BOOKS | Reviews
DEBUT FICTION AMY BURNS Leaving is My Colour (Freight Books) ●●●●●
‘I first realised I loved Jack the day he drowned,’ begins Amy Burns’ novel, setting the reader up for a wistful tale on the pitfalls of a modern, melancholic romance. Don’t buy into it. There's nothing romantic about this darkly witty road trip through the bumpy highway of a young woman’s mind. Instead, it’s about the anti-romance of reconciling life and love, finding your place in an imperfect family, and the way our flaws are exposed and exploited by the people closest to us.
With acerbic pragmatism, Burns takes us through the life of Rachel, a serial divorcee and recovering drug addict. Rachel’s sister never warmed to her because ‘she was expecting a puppy’. Her mother tried to poison their father when she suspected an affair. Jack is the love of her life, but actually, Jack’s a bit of a douche. He’s also married, distant and an imperfect representation of the idyllic life Rachel craves. Where Burns succeeds is in making us feel sympathy for
Rachel without ever asking for it. Conversations with her family are played out in script form, because we don’t need narrative interjections to see that they’re dysfunctional. We don’t need Rachel to tell us she is depressed: Burns does that for her, by painting a bleak world in which she’s trapped, in few enough words that the reader can imagine it all too well.
If you like novels with linear plots and a neat little ending, this isn’t for you. If instead, you want a book that is as honest, fractured and occasionally as hilarious as life itself, Leaving is My Colour will look good on you. (Rebecca Monks) ■ Out Thu 16 Feb.
ANTHOLOGY MAHVESH MURAD AND JARED SHURIN The Djinn Falls in Love (Solaris) ●●●●● MEMOIR CAT MARNELL How to Murder Your Life (Ebury Press) ●●●●●
‘Djinn, jinn, genie,’ reads the introduction. ‘Every culture has their own interpretation.’ This short story anthology, edited by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin, uncorks conjurings of this mystical being from writers across the world including Kirsty Logan, Kamila Shamsie, Neil Gaiman and Sami Shah. Genies take various forms here, but
along the way there’s much smoke and fire, disappearance and possession, teetering on the edges of reality. Occasional forays into medieval quirk are bound to traditional myth, but the strongest blur the lines more subtly. Monica Byrne’s ‘Authenticity’ depicts
with awe an adult film shoot in a desert, and JY Yang’s ‘Glass Lights’ shows a lonely office worker irritated by transit dating ads. Kuzhali Manickavel’s ‘How We Remember You’ is a particular highlight, with sun-dappled and guilty distortions of memory. It’s rare to find an anthology spanning both the globe and realms beyond, and the variety is enjoyable. (Laura Waddell) ■ Out Thu 9 Mar.
50 THE LIST 1 Feb–31 Mar 2017
For someone who has managed to land what many would consider dream opportunities, Cat Marnell sure knows how to screw things up. This is the main takeaway from How to Murder Your Life, a memoir that traces the journey of a downward spiral of prescription medication, hard drugs, less-than-stellar boyfriends and intense partying.
Marnell’s account of life as an addict while working her way up through Condé Nast is rough yet strangely captivating, with each chapter exhibiting a fierce honesty. Despite her candid narrative, an abundance of white privilege dominates, initially materialising as a result of her wealthy upbringing. But Marnell’s consistently self- deprecating acknowledgement of this is amusing, preventing her colloquialisms and anecdotes from being insufferable.
How to Murder Your Life is a response to our widespread fascination with dysfunction, allowing Marnell to retrospectively divulge her own challenging, intricate tale, while laying bare the horrors of addiction. (Arusa Qureshi) ■ Out Thu 2 Feb.
CRIME CLAIRE MACLEARY Cross Purpose (Saraband) ●●●●● FICTION AYOBAMI ADEBAYO Stay with Me (Canongate) ●●●●●
When her husband dies suddenly, Maggie Laird is left with a mortgage and two teenage children. With little employment to her name, she's convinced by neighbour Wilma that they should take on Maggie’s late husband’s private investigator business.
Set in Aberdeen, Maggie’s initial lack of street smarts is a welcome change from the macho bravado of many crime novels. For a novel with quaint chapter titles such as ‘Maggie Has a Wobble’, it’s surprisingly gritty, with the duo quickly embroiled in cases involving drugs, fraud, prostitution and even murder. While Maggie is firmly the protagonist, the book lends a variety of perspectives to Aberdeen’s mean streets. Chapters are voiced by the likes of drug dealer Fatboy and alcoholic childminder Kym, creating an intricate web of plotlines. There’s a tendency to explicitly sum up how far the two women have come, but with the business established and the women’s friendship cemented, hopefully the sequel dives more directly into the Granite City's underworld. (Rowena McIntosh) ■ Out Thu 23 Feb.
Ayobami Adebayo’s novel takes its title from the translation of ‘Rotimi’, the name of lead character Yejide's third child. It’s a phrase that rings truer and truer to Yejide throughout the book as everything and everyone she holds dear slips through her fingers. Set in 1980s Nigeria, Stay with Me tells the story of Yejide and husband Akin’s marriage and its ultimate demise. Set amid stormy political times, their crumbling marriage is juxtaposed against the country’s faltering foundations. Both husband and wife are given a narrative voice, cajoling the story out from alternate perspectives across chapter after harrowing chapter.
Endless strands are explored and woven through Adebayo's beautiful, stark writing, from the couple's tragic attempts to bear children to the Nigerian relationship between modern and traditional medicine, through betrayal and motherhood. Stay with Me is suffused with the
constant ache of heartbreak, bolstered only by that intangible need to keep going, no matter what. (Kirstyn Smith) ■ Out Thu 2 Mar.