The Family Clause
Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Harvill Secker, £16.99, pp320
A man dreads the arrival of his critical, overbearing father, but a family agreement entitles the elderly patriarch to stay in the family’s Stockholm apartment whenever he visits. These visits are not happy affairs and the unnamed son – a stay-at-home dad who has lost his professional way – wants to revoke the agreement. What follows is a claustrophobic and melancholic portrayal of a dysfunctional family, in which the narrative drama never quite lives up to the novel’s foreboding tone.
Anti-Social: The Secret Diary of an Anti-Social Behaviour Officer
Nick Pettigrew
Century, £16.99, pp384
Since the success of Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt, publishing has been champing at the bit to furnish readers with “secret diaries” to every possible profession: nurses, barristers, prison officers and yet more doctors. Now comedian Pettigrew is here to give us the inside track on his decade working as an ASB officer. While there are undoubtedly some interesting stories here, the tone and diary format both feel a little too familiar.
My Name Is Why
Lemn Sissay
Canongate, £9.99, pp208
Poet Lemn Sissay’s deeply affecting memoir chronicles his life and experiences within the care system. Born to an Ethiopian mother, Sissay was, against his mother’s wishes, placed into foster care with a white, working-class Baptist family where, throughout his early schooldays, he was subjected to racist abuse. Eventually rejected by his foster family in scenes that are both baffling and heartbreaking, Sissay subsequently endured a peripatetic existence at a string of increasingly dislocating children’s homes. Here, he brings his exceptional descriptive and emotive powers to a story of both brutality and hope.
• To order The Family Clause, Anti-Social or My Name Is Why go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
