INSEPARABLE
Yunte Huang
Liveright, £11.99
The story of Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, has been covered before, but this extensively researched biography sheds light both on their extraordinary lives and the 19th century America in which they lived. Born in 1811 joined at the sternum, Chang and Eng were discovered by a Glaswegian merchant and taken to Boston as sideshow curiosities. Huang records the unexpected twists and turns their lives took as the conjoined brothers made enough from the freak shows to buy a farm in North Carolina, become slave owners and marry two white sisters, fathering 21 children between them. Having previously examined the role of Charlie Chan in American cultural history, he continues his exploration of East meeting West here, informed by his own experiences as a Chinese immigrant. Charting the fascination Chang and Eng exerted on doctors, writers and the general public leads to many digressions, but all are in their own way relevant and add context to their story.
THE UNNATURAL DEATH OF A JACOBITE
Douglas Watt
Luath Press, £8.99
This fourth instalment in the adventures of investigative advocate John MacKenzie and his assistant Davie Scougall reaches the turbulent year of 1689. James II has fled the country, leaving the throne to William of Orange. There are armed uprisings in the Highlands and threats of a widespread Jacobite rebellion. The nation is tense, paranoid and divided. It’s against this backdrop that we find a disheartened MacKenzie, fired from his job by the new regime and stunned that his daughter has eloped with a Jacobite. So, when Clan MacLeod ask him to investigate the murder of lawyer Aeneas MacLeod, found dead in Edinburgh’s Craigleith Quarry, he jumps at the chance. Depicting the political divisions of the day in a way that feels uncomfortably close to home, Watt conjures up a pungent atmosphere of darkness and period detail as MacKenzie and Scougall prowl Edinburgh looking for answers, encountering a mixture of fictional characters and real historical figures along the way.
THE PAPER LOVERS
Gerard Woodward
Picador, £8.99
Married for 20 years to Polly, who sells handcrafted paper in the local cathedral shop, Arnold Proctor had a quiet and unremarkable life before meeting Vera, the mother of one of his daughter’s friends. Initially intrigued by the religious aura around her, he falls in love and embarks on an affair. Strangely, while the atheistic Arnold is consumed with guilt, the devout Vera doesn’t seem to have a problem with their affair, and Arnold finds himself moving in an uncharacteristically spiritual direction. He starts praying and attending church, and when Polly finds out about his infidelity she’s less troubled by the affair than by his new-found faith. Their lives are complicated further by the intrusion of a literary protester calling himself Martin Guerre, a poet who demands that Arnold and Polly’s small publishing press print his poetry. Woodward gives the tired sub-genre of middle-class infidelity an idiosyncratic twist, his interplay of comic and tragic culminating in a poignant finish.
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