Richard Russo’s pacy Chances Are, a debut novel by Kathy O’Shaughnessy and the latest from Benjamin Markovits, this week’s best new fiction
Chances Are
Richard Russo Allen & Unwin £15.99
When three old college pals reunite for a nostalgic late summer getaway to Martha’s Vineyard, their thoughts soon turn to Jacy, the girl they were once all mad about, who vanished without trace shortly after holidaying with them there some 40 years earlier.
We cut between Teddy, a lonely, frail book publisher, and Lincoln, a happily married father-of-six, digging for clues in the archives of the local press, but it’s Mickey, a rock guitarist who fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, who knows the truth.
Cleverly paced, Russo’s latest novel folds page-turning suspense into an unhurried, warmly observed portrait of friendship in later life.
Anthony Cummins
In Love With George Eliot
Kathy O’Shaughnessy Scribe £16.99
Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of her birth, this debut novel focuses on George Eliot’s most creative years, when she produced enduring works including Middlemarch and scandalised Victorian society by living openly with a married man, the writer George Lewes.
O’Shaughnessy succeeds admirably both in bringing to life Eliot’s interior mind and the oppressive world she inhabited, and in showing her to be an indomitable pioneer of women’s emancipation.
An accomplished tribute to one of our greatest authors.
Simon Humphreys
Christmas In Austin
Benjamin Markovits Faber £16.99
Markovits continues his semi-autobiographical chronicle of three generations of the Essinger family, last seen in A Weekend In New York.
In part two of the tetralogy, they gather a year later for Christmas at the family home in Texas.
The adults are well-educated Caucasians – Oxford, Harvard, Yale – who reckon with death, old age, ambition, ailing children, and the heart’s upheavals. Markovits has a keen eye for these clannish rituals with their small dramas and occasional revelations.
Jeffrey Burke