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Roula Khalaf, editor -in -chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Impressive Funmi Fetto Hail (Magpie £ 16.99) is made up of nine stories that have taken together have the weight of a novel. Everyone focuses on the experience of a Nigerian woman, collectively giving a portrait of temperaments, horizons, situations and variable parameters. A central character in a story could present himself as an appointment role in another, but for the most part, they are alone. “House Girl”, the most poignant, focuses on Nkechi, a maid to an imperious and lazy Lagos Socialite. Little by little, we see the abuses and the assaults that Nkechi must suffer, learn how she has entered the situation and how much is packed up against her socially and culturally.
In “Dodo is Yoruba for Fried Plantain”, a new widow who lives in the Gloucestershire for a quarter of a century settles down in the exotic products of Brixton Market, wondering where life will then take it. The surface area Mary of the history of the title Homes in the newcomers in London With help offers that have a bite in the tail. Let's easily pass from humor to sadness to indignation, Fetto collects stories, letting his readers determine each result.
The reader also has work to do as part of Issa Quincy Absence (GRANTA £ 14.99). An anonymous man recalls conversations and stories told by family, friends and more distant links, linked together by his own associations. The photographs give birth to memories; Tales are woven with other tales. It is rather done in the manner of Rachel CuskBut without its incisiveness. Instead, Quincy offers vignettes that are even more obsessive to be indistinct: a boy drowns at sea, toxic brothers encountered by chance telling their story, a donkey is whipped to death, an elderly Arab woman tells the fate of her brother in the hands of the French authorities of in the French authorities in the Algeria.
The descriptive passages display the lyricism of Quincy, for example the visit of the man in a distant and decrepit country manor in search of another piece of puzzle. The narrator hides behind the stories of others, but a framing device depends on his obsession for a poem that reminds him of his mother (without name, but clearly Oscar Wilde Depths). Plotless (there are a lot of session and wandering), the novel acts as a meditation in time, a meaning and a forgetfulness.
There is a more tangible mystery to solve in the spark of Louise Hegarty but sad Fair play (Picador 16.99 £): Sudden death, the day of his birthday to the New Year, of the brother of the protagonist. Abigail gathered a group of friends in a big old house that she hired for a mysterious party of murderous murder. Condedably dressed, friends join the pleasure but that Benjamin Calme is found dead in bed the next morning.
The text is suddenly divided into two: an investigator arrives straight out of the pages of a story of detective of golden age to elucidate the mystery in a real time style; While in the real world, friends all go home by leaving Abigail to face reality, rather fiction, death, so slightly distributed criminal novels. Fair play acts both as a spiritual deconstruction of a genre and a portrait of unbearable sorrow and loss.
A father and a son lose almost everything in black comedy Last acts By Alexander Sammartino (Pouchkin One 10.99 £, published for the first time in the United States by Simon & Schuster last year). David Rizzo without luck manages a firearm store on the border of legality in a dilapidated shopping center in the Arizona desert. His son Nick – His only hope of continuing the company in difficulty – is a convalescent drug addict. In a vague attempt to do good and differentiate Rizzo Fire Weapons from competition, David connects sales to a charitable business to fight the opioid crisis with a series of revolutionary viral announcements. However, the sale of an assault weapon to a minor who uses it in a school shooting derails their entire program. The fact that the shooter, as incompetent as everyone in the novel, only kills anyone.
Opening just before Trump's first presidency, Last acts Combines a sardonic and sardonic vision of the marginal life of the white working class with a real penchant for characters such as failure, but the businessman eternally full of hope Buford Bellum, while moments of transcendence regularly arrive graciously gracious views of the desert.
The writer of the New Saba Sams tended first novel, Gunk (Bloomsbury Circus £ 16.99), located in Brighton, examines what is happening when two different young women reinvent maternity and partnership. Jules works in a grungy club with his ex Scuzzy ex Leon, who obtains a young barmaid, Nim, pregnant. She decides to have the baby and put him back to Jules, who could never conceive. An unconventional link ensues, which should not need formal definition to function. The poignant tale of Sams travels the questions of identity as essentially unknowable, and simply rejoice in the waste of life – the Gunk.
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