More from Books

It is winter in north Yorkshire. On the brink of New Year, Jake, a laconic, isolated former farmhand in his seventies, stands alone on the moors with no idea where to go or what to do. Traumatised by the death of his wife and consumed by thoughts of a child he knows cannot be his, he is a beleaguered man. He is also in flight from the law, following the murder of an elderly resident in a local care home. With nowhere to turn, he falls back on an old friend, Sheila, for sanctuary and solace.

Dara McAnulty is a teenage naturalist from Northern Ireland. He has autism; so do his brother, sister and mother — his father, a conservation scientist, is the odd one out. This book records a year in the life of a gifted boy in an unusual family. Minutely detailed observations of birds, insects, trees and weather are woven into an ecstatic description of the unrolling of the seasons. It is also an impassioned and original plea for protection for ‘our delicate and changing biosphere’. The diary is valuable in several ways. The writing of it is necessary to Dara himself, his means of processing his experiences. When he’s outside, absorbed in nature, he’s mentally storing his observations.

Beth, the protagonist of Joanna Briscoe’s The Seduction, reminded me of Clare in Tessa Hadley’s debut, Accidents in the Home. Both are domesticated mavericks with a reluctantly wandering eye: frustrated mothers looking for lovers to mirror their dormant wildness back at them. The fact that Briscoe’s work feels familiar — sharing the same bohemian preoccupations with adultery, motherhood and quirky interiors as other purveyors of the unfairly maligned Hampstead novel — is no bad thing. The author has a fine eye for aesthetic detail and an even finer one for parental relationships. The star of the show is not actually Beth’s love life, but her heart-breaking attempts to revive her relationship with her daughter.

Those who have been on creative writing courses may be familiar with the ‘I remember’ exercise. The two words become a prompt for whatever you recall, and can lead to a fruitful ramble into senses and impressions worth plundering later. It could be useful during a lockdown (‘I remember the water cooler/my girlfriend coming round/trains’) and at any time can evoke feelings of nostalgia.The painter and poet Joe Brainard created the form, and his sequences of recollections snowballed into I Remember (1975), a sensual memoir of his childhood in Oklahoma (‘I remember my first erection’). The wonderful Georges Perec heard about it from a friend. He didn’t read Brainard, but adopted the form and made it his own.

Twins are literary dynamite. For writers, they’re perfect for thrashing out notions of free will, the pinballing of cause and effect and fate’s arbitrariness. One twin reflects the other, darkly: living proof of the road not taken, the life not lived. In Maryse Condé’s The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana this point is rather laboured — literally, as we first meet the titular pair when they are dragged from the ‘warm and tranquil abode’ of their mother’s womb. They emerge bawling into contemporary Guadeloupe, where their mother Simone ‘works herself to the bone in the sugarcane fields’. Things don’t improve much when they seek their fortunes abroad, first in Mali, then in France.

‘Grief is the price we pay for love,’ the Queen once wrote. This memoir is steeped in the pain of unpaid debt. ‘When you were nine, you had a pink coat that you loved so much you wore it all the time, even on the early morning flight to Tunisia,’ Gavanndra Hodge begins, talking to her younger sister Candy, who’s been dead for 30 years. ‘It was long and thickly padded and made you look like a flamboyant Michelin Man.’ Hours after that flight Candy is killed by a virus as inexplicable as the one currently causing hundreds of thousands deaths, and Hodge stares into her coffin, noting the strange softness that comes just before decay.