Paranoia

In photography, balance, whether radial, conceptual or symmetrical, is critical to the success of a composition. An unbalanced photograph can confuse, obfuscate or otherwise diminish an image. It is the same for a literary writer (Nicholas Shakespeare has twice been Booker-longlisted) taking on the thriller genre. Finding an equilibrium between prose styling and fine plotting requires considerable skill and a gentle touch. In his second outing for the former journalist John Dyer, Shakespeare treads this tightrope nimbly. Following the events of The Sandpit (2020), Dyer is in Tasmania, engaged in research for a book on the Tupian peoples of the Amazon. He is soon interrupted by a voice from the past, that of Miguel Girondo de Belew, an Argentinian photo-journalist.

Some time in the late 1950s, Jacques Derrida and other intellectual luminaries at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris were surprised to be told that the excruciatingly introverted German-language instructor they had been avoiding in the corridors for several years was ‘the greatest living poet in the German language’. Paul Celan was reputed to be as ‘difficult’ as his poetry – rebarbative, then intriguing and finally unforgettable. His best known poem is ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’), which may refer to Jewish musicians in a Nazi death camp: ‘Black milk of dawn, we drink you at night...’ He can be heard online reciting the poem in a rising tone of suppressed hysteria.

In June 2022, Vladimir Putin tipped up at a party at the headquarters of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. This was to mark, of all things, the centenary of the country’s programme of deep-cover spies, who live for years abroad under elaborate false identities while passing secrets back to their masters at home. The weirdness of that espionage hoopla, just four months after the invasion of Ukraine, leaves one wondering what other bizarre birthday events Putin might have in his diary. The 85th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, perhaps? Ah, you can imagine the banter. The cracker hats. The roll-out noisemakers.

Lauren Beukes is a writer who puts cerebral propositions into breakneck thrillers: structural misogyny in The Shining Girls; the flipside of patriarchy in Afterland. In Bridge, she investigates the depressive’s favourite hypotheticals – could have, should have, would have, might have. The protagonist is Bridget, whose mother, Jo, has recently died from brain cancer. Jo was a scientist, interested in rather eccentric ideas, and has bequeathed Bridget a problematic legacy. It seems as if Jo had found a way, using harmonics, visual stimuli and an odd, worm-like thing (think fungus or parasite or the nematode in a tequila bottle) to access other realities. Through trial and error, Bridget manages to live up to her name and bridge universes.

Like light from faraway stars, fiction from outside the Anglosphere may take decades to reach English-language readers. This sinister, indeed sulphurous, novella by a Belarus-born author was first published in Russian in 1991, and won major awards. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse’s English translation, as creepily compelling as the book deserves, appears long after the contemporary hook that Aleksandr Skorobogatov embeds in his tale has lost its topicality. Recent events, however, make this fable of obsession, madness and violence timelier than ever. It almost vindicates a belief in Russian history and literature as an epic recycling of eternal themes. In a dismal Russian town lives Nikolai, a drifter and drinker on a meagre government pension.

Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a recently widowed 72-year-old, lives in a secluded lake cabin in rural New England. Walking her dog one day in the woods, she finds a cryptic note under a rock: ‘Her name was Magda,’ it reads. ‘Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.’ With no trace of a body or other clues in sight, Vesta pockets the note. Is it a prank, she wonders? Or ‘the beginning of a story tossed out as a false start, a bad opening’? What follows is less of a whodunnit than a portrait of paranoiac unravelling in isolation.