COLD BATH STREET
A.J. Hartley (Uclan Publishing, £7.99)
In the Lancashire town of Preston in 1978, 14-year-old Preston Oldcorn is attacked by the spectral figure of a girl on his way back from Scouts. When he comes to his senses, he finds the streets are empty of cars and people, the clocks are stuck at 9:22pm and he is, well, dead. He discovers he’s in a form of limbo, and, that other child ghosts have a habit of disappearing altogether. to stop himself fading away completely, he has somehow to retain a foothold in the world of the living, to keep people remembering him. But an entity called the Leech, which lives on the grief of those left behind, has Preston in its sights. A Young Adult novel, its pages adorned with creepy black and white illustrations, Cold Bath Street drips with atmosphere, drawing on local legends like the Bannister Doll. Written by an established YA author, it’s certain to find its audience and give them chills.
OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES
Lore Segal (Sort Of Books, £8.99)
Lore Segal (then Groszmann) was one of the 10,000 Jewish children given refuge from the Nazis in the 1938 Kindertransport. Ten years old when she arrived in Britain, she spent a decade here and three years in the Dominican Republic before being granted entry into the USA. This book originally appeared in 1958, and in it she recalls her British foster families, few of whom fully understood what she was fleeing, and how she slowly learned the rules of British society while struggling to get visas for her parents to join her. When they did, she was forbidden to live with them as they were working as domestic servants. It’s classified as “autobiographical fiction”, but the core of this book is clearly her own experience, and its reissue is timely as, even 80 years later, further waves of refugees are subjected to similar suspicions and accusations of ingratitude from their host countries.
THE TYRANNY OF LOST THINGS
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (Sandstone Press, £8.99)
Her name is well known to Guardian readers, but this is Cosslett’s first foray into fiction, a weirdly obsessive novel in which millennial angst conceals deeper and darker feelings. Harmony drops out of university and rents a room in her childhood home, now divided into flats but back then a commune where she lived with her hippy parents. Moving back is an attempt to confront long-suppressed trauma and uncover what happened there 20 years earlier. For Harmony, growing up in the shadow of baby boomers and the mythology they wove around themselves is inextricably linked with her ambivalence towards her charismatic but unstable mother. Those obsessions tend to crowd out everything else, making Harmony a hard character to connect with, but an arresting picture develops of a woman who has good reason to be lost and dislocated. As a bonus, Cosslett conjures up an almost palpable vision of London during a hot, sweaty summer.
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