From Rebecca Wait’s ‘outstanding’ Our Fathers to the evocative Low by Jeet Thayil and Agency by William Gibson, this week’s best new fiction
Our Fathers
Rebecca Wait riverrun £14.99
Twenty years after he was the only survivor of an appalling massacre, in which his father gunned down his mother and siblings before shooting himself, Tom Baird returns unannounced to the remote Hebridean island he once called home.
As he retraces his childhood footsteps in search of some kind of explanation for the tragic brutality that scarred his life, a picture slowly emerges of the events that led to that terrible night.
This is a beautifully realised novel, touching on the fallibility of memory and the unknowability of families, and gripping in its intensity. Outstanding.
Simon Humphreys
Low
Jeet Thayil Faber £14.99
Dominic Ullis is a cosmopolitan wastrel with a long history of heroin addiction. Following his wife’s suicide, he returns from Delhi to his native Mumbai to scatter her ashes.
There he hooks up with his former dealer and embarks on a drug-fuelled odyssey through the city, assisted by chance encounters will fellow junkies and alcoholics.
As with most novels about addiction, the litany of scoring and snorting soon becomes tedious, but it’s offset by Thayil’s lively evocation of India’s most overblown metropolis, and his scorching diatribes against the country’s corrupt rulers.
Anthony Gardner
Agency
William Gibson Viking £18.99
This is the second volume of a trilogy that began with The Peripheral, a murder mystery using time travel between a near-future in rural America and one 70 years further on in London.
In Agency, a techie in 2017 San Francisco works with the returning cast from that future London as various parties vie to control a powerful AI entity.
Gibson’s gizmos and extrapolations are always fun, but things bog down here in prolonged cat-and-mouse action. And it’s unclear why this sci-fi seer is dabbling in the present. Maybe time will tell with volume three.
Jeffrey Burke