Books to Look Out for in March 2019: Part Two

The first instalment of March’s new titles was all about the USA. The second part begins with a novel about children knocking on its doors trying to get in. Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli’s first novel written in English, sees a family head off from New York on a road trip to the south west which once belonged to Mexico. Meanwhile thousands of children are making their way north from Central America and Mexico, hoping to cross the border against all odds. ‘In a breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive intertwines these two journeys to create a masterful novel full of echoes and reflections – a moving, powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world’ say the publishers. Hopes are high for this one.

As they are for Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel, Gingerbread, which sounds refreshingly original. Perdita Lee and her mother, Harriet, live in a gold-painted seventh-floor flat where they make gingerbread whose biggest fan is Harriet’s best friend Gretel. Years later, Perdita tries to track down Gretel. ‘As the book follows the Lees through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate, gingerbread seems to be the one thing that reliably holds a constant value’ say the publishers, promisingly. Apparently Oyeyemi’s novel was influenced by references to gingerbread in children’s classics.

I’m not so sure about Sadie Jones’ The Snakes having failed to see what so many others did in her much-praised debut, The Outcast. Bea and Dan have rented out their flat for a few months and driven to France where they plan to visit Bea’s brother at his hotel. When they arrive, they find Alex alone and the dilapidated hotel empty. The arrival of Bea and Alex’s rich parents makes Dan wonder why he’s never met them before. All of which may not sound very exciting but ‘tragedy strikes suddenly, brutally, and in its aftermath the family is stripped back to its rotten core, and even Bea with all her strength and goodness can’t escape’ say the publishers intriguingly. We’ll see.

I feel back in safer territory with Nicole Flattery’s collection, Show Them a Good Time described by Jon McGregor as ‘very funny and very sad, usually at the same time’. Flattery explores the lives of young men and women from a woman navigating a string of meaningless relationships to a couple of students working on a play knowing that unemployment looms, apparently. ‘Exuberant and irreverent, accomplished and unexpected, it marks the arrival of an extraordinary new Irish voice in fiction’ say the publishers but it’s McGregor’s opinion that’s swung it for me. He was spot on with El Hacho, one of my books of 2018.

I’m ending March’s preview with the third in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, Spring, which comes with the usual opaque blurb: ‘Spring will come. The leaves on its trees will open after blossom. Before it arrives, a hundred years of empire-making. The dawn breaks cold and still but, deep in the earth, things are growing’. I’m sure it will be great.

A click on any of the titles that have snagged your attention will take you to a more detailed synopsis, although not so much with Spring, and if you’ve missed the first part of the preview, it’s here.