Francesca Peacock

‘Like a child in a fairy tale’, 14-year old Mina Mendel walks into a Latvian forest one day in 1913. With her basket and shawl, she looks like Little Red Riding Hood, but the wolves she meets – Bolsheviks, ‘agents of the coming revolution’ – are anything but mythical. Linda Grant begins her sweeping, ambitious ninth novel The Story of the Forest with this accidental encounter. From Latvia to Liverpool – and Soho to World’s End – she tells the story of one Jewish family in the 20th century as they live through plots to overthrow the tsar, the trenches of of the Great War, the racism of Liverpudlian suburbs and the horrors of the second world war It is a novel of chances: of lives changed by the ring of a phone, a meeting in a street, or the march of global history.

In the wake of the death of her mother, divorce from her husband and the loss of custody of her son, a young writer and poet in Seoul turns her attentions to lessons in ancient Greek. She walks miles across the city to the classroom, dressed in a black jacket, black scarf and black shirt – a ‘sombre uniform, which makes it seem as if she’s just come from a funeral’ – and devotes herself to the unfamiliar alphabet, verbs and nouns. This delight in words – ‘the wondrous promise of the phonemes’ – has sustained her since childhood, when she first scratched Hangul, the Korean alphabet, into the dirt. There is only one barrier to her love of language. Not for the first time, she has completely lost the power of speech.

‘What are you like with enclosed spaces?’ Tom asks his sister Billie before they head into the maze of tunnels under Paris. Away from the ‘tourist bit’ of the catacombs – the part filled with bones moved from the city’s cemeteries – is an extensive network of claustrophobic pathways beneath the everyday, visible level of the city. As the setting for the climax of Imogen West-Knights’s subtle and compelling debut Deep Down, it is certainly fitting: in the wake of their father William’s death, the siblings begin to explore hidden and submerged memories from their childhood. The two are not close.

A man ignores his wedding anniversary and is so sickened by the bowl of flowers his wife has placed by his bed that he drops them and breaks the precious cut glass. Another man is so enraged by seeing his wife close the kitchen door when he comes in from work that he enters a state of fevered reverie where he concludes ‘nothing in his life made sense’. In a different story, the mess and argument caused by an improperly laid fire makes Mrs Derdon leave the house, sure that she ‘was not coming back’. The stories in Maeve Brennan’s The Springs of Affection (first published in the New Yorker, and, after her death in 1993, as a collected edition in 1997) are not about dramatic flights of fancy or the memorable red-letter days of a life.

The name Lalla Romano is not familiar to English readers. Despite being much acclaimed during her lifetime (and the recipient of Italy’s Strega Prize), works by the novelist, poet and painter have rarely made it out of her native language. Prior to A Silence Shared, masterfully translated by Brian Robert Moore, only one of Romano’s novels had been published in English: the quiet, eerie tale of a childhood revisited, The Penumbra. In A Silence Shared Romano demonstrates with understated economy why her work deserves to be read alongside other titans of 20th-century Italian literature such as Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino (all of whom knew and revered her). Her books are often heavily autobiographical and almost exclusively narrated in the first person.

As introductions go, ‘My name is Agnès, but that is not important’ does not have quite the same confidence as ‘Call me Ishmael’. But there’s a reason for this. Agnès Moreau, the narrator of Yiyun Li’s disconcerting, mesmerising fifth novel The Book of Goose, only became a storyteller by accident. Writing from Pennsylvania, where the ‘French bride’ Agnès raises geese, she remembers post-war rural France and her childhood in Saint Rémy. She and her friend Fabienne, avoiding other girls their age, spent their days lying among gravestones and minding cows – until Fabienne decides that they should write a book together.

Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there are tante Italie – many Italys. ‘Mine is different to hers, which is different to my mother’s, which is different to my father’s, and so on down the queue,’ she writes. These Italys – of fascismo, of Garibaldi, of emigrants living in Sheffield and Manchester, of 31 dialects – are not far-flung historical oddities confined to documentaries or textbooks but are, in Lenarduzzi’s account, the patchwork story of one family.

There’s a moment near the end of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ when it becomes clear that the duke, whatever he might claim, did kill his wife: ‘I gave commands;/ Then all smiles stopped’, he lets slip. In The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell’s sombre, haunting novel based on the historical couple described in Browning’s poem, this revelation comes rather earlier. The young Lucrezia knows with ‘a peculiar clarity’ that her husband ‘intends to kill her’ right from the first page. After leaving Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, Lucrezia died within a year.