Portrait Of A Family With A Fat Daughter by Margherita Giacobino (Dedalus, £12.99)
This memoir of four generations of a family provides a vivid and eloquent picture of Italian life stretching from the late 19th century, when the peasant lifestyle had changed little from medieval times, up to the consumer culture of the 1950s. It’s a saga that embraces characters like Maria, who emigrated to the USA for an unwise marriage, returning a few years later with a daughter and paralysis down one side of her body, and the author’s father, Angelo, a feckless chap who was interned in a German POW camp. In writing about her female-dominated family, some of whom she is old enough to remember – most notably the matriarchal grandmother Ninin – Giacobino imbues her account with a real sense of intimacy. She has a powerful feel for traditional Italian culture, her early chapters conjuring up a time when the hierarchy of the family was the only true reality, fairness was unknown and “a moment’s tenderness must last a week”.
A Very English Scandal by John Preston (Penguin, £9.99)
Even 40-odd years of political scandals later, the Jeremy Thorpe case is still in a class of its own. The thought of the former leader of one of Britain’s main political parties standing trial for conspiracy to commit murder, even now, takes the breath away. This is far from the first book to cover the scandal, but Thorpe’s death in 2014 has given Preston a freedom denied to previous authors. He also nails the tone. Knowing how unreal a situation it seemed at the time, Preston highlights the absurdities of the case, zeroing in on its tragicomic potential, and relates the story in a lively, accessible way. It’s a non-fiction book that reads like a wry, clever political satire, though it never stoops to presenting the sad Liberal leader simply as a figure of ridicule. Thorpe’s acquittal, as the Establishment closes ranks, reads like the kind of satirical flourish that could have come from the pen of Michael (House Of Cards) Dobbs.
The Debutante And Other Stories by Leonora Carrington (Silver Press, £9.99)
Not to be confused with Bloomsbury Group stalwart Dora Carrington, Leonora was born in England but moved to Mexico, where she established herself as a pioneer of Surrealist painting. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she was more interested in magical realism than Freudianism, and that’s as much reflected in her short stories as her pictures. Rooted in the form of the fairy tale, these otherworldly vignettes follow the narrative logic of dreams as her characters encounter bats, a hyena, a seemingly endless supply of horses and various eccentric humans in landscapes of rich scents and colours. The precise rules of how these worlds work are a mystery, but Carrington’s stories honour the tradition of the classic fairy tale by highlighting the unsentimentality of nature in the raw with a mixture of wide-eyed wonder and deep cynicism. Their meanings are as hard to discern as those of Surrealist paintings, but there’s much to be enjoyed in these fanciful flights of the imagination.
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