Friendship

Two girls in Basque south-west France in the 1980s have been best friends since early childhood. Rose is the good one, studious and kind, with a sweetheart she plans to marry. Solange is the wild child: rebellious, dishonest and pregnant at 15. How to Make a Woman might sound like a Gallic take on Elena Ferrante territory, but it’s much more than that. Visceral and cerebral, with echoes of Simone de Beauvoir, it describes what it means to live in a world apparently created by and for men. The novel unfolds as a triptych: Part One ‘According to Rose’; Part Two ‘As told by Solange’; and, finally, ‘Together’. Typically, while Rose goes on a school trip to Madrid, Solange survives a horrific birth, described in unflinching detail.

There are novelists who seem to spend their entire careers either apologising for being themselves or trying to become someone else entirely. And then there’s Dave Eggers, who has spent much of the last quarter century trying – and, it has to be said, as far as one can tell, very happily succeeding – to become Dave Eggers. Ever since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius appeared in 2000, fulfilling almost entirely the audacious promise of its title, Eggers has occupied that peculiarly American position of being not simply Yet Another Novelist, but the Guy, the Man, the yardstick by which all others might be judged and found wanting. He’s a publisher, campaigner, literacy activist, editor, artist, children’s author, philanthropist and impresario.

‘Across the courtyard the water glistens a pale blue, the sun’s rays shimmering on its surface. The surrounding garden is wild and overgrown with trees and bushes tinged reddish orange, overlooking a valley of scorched grass fields.’ This is the setting of Chloë Ashby’s Family Friends. Taking place over one eventful holiday between old university friends in the south of France, it’s a sun-soaked work simmering with secrets that lurk just below the surface. First, a look at our cast of characters. There’s the ‘endlessly reliable’ Maggie, with weak, ‘beautiful in a boyish way’ Will and their two children, Alice and ‘gangly’ teenage Sammy.

In 2005 Xandra Bingley published Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, an extraordinarily lively and enjoyable memoir of her childhood on a Cotswold farm during the second world war. Much of the writing was glancing rather than straightforward, its narrative not strictly chronological, while its title hinted at something not fully explained in the text. Dispensing altogether with conventional punctuation, the book contained not a single comma or quotation mark, using instead ellipses. This was brilliantly imitative of both the clipped speech of its upper-class characters, particularly when facing disasters large and small, and the hell-for-leather pace of lives spent galloping on horseback across the Gloucestershire countryside.

Following the enormous success of Butter’s English translation in 2024, it seemed inevitable that another of Asako Yuzuki’s novels would surface in the UK. Nairu pachi no joshikai (The Nile Perch Women’s Club), published in 2014, has now become Hooked. Billed as a literary thriller about female friendship, loneliness and obsession, it is a deeply strange, unsettling read. The novel follows Eriko, a high-flying project manager, and Shoko, a slacker housewife blogger, who both struggle with life – or, rather, with the behaviour expected of Japanese women. Both have achieved a level of acceptance socially (Eriko in her career, Shoko in her relationship), but they find the pursuit of ‘gal pals’ a major stumbling block in their quest for the appearance of normality.

The fantasy of telling disagreeable friends how awful they really are is a relatable one. But rarely does it find such extravagant, relentless expression as in Zoe Dubno’s debut novel Happiness and Love. The narrator is a nameless woman who finds herself among former friends in New York. While she never succumbs to an outburst, her interior monologue issues forth like a furious esprit d’escalier. The dramatic scenario – modelled on that of Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 novel Woodcutters – is a dinner party in the loft dwelling of an ‘art world’ couple with whom the narrator used to live, following the funeral of one of their cohort.

Alexander Starritt has form with satire. His 2017 debut The Beast skewered the modern tabloid press, drawing comparisons with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. For his third novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, he is back at it, mercilessly mocking everything from Oxbridge and management consultants to tech bros and new parents in a story that hinges on whether two unlikely friends can make a success of their tidal energy start-up. It’s more fun that it sounds. The narrative opens in the early 2000s with James Drayton – someone who gets his kicks by finishing his maths A-level exam in 20 minutes and who finds undergraduate life disappointingly basic. ‘He supposed he’d been naive to think of university as concerned with intellect...

One of the pleasures of reading, often looked down on in literary circles, is when one warms to an author’s characters. Among the many delights of Mrs Calder and the Hyena, Marjorie Ann Watts’s second collection of short stories, was my feeling that here were people with whom I would get along. Ostensibly, they are undistinguished – from the hinterlands of society, whether by virtue of status, wealth or age; yet they reveal some irrepressible glint of antinomianism, a rejection of conventional judgments and standards, a certain anarchic glee. In the title story, elderly Mrs Calder insists she is being accompanied by a hyena – ‘always a little on the edge of my vision, but definitely getting closer’.