The Female Persuasion

Meg Wolitzer

(Vintage, £8.99)

In Wolitzer’s pointed satire on contemporary feminism, a sexual assault by a frat-boy in 2006, and the token punishment imposed on him, begins the raising of student Greer Kadetsky’s consciousness.

Her anger channelled into an awakening by legendary second-wave feminist Faith Frank, she goes to work at Faith’s charitable foundation, Loci, set up to host conferences and fund projects for women. But Loci turns out to be an excuse for privileged white women to salve their consciences by paying lip service to the downtrodden over champagne.

Meanwhile, Greer’s boyfriend Cory quits his high-flying career to care for his mother, which is a laudable thing for a successful man to do, so why does it pain Greer even to look at him now?

For all her satirical intent, Wolitzer doesn’t skimp on strong characterisation, thoroughly dissecting Greer and Faith while examining the divisions between different generations of feminists, all done with sharp humour and a healthy regard for irony.

Your Fault

Andrew Cowan

(Salt, £12.99)

The notion that memory is like a video recording inside one’s head is well past its sell-by date. We now understand memory as a reconstruction rather than a recording, and that understanding has changed how we view the past.

Your Fault is a fascinating novel in which a man looks back on his childhood with the self-awareness denied him at the time, and in which the act of remembering matters as much as the events themselves. It’s the melancholic memoir of a 1960s childhood by Peter, the son of a Maltese mother and a much older British father living out an unhappy marriage in one of the English New Towns.

Beginning in 1962, it progresses a year with each chapter, Peter becoming steadily more able to make sense of things, but it captures a child’s uncertainty and incomprehension of the adult world.

It’s also a deadly accurate recreation of the period, making it a powerfully evocative, as well as skilfully executed, must-read.

Gigged

Sarah Kessler

(Random House, £9.99)

The world of work has been turned upside-down with the emergence of the “gig economy”, the huge shift over to the freelance sector which has made household names of companies like Uber.

This shift in working patterns was driven by the technology companies of Silicon Valley, and Kessler goes there to look at the experiences of a variety of people working in the gig economy and having to adapt to new business models, sacrificing stability and benefits for a precarious flexibility.

She examines the debates it has sparked amongst policy-makers, but also where we might be heading: potentially towards a division between a stressed, insecure underclass and those who can pick and choose when they work. Kessler doesn’t entirely take against the gig economy, acknowledging the benefits it might have for ailing rural communities, but this incisive and worrying book reveals a system that needs a great deal of refinement before it should be rolled out on a grand scale.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT