As a new crop of debut novelists sets out to remind us, entire lives can turn on the slenderest of moments. Take Margaret Benson, the middle-aged narrator of Alex Hourston’s slyly compelling In My House (Faber, £14.99). She’s standing in line for the loo at Gatwick airport when a teenage girl catches her eye in the mirror and mouths a single word: help.
Margaret ends up rescuing Anja from a trafficker but that’s just the beginning. Soon, the girl has become her cleaner. Though she fills a void in the older woman’s emotional life, there’s plenty about her – and the questions she asks – that’s unsettling, enabling Hourston to galvanise Margaret’s low-key delivery with a very persuasive thread of menace.
Eye contact proves just as pivotal in The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan (Harvill Secker, £12.99). The latest book to be set in a futuristic, waterlogged dystopia, The Gracekeepers depicts a world where citizens fall into two categories: “damplings”, whose floating lives are at sea, and “landlockers”, the privileged few who cling to surviving archipelagos. Against this backdrop, Logan conjures a story of star-crossed lovers that, for all its promise, almost capsizes beneath its burden of gender theory.
In Julia Rochester’s The House at the Edge of the World (Viking, £12.99), it’s a father’s drunken stumbling that kickstarts the lives of twins Morwenna and Corwin. Shortly after their 18th birthday, he falls from cliffs near their Devonshire home, and the chaos that ensues compels the pair to run far from their birthplace to begin new lives. But as every keen reader knows, the past is not so easily left behind, and this poised, lightly witty novel is not out to prove otherwise.
Mark Blacklock’s I’m Jack (Granta, £12.99) offers an altogether more abrasive encounter. A deftly executed ventriloquist act, it’s anchored in the true story of notorious hoaxer John Humble who, in 1979, mailed police a tape recording in which he claimed to be the Yorkshire Ripper. His mischief sent them off on a wild goose chase that enabled Peter Sutcliffe to kill three more women. The book itself is just as slippery.
Annie McDee, the accidental heroine of The Improbability of Love by Hannah Rothschild (Bloomsbury, £14.99), almost misses her destiny. She’s nosing around a London junk store when a dusty painting of two lovers in a woody glade catches her eye. A fledgling chef still reeling from a divorce and dizzied by the cost of living in the capital, she knows she can’t afford it. But then the shopkeeper comes running after her, and the painting is hers for £75, a snip given that it will turn out to be a lost masterpiece. It confers decidedly mixed blessings, however, ensnaring Annie in lethal art-world skulduggery. Rothschild’s canny romp features love, murder and Nazi-looted treasure, all whipped up into a timely reflection on art’s true value.
Finally, there’s Laura Barnett’s The Versions of Us (Weidenfeld, £12.99), which positions itself at a crossroads. Opening in 1958, it tracks three quite different scenarios set in motion by one short bicycle ride taken by Cambridge undergrad Eva Edelstein. In all three, Eva crosses paths with a fellow student named Jim Taylor but though they are, we’re led to believe, meant for each other, Jim’s role in Eva’s life will vary wildly over the coming 50 years, depending on which way she steers when a small white dog comes running towards her. Barnett renders an irresistible concept in sweet, cool prose – a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure book in which you don’t have to choose.
