Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud, Faber & Faber, £14.99 (ebook £8.99).
What would happen if your heart broke? If the world you know was ripped away from you? Could you move on and find love again? Love After Love is the story of life after abuse. Betty and her young son Solo are caught, trapped in an abusive cycle with her drunken husband Sunil. Culturally, in Trinidad, a blind eye is turned, but Betty is strong, doting mother - and to keep a roof over their heads rents a room to Mr Chetan. Over time a new family forms. A new normal. Betty continues to look for love, Solo wants to spread his wings and Mr Chetan longs to be accepted for who he really is. Until a hushed conversation forces them apart. Ingrid Persaud has created a passionate, dark tale that glimmers with hope.
Rachel Howdle
The Discomfort Of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijnevald, Faber & Faber, £12.99 (ebook £7.99).
Marieke Lucas Rijnevald's debut is at times so unnervingly vivid and supremely disturbing, you have to put it down and walk away for a little while. Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison, it concerns the extraordinary perspective of 10-year-old Jas who lives on her family's dairy farm, where the day-to-day is dictated by the cows, the word of God, and what Jas' mother is cooking for dinner. Then an accident on the ice turns everything brutally sour, and Jas' off-kilter understanding of the world begins to turn in on itself, becoming increasingly dark and nauseating as she tries to make sense of her family's new reality, and the impact it's having on her and her siblings. Rijnevald's writing is incredibly visceral, capturing pain, grief, the negligence parents can inflict and the truly disgusting (from murdered hamsters to a pin in a belly button), in a way that's both impressive and also deeply unsettling. Often it's difficult to keep reading. Bold, intriguing, and quietly disconcerting, it's hard to get out of your head.
Ella Walker
Greenery by Tim Dee, Jonathan Cape, £18.99 (ebook £9.99).
Alongside sights, sounds and species, the experience of nature - its role in our lives and history - has formed the heart of recent nature writing. A radio producer, student of literature and dedicated birdwatcher, Tim Dee has shown his aptitude for this blend of personal, cultural and natural histories in previous memoirs. Greenery is an anatomy of spring, travelling northwards through the year, but its course meanders eclectically. Swooping in one chapter from Sicily's Persephone myth to a discarded toffee wrapper on Heligoland, by way of human and avian migrants and Brueghel's Icarus, Dee's writing sings. Sometimes the lush prose overwhelms but many moments resonate, like the 'rhyme' between birds in the daylit arctic summer and in the sun-drenched south. When scattered personal anecdotes finally crystallise into the recent events in Dee's life, the heart breaks. A book best experienced like spring itself, blooming and fading at its own pace.
Josh Pugh Ginn
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