Book review

More than ever, arguments about tradition and gender roles are flaring up across the States and beyond. It is timely, then, that Addie E. Citchens’s debut novel, Dominion, arrives in this climate of revivalist misogyny and debates about rigid patriarchy. It is a story of power cloaked in piety, and of the damage done when pride usurps justice. Citchens is obviously an author of steely intelligence who possesses a crisp and sharp eye for tiny vignettes of ordinary cruelty, and has unwavering compassion and love for her subjects. Nothing is obvious in her work, and nothing is contrived. Citchens sets her story within a claustrophobically tight-knit black Missionary Baptist community in Mississippi.

A narrative biography by a member of its subject’s family is, if not unique, something of a novelty. Here, Christopher Shaw Myers writes the story, while his uncle Robert Shaw’s life (1927-78) provides the book’s framework. Shaw Myers has previously written the as-yet-unfilmed screenplay Jaws & Mrs. Shaw and revisits some of the same material here. In both cases, a pivotal moment comes when Robert Shaw’s mother visits the set where Jaws is being shot in 1974 off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, and thus happens to be present when her son polishes off the monologue about the shark attack on survivors of the USS Indianapolis that anticipates the gory finale of the film.

Martin Suarez’s Inside the Cartel is part confession, part war chronicle, and part emotional autopsy of a man who spent years on the edge of death in order to bring the world’s most ruthless drug syndicates to their knees. It is not your average true-crime memoir. There are no cheap thrills, no voyeuristic obsession with gore, no Netflix shine or studio gloss. Instead, Suarez offers something far more dangerous: the truth. In the world of cartels, after all, the truth is synonymous with death. Inside the Cartel is not an easy book to read, nor is it meant to be. It opens with a gun pressed to the back of the author’s head and never really lets the reader exhale after that. Suarez’s prose is tight, muscular and cinematic without straying into melodrama.

In the wake of her niece’s death, a writer travels with her family to Scotland, hoping the holiday will ease their pain. After tasting water from Skye’s natural Fairy Pools, the writer starts to feel not quite herself. It must be a fairy trick, she thinks, or perhaps her grief. She loses feeling in her legs and her grasp of language, but gains an odd new power: access to other creatures’ sensations. Watching her friend eat, she feels the food “slipping spoonful by spoonful inside her,” and picking a sunflower’s petals elicits a “tug in her own flesh.” Patricia Lockwood’s latest novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, charts the protagonist’s bizarre illness and recovery.

Patrick Ryan’s second novel is a small-town family saga that spans three generations, four wars, 11 presidents and many a watershed moment along the way. Ryan understands that big stories are made of small moments, not the other way around, and Buckeye is a fine illustration of how drawing-room tensions can fester and become matters of historical significance. In 1945, very few young men can be seen walking the streets of Bonhomie, Ohio. Cal Jenkins, a hardware store clerk with one leg shorter than the other, is one of them. The superheroes in the comic books he reads are versions of himself, but for the limp. Cal is married to Becky, whose occasional séances with her childhood friend Janice he initially brushes off as an innocuous, if slightly odd, pastime.

She was Adeline Virginia Stephen, then. Signing her letter “AVS”, in August 1907 the 25-year-old who became Virginia Woolf complained to her friend Lady Robert Cecil: “The effort it is to write… I feel like one rolled at the bottom of a green flood, smoothed, obliterated, how should my pockets still be full of words?” Long before the masterpieces that would make her name, she was working on a series of literary exercises. These attempted to remold the biographical form into one that could encompass and celebrate the lives, not of famous men, but of unfamous women and combine what she called the granite and rainbow of “life-writing”: stony fact and iridescent fantasy. Her letter continues: If you keep The Life, or Myth, don’t quote it – see my vanity!