Abandonment

Set in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Tayari Jones’s Kin follows the parallel lives of Annie and Vernice. The ‘cradle friends’ are both motherless, Annie having been abandoned and ‘Niecy’ orphaned, leaving them with a painful ‘wound’. They are as vulnerable as ‘unshucked, naked peas’. Though they are trauma-bonded, the ways in which they approach their lives differ hugely. As her mother is still somewhere out there, Annie becomes fixated on finding her and ‘trying to climb back in her womb’. She’s unable to move forward until she arrives at a resolution. Tracking her mother down becomes ‘the point of her whole life’ – much to Niecy’s

A century ago, the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was settling into his first term at Stromness Academy. His schooldays were to prove a dismal grind, but English lessons brought moments of magic. He was especially intrigued by poems – ballads, mostly – signed simply ‘Anon’. The name of the poet was lost – and perhaps there hadn’t been just one but a host of craftsmen in the making of each of these wonders. They were the creation of a tribe, the inheritance of a community, songs ‘seraphically free/ Of taint of personality’. Today, as publishers bust themselves to promote the cult of individual authors, it’s a thrilling, liberating notion.

The Appalachians have become fashionable fictional territory. Following Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Demon Copperhead comes Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch. Like Cold Mountain, it is set largely in the aftermath of the American civil war, but, for all its wealth of detail, it is less a historical account than a redemptive fable. As befits a portrait of a society riven by war, the novel unfolds in a series of discrete episodes. Its dominant consciousness and first-person narrator is 12-year-old ConaLee, who lives in a remote hillside cabin with her mother Eliza, infant brothers and sister and violently abusive ‘Papa’. Their nearest neighbour is Dearbhla,