The Bureau Of Second Chances by Sheena Kalayil (Polygon, £8.99)
At 56, having lost his wife to cancer, optometrist Thomas Imbalil decides to leave his home in London after 30 years and return to India, where he can reconnect with his roots. In a small fishing village in Kerala, he begins to recover some enthusiasm for life, and accepts an offer to take charge of an optician’s while its owner is on a long holiday in America. At first, Thomas has no idea of his office manager Rani’s sideline, but discovers she is running a dating agency aimed at older, divorced and widowed men and women – people a lot like himself, in fact. While he’s trying to make sense of his conflicted emotions about Rani’s activities, and take into account the feelings of a daughter who feels he’s abandoned her, Thomas finds that he’s becoming attracted to a married tourist. It’s a gentle and charming, though poignant, tale of grief and romance, which also delves into India’s caste and gender issues.
Play All by Clive James (Yale University Press, £7.99)
One of the pleasures of Sunday mornings used to be Clive James’s TV columns in the Observer, so it’s some consolation that one of the more positive consequences of his illness has been his renewed zeal for the small screen. But TV has moved on, and James has been devouring box sets by the dozen. Excited by the idea that a “new critical language” was developing to discuss “the new, high-end product”, he has been revelling in long-form shows which allow the lengthy examination of character and theme denied to films. Being Clive James, he even revels in the bad ones, binge-watching The Following and The Pacific as eagerly as The Sopranos and The West Wing. It’s great to see him writing about TV again, though sentences like, “Peter Dinklage … had such an impact that he suddenly made all the other male actors in the world look too tall”, make it feel like he’s never been away.
The Bickford Fuse by Andrey Kurkov (MacLehose Press, £8.99)
The Ukrainian author of the classic Death And The Penguin originally wrote The Bickford Fuse in the late 1980s, just before the Soviet Union collapsed, as he was working out his ideas about “Soviet Man” – an archetype who held back modernisers and who, these days, is likely to be a Putin supporter. Looking back, he considers this one of his most important books, and its structure, which takes after A Pilgrim’s Progress and Gulliver’s Travels, heightens its classic, timeless feel. The premise is that a seaman, Kharitonov, is in charge of a barge full of dynamite when it runs aground, and crosses thousands of miles of Russian countryside holding a fuse which is still attached to his volatile cargo. In a series of absurdist and satirical episodes, he encounters some odd people and passes through strange towns whose ways are unknown to him. It’s a cutting, sceptical takedown of Russian society, but still one written with great affection for its people.
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