Mika Ross-Southall

‘My parents were liars,’ the narrator Ruthie says at the beginning of Sarah Manguso’s unsettling debut novel. Looking back on her abusive childhood in a New England town near Boston in the 1980s, she recounts how her father wore a fake Rolex that didn’t work, and her narcissistic mother was obsessed with social climbing, pinning the wedding announcements of local Mayflower descendants on the fridge as if she knew them. Ruthie observes everything in high definition, from her parents’ neglect (‘I have no memories of being held’) to their naked bodies flopping on top of each other while they all share the same bed. In a disturbing scene, her mother, who seems to have been traumatised by her own upbringing, asks her elementary school daughter to spell the f-word.

Feelings of dislocation are at the heart of Amit Chaudhuri’s award-winning novels. Friend of My Youth (2017) followed a writer’s unsettling trip back to his childhood home in Bombay. Before that, Odysseus Abroad (2014) charted the day of a lonely English literature student from India as he meandered around London. Now, in Sojourn – Chaudhuri’s eighth novel – we meet a nameless first-person narrator adrift in Berlin. It is the early 2000s, and the 43-year-old, Indian protagonist has just arrived as a visiting professor at a university for four months. He doesn’t know anyone, and navigating the streets is confusing.

The #MeToo movement isn’t all it seems. More than three years after countless sexual abuse allegations shook the world, the relationship between men and women has mutated into something ‘subtle and insidious’, writes Sam Mills. Her new book — an intriguing blend of feminist theory, memoir, psychological sleuthing and self-help — investigates the rise of what she calls ‘chauvo-feminists’: men who champion women’s rights in public to appear woke while in private their ‘shadowy doppelgänger’ is misogynistic. ‘If sexual harassment is not just about desire but about power,’ Mills says, then ‘the means will no longer be a hand on a knee as a way of implying threat’.

Although widely read in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó, who died in 2007, did not gain international acclaim until the mid-1990s with the translations of her novels The Door and Katalin Street. Abigail, which was originally published in 1970 and is her best-known book, now appears in English for the first time in a superb translation by Len Rix. Set over six months, from September 1943 to March 1944 when Germany occupies Hungary, Abigail follows the 14-year-old Gina Vitay, who is ‘plucked away as if by a bird’ from her privileged life in Budapest and sent to a remote fortress-like Protestant boarding school for girls by her father, a general in the Hungarian army.

At the beginning of After the Party, Phyllis Forrester tells us she was in prison. While inside, her hair turned yellowy-white, ‘like the mane of an old wooden rocking-horse’, not out of shock, she reassures us, but because ‘one couldn’t get one’s hair dyed’. She thinks she deserved to be there: ‘What I did was terrible. Terrible. The shame of it will never leave me until my dying day.’ For a long time in Cressida Connolly’s chilling new novel, though, it’s not clear what she has done. The year is 1979, and middle-class Phyllis, who is bitter and alone (her family don’t talk to her any more), recounts her story to a voiceless interviewer in mannered, first-person chapters that interject throughout.

In 1940, the British Security Coordination sent an agent with an assistant to a Hollywood film studio to help promote the British war effort in America. This is the inspiration behind Louise Levene’s enjoyable new novel Happy Little Bluebirds. Here, though, the assistant — Evelyn Murdoch, who was working at the Postal Censorship department in Woking — discovers that she was drafted in by mistake: HQ didn’t read her file properly and assumed she was a man (‘Red faces all round,’ a British Intelligence worker tells Evelyn when she arrives in the United States), which is one of the only moments in the narrative that feels stretched. The agent who Evelyn is meant to assist has gone to Bermuda for an unspecified length of time.