From Deepa Anappara’s ‘delightfully observed debut’ to Miss Austen by Gill Hornby and Jeanine Cummins’ page-turner, this week’s best new fiction
Djinn Patrol On The Purple Line
Deepa Anappara Chatto & Windus £14.99
Deepa Anappara’s richly textured and delightfully observed debut evokes the sights and sounds of a sprawling Indian city.
Every detail rings true, from the mangy dog called Samosa to the kindly eccentric giving ragamuffin boys chocolate bars. Day-to-day life in the slums has such vitality that you immediately warm to the residents, with their resilience and dry humour.
But horrors are lurking in the wings, and it is only thanks to the detective work of a resourceful nine-year-old boy that the scale of those horrors becomes clear.
Max Davidson
Miss Austen
Gill Hornby Century £12.99
You don’t have to be a card-carrying ‘Janeite’ to get excited by the prospect of a cache of letters from the author of Pride And Prejudice. Unfortunately, no such treasure trove exists, most of Austen’s epistolary output having been burnt by her doting older sister, Cassandra.
Just why Cassandra did this – and why she waited until Jane had been dead for 23 years – is the mystery at the heart of this moving, often funny novel.
Richly imagined and spryly told, it reinstates overlooked Cassandra as the most important person in Jane’s life, reimagining some of those lost letters as an added bonus.
Hephzibah Anderson
American Dirt
Jeanine Cummins Tinder Press £14.99
This punchy page-turner follows Lydia and eight-year-old Luca, a Mexican mother and son on the run after a drug cartel massacres 16 members of their family, including Lydia’s husband, a reporter who exposed the cartel’s kingpin.
Their ensuing 2,000-mile odyssey to the US puts them in the company of vast numbers of others displaced by violence in Latin America.
Swept up by their hazardous, heart-wrenching trek, you can easily forgive the self-congratulatory air that hangs over the novel’s desire to raise awareness of pressing social issues.
Anthony Cummins