A line from Marie Curie echoes through Megan Abbott’s searing, fierce novel of female friendship and ambition, Give Me Your Hand (Picador): “My head is so full of plans that it seems aflame.”
Kit Owens and Diane Fleming meet as teenagers in chemistry class. Diane is brilliant and Kit is inspired to emulate her and focus single-mindedly on science. Together, the girls fly above their peers (“I was thinking so much, so fast, so hard, that sometimes I dreamed about ionic compounds”) and become close friends – until Diane shares a secret with Kit and nothing can be the same again.
Prestigious science scholarships duly follow, and the two haven’t seen each other for years when we meet Kit again as an adult – a researcher in the lab of the dazzlingly talented Dr Severin, who is looking into premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Like PMT on steroids, it affects, 3-8% of women, resulting in terrible mood swings and uncontrollable rage. “Don’t we all feel we have something banked down deep inside just waiting for its moment, the slow gathering of hot blood?”
Much-needed funding has arrived for this under-researched condition, but there are only a couple of places on the programme. Kit, who has devoted herself to work since school – how else could she get a doctorate by the age of 30? – is desperate to land one of them. But then Diane arrives as the latest member of Severin’s team, cool, beautiful and mysterious, an adult version of “the 17-year-old girl standing in that far corner of my head, the one glaring at me, needy, full of thunder and consequence”. How far will the ambition of both women drive them?
Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World (Titan) opens as seven-year-old Wen is collecting grasshoppers outside her family’s remote New Hampshire cabin. She knows she shouldn’t speak to the friendly stranger who arrives – an unusually large man called Leonard – but she chats to him for a while, until, even to her young mind, things start to feel a little wrong. When his “friends” arrive, bearing makeshift weapons, she runs to find her parents, Daddy Eric and Daddy Andrew, and her little family are catapulted into a nightmare.
The group force their way into the cabin, tell them the apocalypse is nigh, and can only be avoided if the family sacrifice one of their members. When they refuse, Leonard shows them footage of an approaching tsunami. And asks again. Just like his excellent novel about the possession – or not – of a teenage girl, A Head Full of Ghosts, Tremblay skilfully keeps his readers guessing about the reality of Leonard’s ominous warning as he lets his horrifying scenario play out.
In Shari Lapena’s An Unwanted Guest (Bantam), a disparate group of guests make their way to a remote hotel in the Catskill mountains. Lapena swiftly takes away all trappings of modernity by enveloping the hotel in an ice storm – no reception, no phone lines, no electricity, no internet – so that, when a body, is discovered their first morning, the group find themselves in the middle of a classic mystery. Is it the mysterious writer? The lawyer with a dark past? The reporter suffering from PTSD? The guests pick over the clues as another freezing night draws in, unable to know who to trust and who to fear. Just in case it’s not obvious enough that we’re in the middle of a homage to classic crime fiction, one of the guests finds an old Agatha Christie on the bedside table.
Dervla McTiernan’s assured debut novel, The Ruin (Sphere), flits between past and present, as detective Cormac Reilly, newly returned to Galway, investigates the apparent suicide of a young man he knew as a child. As Reilly is told at one point, as he struggles to make headway in this disturbing case: “So far in this lovely story we have alcohol abuse, and apathetic social workers. There’s only one thing missing, isn’t there, to round out the classic Irish trinity … The Holy Catholic Church?”
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