about her body and her ambivalence about her relationship with an older man, Rich. He seems far less real to her than two imaginary companions, the Seducer and the Scholar, whose relationship she fantasises about, while attempting to channel the Scholar’s brilliance in her work. But even in her imagination, the two men won’t let her watch them have sex. Practice is funny, intense and strangely gripping; after all, it’s the non-events — stray thoughts and ignoble bodily needs among them — that form the texture of a life.
For the central character in Night Swimmers by Roisin Maguire (Serpent’s Tail, £16.99), the body is a vehicle for exhilaration rather than disquiet. Grace is 50, has greying hair and bags under her eyes, lives alone in a small hamlet on the Irish coast, and feels taciturn contempt for the “townies” who clutter up her beach in summer. As well as her competence in fishing, quilting and plumbing, Grace is adept at sea rescue, so when new arrival Evan nearly drowns himself out kayaking the pair are thrown reluctantly together.
A chance of late romance is almost beside the point in this vivid and lovingly drawn picture of an isolated community, which radiates warmth under a protective veneer of aloofness. “They hunker down inside when they’re hurting,” says Grace of a cormorant tangled in a fishing line. “Takes someone else to set them free.”
As befits the work of an award-winning poet, not a word is wasted in Pity, Andrew McMillan’s slim, spare, sparkling story about three generations of men in a Barnsley mining family (Canongate, £14.99). Alex is a miner’s son and ex-miner himself, still coming to terms with the fracture of the town’s way of life after the pit closures of the 1980s; passages evoking the trudge to the mine are both harsh and lyrical, tender and unsentimental. His very identity has been undermined, but he wouldn’t wish his and his father’s life down the mine on his own son, Simon, who is free to express passions Alex has always repressed. Simon supplements his office income with stints as a drag performer and by filming sex acts for punters online. Both uplifting and mournful, full of hope and regret, Pity speaks volumes by never saying too much.
The Painter’s Daughters by Emily Howes (Phoenix, £20) lavishly imagines the young lives of Peg and Molly Gainsborough, their socially anxious mother Margaret, and their brilliant father Thomas. The family moves from Ipswich to Bath where the wayward daughters must be made suitable for marriage, and Thomas must attract wealthy clients. Howes weaves in details from the girls’ portraits in a tender study of sisterly affection, and by probing the historical record has also ingeniously filled in the hidden back-story of the girls’ mother. This is storytelling so vivid you can practically smell the linseed oil and turps.