Three (more) novels for June

the reading gods have blessed you

I have been reading too much. When a small child has an accident, the aftershock lingers—and my jangled brain has reverted to type: resist slumber; read excessively. But such reading is good for this newsletter. Herewith, three more new novels for you to sweat over, as we slide into thirsty summer. All of them share one thing: the search for home as a sense of belonging, and the belonging being as much bodily as it is of the mind.

As Mariam Rahmani puts it in Liquid:

“Belonging wasn’t only what you claimed to be, but also who claimed you.”

Speaking of summer books, if we hadn’t just discussed Sleep for 2 Girls 1 Book, it would be in this pile. Ditto Gunk (chat here.) Both are great immersive reads for sun lizarding, particularly the former which shares a synergy with 2021’s summer hit, The Paper Palace.

And if you are need some more options (I know that for some people a summer holiday is the only time they find they can finish a book, so making an informed choice feels crucial) you can read new fiction round-ups from:

• January (special mention for The Book of George)

• February (special mention for We Were The Universe)

• March (special mention for The Dream Hotel)

• April (special mention for Flesh)

• May (special mention for all three)

• Earlier this month (special mention for Fulfilment)

• I also recommend Fundamentally and Hunchback

• And three excellent memoirs, here

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The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden

The Safekeep is a queer love story set in the Netherlands, fifteen years after the end of WWII. The debut novel came out last year, but it just won The Women’s Prize for Fiction (it was also shortlisted for the Booker and the Dylan Thomas prize) so its back in all the books pages. I think it’s a worthy winner: unique, cleverly layered and aching with emotional tempest.

It is 1961 and the start of the not so swinging sixties for Isabel, a stiff and lonely young woman whose sole preoccupation is being an attentive custodian of her family home, which her late parents moved into at the end of the war, in 1944. She is almost 30, unmarried, friendless—a deliberate, determined island—and terrified that her older brother will come to claim the house that was left to him. She has two brothers, Henrik—a kind man, quick to laugh, living quietly with his partner, Sebastian, who Isabel tolerates with prim anxiety—and Louis—a brash casanova (and owner of the house), who wishes his sister would loosen up a little.

When Louis first introduces his siblings to his new girlfriend, Eva, Isabel is rude and Henrik is lightly mocking. They have met dozens of girls over the years—Louis has a terrible habit of springing these brassy, fey girls on their sibling dinners—and they see little difference in Eva. She is petit, bottle blonde and laughs at all their jokes without understanding them. She drapes herself over Louis and repels Isabel with her wantonness.

“Eva seemed like the kind of person to have plenty of friends, and this, in Isabel’s view, spoke badly of her. Friendship had always seemed a distrustful thing to Isabel.”

Isabel is not just horrified by Eva; she is horrified by everything that exists outside of her house and her mother’s treasured cabinet of china, which she keeps in immaculate order. The china is the talisman of the book, as you can see if you have the new paperback cover, with its delft print. Because the china does not belong to Isabel and her family. The china belonged to the family who lived here before. Isabel has always puzzled over why the house was fully furnished when they arrived. That’s not the only secret and sinful thing that Isabel won’t allow herself to think about. Like Henrik, Isabel is not drawn to the opposite sex, but she refuses to consider where else her desire might be drawn.

Until Eva comes to stay for a month, while Louis is away working. Despite her outward repulsion for Eva and her cloying attempts at friendship—Isabel answers everything in the tightest voice, if she answers at all, and sometimes leaves the room the moment Eva walks in—she is inescapably drawn to this mysterious young woman. But then things start to go missing; and Isabel doesn’t know if it’s the maid, or Eva, or her own madness after so many years spent alone. But why is Eva here? Is it for Louis, or Isabel—or something else?

I can’t write much more without giving the central conceit away. It’s not really a thriller (I mean, there’s a revelation, of course, several in fact), rather, it is a book about a nation and a family reckoning with the part they played during the Nazi occupation—and those left most wounded by it. It’s about a traumatised young woman coming back to claim what’s hers and a house unburdening itself of its secrets. (I always say I don’t like historical fiction; perhaps it’s just ancient myth I don’t gravitate towards.)

The Safekeep is also a fantastically sexy book, pulsing with sexual frustration; it is a deeply moving portrait of one woman’s sexual awakening and her terrified, tentative steps into her own desire. I think my favourite part of all is when Isabel tells her oldest brother, Louis, that she will not marry. He does the whole, course you will, just need to find the right bloke, chat, and she fixes her eyes on him and says, no, I am like Henrik, I will never marry. It is such a powerful moment, despite its obliqueness: this starched, miserable young woman giving agency to her desire.

My only criticism would be that the feverish clash of Isabel’s unyielding urges and Eva’s spirited desperation was drawn a few too many times; but maybe that’s the point. Isabel was driven mad by her own fear of feeling—her determination to live neatly within the margins of life—as was Eva, by the performative joy and patience her subterfuge demanded. As the reader, you have to reach the same bursting point as our protagonists. Things have to burst, in order to re-form as something new. Van der Wouden is a masterful writer, historian and chronicler of female desire—and I’m intrigued to see what she writes next.

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Island Calling by Francesca Segal

Island Calling is the second in Segal’s Tuga trilogy, a hugely entertaining book about a fictional tropical island, the isle of Tuga de Oro, a British territory 7,000 miles away. Everything about this island is invented and you can tell how much fun Segal has had building her world: the people, the patois, the foodstuffs (soft drinks are known as fizzycan), the local bar. The things they eat, how they celebrate, what they believe in, the community lore and logic. Everything has been so meticulously considered that you imagine there to be a vast wall of sticky-notes behind it. Elizabeth Day has called the Tuga trilogy “a modern-day Jane Austen meets The Durrells” which is an apt description of it’s sweetly old-school feel.

In the first book, Welcome to Glorious Tuga, Charlotte Walker, a British vet in her late twenties, takes an obscure posting on the isle of Tuga de Oro, ostensibly to study an endangered breed of gold coin tortoise. Secretly, she’s looking for her father, whom she has never met, but who—by way of a childhood toy—she believes to be Tugan. There are also several moving story lines about what happens when you live on a remote island, where people do not always talk of their troubles, where access to healthcare is limited, such as a woman who has not left her home in 20 years due to chronic fistula pain and incontinence after giving birth. This is a secret closely guarded, but Charlotte and another expat help get her to England, for treatment.

In Island Calling, Charlotte has settled into her role as a vet, the islanders have grudgingly accepted her—like her, even—and she is in a new relationship with local man-about-the-island, Levi. Anxious, obedient Charlotte has been unravelled by Levi, with his mismatched flip flops: finally, she is having (shocking amounts of) fun. She also knows who her father is—and so does the rest of the island.

In this second book, Segal adds historical depth and vividity to Tuga, with the reader learning a little more about how it came to be (the first islanders were refugees fleeing colonialist rule). A metaphor for the island’s ties to colonialism arrives in the figure of Charlotte’s barrister mother, who has come to drag her daughter home to her ‘real’ life in London. During ‘Island Closing’ season, no-one can come onto the island for 8 weeks unless it’s life or death, and so Charlotte’s mother fakes a heart attack to get a boat to bring her over. The message is clear: only an entitled Brit like Lucinda Compton-Neville would put Tugans at risk like this on the seas, simply so they can get somewhere faster.

Segal also explores more of the tensions of island life: Tugans who leave for the UK may get a better education, but they might never come back. And when they do, like doctor Dan Zekri, they might be treated like outsiders forever by Tugans slow to trust someone who has abandoned them. (Known as FFA, expats are not allowed to drive, which means even as the island vet, Charlotte must go everywhere by bike, or by foot.)

What I enjoy most about Island Calling is how immersive it is. I felt like I was hiking through this lush island with Charlotte, rattling over the uneven roads on my bike, or heading down to the bar for a shot of their lethal local spirit which Charlotte once got embarrassingly hooned on.

“On one side of the road grew tall cinnamon trees, their bright glossy green splashed here and there with streaks of young leaves, poppy-red. There had been high winds, and the cinnamons had littered the track with their hard, dark berries, compressed by Charlotte’s footsteps into the mud. On the other side was a steep slope down to the ocean. Last week it had been roiling, dull and grey; this morning was a plain of winking sapphire. For a moment Charlotte stopped and simple looked. There it was; the boundlessness, and the near-galactic extremity of their isolation.”

Segal herself has said that:

"Writing this novel was a deliberate reaching out for joy… my own magical portal to wide beaches, crystal seas, endless sunshine, and most vitally, to a warm, eccentric community of good people mostly just trying to do their best. Tuga de Oro was a refuge for its first settlers, and I hope will offer refuge for readers, too."

To her credit, Segal (who, on top of the Tuga trilogy, is the author other of three excellent previous books—two novels and a memoir) does not paint island life as idyllic: for many of the islanders, it is a hardscrabble existence. There is not enough money—for infrastructure, medical supplies, education—and many families live hand to mouth, with one parent often taking a job overseas in order to send money back home. In the first book, a Tugan woman leaves her husband and her little girl for a year to work in England, because the family desperately need the money. She does not see her five-year-old girl for a year and when she returns in the second book, the little girl is confused and hostile.

For all the joy of this tiny island, it is a community thrumming with secrets. Charlotte came to Tuga because she was running away from herself. But as she prepares to travel back to London with her persistent mother, she wonders: what if she has run towards her home—not away from it? As is probably obvious by now, if there is an ultimate holiday read, this is it.

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Liquid by Mariam Rahmani

This is a provocative and witty novel about a Muslim academic who, struggling to land an academic post in LA after a brutal six-year PhD, brainstorms a new project (which she intends to take as seriously as her degree), to go on 100 dates over one summer. She is looking not for a romantic partner, but a sponsor. She’s confident in her new venture—imagining it to be easier than the academic job market.

“What was marriage but tenure? Thanks to our society’s ableist superficial values, this field, this market, was in some real sense available to me. I was a thin, educated young woman from a respectable family who knew how to cook; surely I could master a few suitors.”

Our (guess what!) unnamed narrator becomes an app mixologist, moving deftly between hundreds of different chats—where she invents dozens of personas—and tracking the traits and peccadilloes of her dates on an Excel spreadsheet. But this Tinder sociologist is frequently more titillated by her fellow daters than her actual date.

“A bottle blonde encased in a bandage dress, ageing stomach beaten flat by Pilates, and a sunspotted puddle stuffed into cargo shorts and a polo”.

This reportage is some of the strongest and funniest writing in the book. Occasionally, the sardonic description can feel overdone. But such observations are also the protagonist’s defence mechanism. If her life is going nowhere, if she’s broke after all that academic excellence, at least she has the brains and spirit to describe other people living more tragic lives than she is.

After 70+ dates (some weird, some hilarious, some depressing), she must put an abrupt stop to her project, as her father is seriously ill in hospital in Tehran. It is not him who calls her, but her mother—who lives in America and has been estranged from her husband for many years. Their marriage has always been a thing of great confusion to their only child, who cannot possibly imagine what her Sunni Indian mother and her Shia Iranian husband had in common. “Of my parents marriage, I’d only witnessed carnage.” Surprised by her mother’s re-entry into her father’s life, she fathoms it to be a deep-rooted obligation to her dying spouse. “He is in need. She was his wife.”

This is only the narrator’s second time in Iran and she is struck by the depth of her feeling for Tehran, a place she has never really known. She is forced to reconsider the meaning of true sensuality, and where she feels she belongs, as well as her relationship with her mother, a tough, accomplished academic who critiques her daughter’s job applications and ambition without mercy. (She also refers to her as an ‘old maid’, which is only marginally better than the narrator’s father, who tried to set her up with her cousin in Iran.) She respects her mother, but their relationship has never been warm. Rahmani writes beautifully about this.

“[My mother] and I traded kisses. It was the opposite of intimacy. Hugs required more surface area.”

There’s a lot of literary connections (if not influences) in Liquid. There’s a touch of My Year of Rest and Relaxation (a cynical, reckless, beautiful protagonist), The Coin (America as a capitalist machine lacking in sensuality; the preoccupation with bodily function), Misinterpretation (the parental home being a place of both agony and ecstasy) and Martyr! (a dead or dying parent, a queer writer searching for purpose).

Rahmani’s narrator is more her mother’s daughter than she allows for. When a kind and interesting older female artist enters her life, the narrator keeps her at a distance, unsure if she wants to build a romantic life in Tehran, if she wants to build a life there at all—despite the deep bodily pull she feels to the food, the flowers, the literature, in a way she never felt in LA. As her best friend, Adam, puts it:

“I know it’s hard for you to have feelings… Or to have other people have feelings.”

Liquid’s unnamed narrator could not be more different from The Safekeep’s Isabel, but they both project a certain inaccessibility; a resistance to—and a fear of—genuine intimacy and pleasure. It peters out a little at the end (I was expecting one final show), but Liquid is still a compelling offering, as we accompany the narrator in her unfurling realisation that it is not other people that are incapable of intimacy; rather, it might be up to her, to scrape beneath her lacerating gift for observation and droll anecdotes, to air the vulnerabilities that lie shyly beneath.