Five years ago I reviewed The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein, as she was known then, describing it as ‘a quirky bit of escapism’. You can see why, given our current predicament, I was keen to read Hex hoping for something similar. Garlanded with praise from the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer and Emma Straub, covering quite a literary gamut, Knight’s new novel takes the form of three notebooks written over six months by Nell Barber addressed to her advisor, Dr Joan Kallas.
After one of her peers accidentally kills herself while studying toxins in the lab they share at New York’s Columbia University, Nell abandons her own studies, stealing two of Rachel’s poisonous plants, determined to discover their antidote. She and her colleagues have been expelled from the university but Nell continues her illicit study, visiting Joan who is not only her advisor but the object of her passion. Nell has recently split with the beautiful but vacuous Tom. She gossips with her lovely best friend Mishti, following the progress of Mishti’s love affair with Carlo whose sights are set on becoming rich, while spying on Joan’s philandering husband Barry. As the autumn term progresses, these six characters become ever more entangled with each other, some more than others, as love and desire take centre stage until things come to a head at Joan’s Christmas party.
Hex has the same idiosyncratic, slightly other worldly style that I remember from The Sunlit Night. Nell is an eccentric narrator, consumed with a passion for Joan which, for some time, she doesn’t entirely understand. Delivered in short chapters, her narrative is punctuated by botanical pen portraits as she devotes herself to finding a way to neutralise the toxins that killed the woman she wishes she could have saved. There’s pleasing thread of humour running through Knight’s novel, witty with a few farcical moments as relationships between the six main players become ever more convoluted. Although it’s entirely diferent, Scarlett Thomas’ The Seed Collectors popped into my head several times. Must be all those botanicals.
Bloomsbury Circus: London 9781526611406 215 pages Hardback Ebook
Several times recently I’ve enjoyed novels I might have otherwise dismissed thanks to a puff from authors whose own work I particularly enjoy. In the case of Jessica Anthony’s Enter the Aardvark it was the ‘fresh, witty and smart’ comment from one of my all time favourites, Kate Atkinson, that sealed the deal. Without it, I’m not sure I’d have picked up this book that manages to combine nineteenth-century taxidermy, twentieth-century genocide and twenty-first century political satire all in just under two hundred pages.
If you’re a reader who prefers a neat plot within a linear, well-defined narrative best steer clear of Jenny Offill’s new novel. If, like me, you’re a fan of 
The Gunners is built around a structure that rarely fails to attract me: a group of people, once friends as children or young adults, are brought together by an event which affects them all. Weddings and funerals are a favourite trigger for this kind of reunion and in the case of Rebecca Kauffman’s novel it’s a funeral just as the friends enter their thirties. The five remaining members of the group that dubbed themselves the Gunners are brought together by the suicide of the sixth who none of them had heard from since she left the group aged sixteen with no explanation.