Sydney

Madeleine Gray’s first novel, Green Dot (2023), was a witty account of a messy office affair, whose fans included Nigella Lawson and Gillian Anderson. Her follow-up, Chosen Family, is an altogether more expansive book. She has described it as the result of years of thinking obsessively about two things for a long time. First, why is it that every queer person I know (including me) has a story about having an intense friendship breakup in high school that years later they realise was probably their queer root? […] Two, why do more people not choose to have children with their platonic best friends? Surely raising a child with someone you trust implicitly and don’t have sex with makes more sense than the other way round?

Lord Hawke, the grand old man of Yorkshire cricket and stalwart of the MCC, was not one to mince words. A century ago, the administrator rejected calls for the national XI to be led by Jack Hobbs. ‘Pray God no professional shall ever captain England,’ Hawke said. ‘We have always had an amateur skipper and when the day comes when we shall have no more amateurs captaining England it will be a thousand pities.’ It took 27 years. Elizabeth II would be less picky about commoners. She knighted Hobbs in her Coronation honours in 1953, the same year that Len Hutton, England’s first professional captain, led the side to regain the Ashes after 20 years. To defend the urn Down Under, however, as he hoped to do in 1954-55, was a hard task.

Any personal history is hard to fictionalise, not least because the story needs to be both universal and unique. Claire Messud manages to find the right balance in her latest novel, reconstructing her family’s past in vivid episodes that open a multitude of windows on to the world. Continents and decades chase one another as the narrative traces the movements of the Cassar family. Hailing from Algeria, for much of the book they are citizens of nowhere. Their tribulations begin in 1940, when Lucienne and her children, François and Denise, flee Greece (where their father, Gaston, has been posted as the French naval attaché) to wait out the war in the relative safety of an Algerian hinterland.

Hera, the heroine of Madeleine Gray’s first novel, is 24, which, as she says, ‘seems young to most people but not to people in their mid-twenties’. She lives in Sydney with her father and their dog and works as an online community moderator, but the contents of her work bag reveal her to be Bridget Jones’s edgier little sister: ‘My wallet, three pairs of underpants, headphones, nine tampons, a travel vibrator, two novels, a notebook, two beer caps, a bottle of sake and a fountain pen.’ She will also inevitably be compared to Hannah from Lena Dunham’s Girls and to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. Gray’s writing style is droll but if Hera’s internal monologue sounds gauche and affected, it is useful to remember what the average 24-year-old sounds like.