For sale: one fresh young woman, organs included
SHORT STORY
ROUND-UP
There is something
unexpected for sale in Red
Market, one of several striking
stories in Sheila Armstrong’s
debut collection, How to Gut
a Fish (Bloomsbury £16.99).
Along with the DVDs and
second-hand Le Creuset, an
Irish country market offers
a trussed-up and half-
anaesthetised young woman:
she has been transported in a
van so her body parts can be
sold off separately, right down
to the kidneys and eventual
skull. There is an equally
visceral aspect to the gory title
piece, built around instructions
for preparing mackerel (“Look
your fish in the eye... You
check every catch this way for
your own reflection, but there
is only a dark hole of fright”).
Other stories are as much
about places or processes as
individual human protagonists,
and the more complex pieces
can be slightly meandering,
but this is an unusually
memorable book.
The 25-year-old, Brighton-
based Saba Sams takes late
girlhood as her special
territory in Send Nudes
(Bloomsbury £14.99), a debut
collection that lays bare the
age group not far below her
own in what often seems to^be the scuzzy wasteland of
teenage existence. It is a
gritty book, but moments of
redemption keep breaking
through: a girl loves her
boyfriend’s dangerous dog
more than she loves him,
and gets to keep the dog;
another breaks free of a toxic
girlfriend; and in the title
story a girl with serious
body-image issues finds it
suddenly empowering to
send an anonymous nude
photo to a stranger, then shuts
the exchange down instantly
without risking his response.
Family life hangs like a
curse over The Trouble with
Happiness (Penguin Classics
£10.99), a bracingly bleak
selection of stories by the
celebrated Danish writer
Tove Ditlevsen. Ditlevsen
worked for much of her life asa newspaper agony aunt but
had her own troubles with
drink, drugs and mental
health, and finally killed
herself. Miserable mothers,
disapproving fathers and even
a husband who mustn’t be
woken all inflict frustration on
Ditlevsen’s protagonists, stuck
in a stifling world of ill temper,
embarrassment and awkward
silences. As for happiness, the
main trouble seems to be that
it’s elusive, but Ditlevsen has
a genius for exploring its
absence. These are perfectly
judged pieces: authentic,
unforced and utterly lucid.
The first character we meet
in the Belfast writer Wendy
Erskine’s collection Dance
Move (Picador £14.99) has a
bedside drawer containing
“remnants of other people’s
fun”, and fun always seems tobe elsewhere, including in the
past and the imagination. In
the title story a well-meaning
mother disapproves of her
daughter’s raunchy dancing,
but with a distinct sense that
she is missing something
herself. Another mother goes
around town scraping off
“missing person” posters for
her dead son, a woman in a
boring marriage remembers
sex with a badly disfigured
young man, and there are
imaginary conversations with
not just the living but the dead
(“She takes Gillian in her arms
and they whisper to each
other all the things that they
never thought to say”).
Superb individually, these
stories risk being oppressively
downbeat as a collection. cPhil BakerHISTORICAL FICTION
ROUND-UP
Jennifer Saint’s debut,
Ariadne, was an excellent entry
in the sequence of recent
novels that retell the stories
of Greek mythology from a
female perspective. (Other
notable examples include
Madeline Miller’s Circe and
Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand
Ships.) Elektra (Wildfire £14.99),
Saint’s second work of fiction,
follows the pattern of her first
by focusing on the women in
tales that have resonated
throughout European culture.
Clytemnestra is the wife of
Agamemnon, nursing
throughout the ten years of
the Trojan War thoughts of
St Matthew Passion. This is a
moving story, well told, with a
wonderfully vital portrait of
the composer at its centre.
William Betty was a child
actor who wowed British
theatre audiences in the early
19th century. Hailed as a
young Garrick, his time at the
top was short, over while he
was still in his teens. Michael
Arditti’s The Young Pretender
(Arcadia £12.99) follows the
older Betty’s attempts at a
comeback. Persuasively told
in the actor’s voice, this
short, compelling novel
records the crumbling of
Betty’s dreams of renewedacclaim and his slow
acknowledgment of
uncomfortable truths about
his childhood stardom.
A very different 19th-
century performer is at the
heart of Lianne Dillsworth’s
lively first novel, Theatre of
Marvels (Hutchinson
Heinemann £14.99). In the late
1840s the mixed-race Zillah is
the headline act at Crillick’s
Variety Theatre. As “the Great
Amazonia”, she titillates white
audiences with images of
otherness until a meeting with
a genuine African sets her on
a journey towards greater
self-knowledge. Dillsworth’s
evocation of early Victorian
London doesn’t always ring
entirely true, but Zillah is a
memorable heroine.
Revol Rossel, the central
character in Ben Creed’s
A Traitor’s Heart (Welbeck
£12.99), is a one-time violinist
in Stalin’s Soviet Union whose
musical career was shattered
when his fingers were crushed
during a brutal interrogation.
As the second novel in Creed’s
proposed trilogy opens, he is
suffering in the gulag. Brought
back to Leningrad, he is
dragooned into tracking down
a serial killer the superstitious
are comparing to Koschei the
Immortal, a malignant figure
from Russian folklore. In this
cleverly constructed thriller
Rossel’s inquiries lead him
into the dark heart of the
Stalinist regime. ccantor’s daughter and was
thrust into the maelstrom of
musical activity surrounding
the first performance of therevenge on her husband for
his sacrifice of their daughter;
Cassandra is the Trojan
princess who foresees future
horrors but can do nothing
to stop them; Elektra,
Clytemnestra’s youngest
daughter, carries the hatreds
into the next generation.
Through their three voices
Saint casts fresh light on
familiar myths.
Best known for the crime
novels adapted for the TV
series Grantchester, James
Runcie has produced a vivid
depiction of artistic creativity
in The Great Passion
(Bloomsbury £16.99). The
novel’s narrator is Stefan
Silbermann, recalling his days
as an 11-year-old in the 1720s,
when he was dispatched to a
choir school in Leipzig. Bullied
and lonely, he was rescued
from his misery by the school’s
cantor — Johann Sebastian
Bach. Stefan was taken into
Bach’s household, where he
experienced the painful
pleasures of calf love with theFresh focus Elektra gives
voice to women of legendRevenge of the
Greek princess
A story of ancient hatreds spanning the
generations tops Nick Rennison’s picks
HISTORICAL FICTION
BOOK
OF THE
MONTHBOOKS
DANIELA ALFIERI36 24 April 2022