Daniel Handler’s ‘bananas’ Bottle Grove, a poignant tale by Romesh Gunesekera and Mona Awad’s clever debut, this week’s best new fiction
Bottle Grove
Daniel Handler Bloomsbury £18.99
Handler, better known as children’s author Lemony Snicket, is very much writing for adults in this utterly bananas comedy set in San Francisco amid the rise of the tech industry.
Fizzing with quickfire quips, the action turns on the desperate fund-raising schemes of a hard-up bar owner, Martin, who tricks his sometime lover, Padgett, into wooing a widowed internet tycoon.
Yet that’s barely half the story in this off-kilter thrill-ride, riotous to the point of anarchy. Well worth checking out.
Anthony Cummins
Suncatcher
Romesh Gunesekera Bloomsbury £16.99
Ceylon in the Sixties provides the setting for this poignant coming- of-age story, narrated by an unassuming teenager whose horizons broaden dramatically when he makes an older, more confident friend.
They may be polar opposites, but the emotional contours of their relationship are beautifully charted and, though tragedy is lurking in the wings, there is much here to admire, from pitch-perfect descriptions of flora and fauna to deftly drawn minor characters.
The Trotskyite who holds forth about the hated bourgeoisie while secretly having a flutter on the horses is a particular joy.
Max Davidson
13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl
Mona Awad Head of Zeus £14.99
This clever debut looks at how a woman’s weight can define her life, and the self-consciousness engendered by a culture in which women’s bodies are sexualised and read as metaphors for their personality.
Awad threads together 13 stories from points in the life of a protagonist as she morphs from plump teenager ‘Lizzie’ into ‘Elizabeth’, a married woman with an eating disorder, and finally ‘Liz’, a skinny but restless divorcee.
The themes may be sobering but Awad examines them with a deliciously wry humour.
Gwendolyn Smith