Seeing her husband in agony, Allison asked him if he wanted to stop. He said no. It broke Allison’s heart to see him suffer, and she worried that the experiment would set Todd back mentally and physically. He covered maybe a few hundred feet before he had to stop.
Still, the brief jog was a victory. Todd felt great. To his mind, he’d struck a blow against the misery that had plagued him for months. When he recalled the experience more than eight years later, the emotion of that day flooded back. He choked back sobs as he described it, slipping at times into the present tense as if he were still standing on that stretch of pavement. “I finally got out on the street,” he said. “This is going to be the start of something that I can do. Regardless of how hard it was and how painful it was, it gave me some hope.”
It’s rare but it does happen: a debut novel comes along that’s so obviously impressive, so advanced in the reach of its ideas and the gracefulness of its execution, that you want to start proselytising for it before you’ve even turned the final page. With its dissident intelligence and its comprehensive vision of a devastated social sphere, Mariel Franklin’s Bonding is the work of an author whose importance already feels assured.
Zoning in on a milieu of tech and pharmaceutical workers in 2020s London, Bonding depicts western society as a juggernaut zombie, digitally reconfigured and bereft of a coherent system of values, that staggers onwards in flight from an all-pervading truth: “no one had any idea how to live”.
James Womack’s latest collection sees the city as both muse and antagonist. A frustrated energy merges with sentiment in poems that feel like a last hurrah to living as we know it. “The city is dead, and yes, the country too, / and probably, beyond, the grey wide world,” he declares in Seasons. Womack, the author of three previous books of poetry, wrote this collection in the shadow of climate crisis and the pandemic, which is why it oozes with anguish. But there’s a quietness, too — a sense of acceptance so the poems never blare.
Full of microaggressions, cultural touchpoints and self-reflection, “Hey, Zoey” uses AI sentience to consider the issue of women’s autonomy from a new angle.
The high caliber of vernacular fiction astounds and delights, from Irish masters such as Kevin Barry and Paul Murray, to Scottish virtuosos like Ali Smith and Douglas Stuart. Now comes a prodigious debut novelist, Scott Preston. His “The Borrowed Hills,” set in rural Cumbria, tucked along England’s northwestern shoulder, is a marvel. Preston’s sinewy, supple prose showcases a cast of desperate sheep farmers as they grapple with the elements and their own clandestine urges.
Structured with the elegance of a three-act play (a small nod to Fennessy’s career as a playwright), the novel sees Weetman invite her readers into the deeply personal journey of her grief, marked with intimate reflections and heartfelt revelations. She confronts her own pain and loneliness with beautifully generous honesty, composure and curiosity.