Douglas Kennedy, Janice Hadlow and An Yu: This week’s best new fiction 

From Douglas Kennedy’s ‘atmospheric’ Isabelle In The Afternoon to The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow and An Yu’s debut, this week’s new fiction

Isabelle In The Afternoon

Douglas Kennedy                                                                         Hutchinson £14.99

Can true love ever trump rotten timing? It’s a recurring question in this atmospheric tale that begins in Paris in the Seventies, where Sam, a callow law student from America’s Midwest, meets a sophisticated older woman. 

Isabelle and her husband have a typically French arrangement and an affair ignites, but Sam soon wants more, a dynamic that will reverse itself several times over in the coming decades. 

It’s a touching exploration of passion untested by domesticity, and Kennedy’s stripped-down prose takes some of the melodrama out of the challenges he throws at his duo.

Hephzibah Anderson

 

The Other Bennet Sister

Janice Hadlow                                                                                           Mantle £16.99

Prim, priggish Mary was the overlooked middle sister in Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice

She’s thrust into the spotlight by Hadlow, who reveals how growing up plain in a family of pretty siblings fuelled Mary’s feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing, making her almost impossible to love – a severe hindrance in an era when life for single women was financially and emotionally precarious. 

Fortunately, she’s about to learn some salutary life lessons, including the virtues of self-reliance, and soon discovers how poetry can illuminate the workings of the world, and the heart.

Eithne Farry

 

Braised Pork

An Yu                                                                                               Harvill Secker £13.99

Beijing artist Jia Jia is left directionless when her husband dies mysteriously in the bath, leaving a drawing of a fish with a man’s head as the only clue. Such is its power that she starts to dream of a world of water. 

The mystery’s answer, she finally realises, lies in a journey her husband made to Tibet, and following in his footsteps, she stumbles upon a phenomenon that sheds new light on her entire life. 

Yu’s first novel is an uneasy mix of the magical and the mundane, but it offers some intriguing glimpses of modern Chinese life.

Anthony Gardner

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