New Year, New Literary Fiction: Alive in the Merciful Country by A L Kennedy, Havoc by Christopher Bollen, Good Girl by Aria Aber

Alive in the Merciful Country by A L Kennedy (Saraband £18.99, 384pp)

A L Kennedy is an adventurous, often brilliant novelist who has won the Costa Award (for Day, fantastic) but who is a bit too spiky (in a good way) to sit comfortably within the literary establishment. 

This latest novel, set during the pandemic, feels steeped in a distinctly post-Brexit ideological disenchantment as it follows the story of Anna, a primary school teacher and former street theatre activist, sucked back into her past when a former lover goes on trial.

Big questions about the mendacious relationship between government and its citizens churn away in a wide-reaching, structurally playful novel, but it’s a pity Kennedy’s trademark bleak and biting wit gives way so often to blunt political proseletysing.

Havoc by Christopher Bollen (The Borough Press £16.99, 256pp)

This is a lot of fun – a deliriously unhinged novel with shades of Patricia Highsmith and narrated by a fabulously slippery 80-year-old American widower, Maggie, who has taken up residence in a luxury Egyptian hotel with the aim of improving the lot of her fellow guests by surreptitiously meddling in their private affairs.

Naturally, her plans rarely work out, not least when she meets her nemesis in the form of an unstable eight-year-old boy, Otto, who is as practised in the art of devilish deception as she is and with whom she engages in an increasingly mad battle of wits.

Events rapidly spiral out of control, the body count mounts up and details of Maggie’s mysterious past are slowly revealed in a cleverly insidious, off-kilter thriller. Perfect for January.

Good Girl by Aria Aber (Bloomsbury £16.99, 368pp)

Set amid the druggy neon squalor of Berlin’s underground art scene, this coming-of-age debut is the story of Nila, daughter of Afghan refugees (and former doctors) who channels her anger and humiliation over her parents’ pitiful immigrant existence into an increasingly elaborate fantasy involving fake versions of her life story.

Following the death of her mother, Nila eventually finds a refuge of a sort in the techno clubs of Berlin – and, a bit inevitably, the arms of an older man who is clearly bad news – yet struggles still to throw off her entrenched feelings of shame and cultural alienation.

Against the heady beat and colour of rave culture, Aber deftly summons a post-unification Berlin still in the throes of its own coming of age, while getting under the febrile skin of a self-sabotaging young woman trying on multiple identities.

A writer to watch.