TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS WELL
David Samuel Levinson (Corsair, £8.99)
This blackly comic depiction of a family at war takes place before a backdrop of near-future dystopia. It’s 2022, Israel no longer exists and four million refugees have flooded into the USA, causing an upsurge in anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, the Jacobson family has gathered in LA to celebrate Passover. The three grown-up children, Moses, Edith and Jacob, claim that their father, Julian – admittedly, a consummately nasty piece of work – has mistreated them all their lives and, what’s more, is deliberately hastening their terminally ill mother’s death. The real reason for the Jacobson children coming together like this is that they’ve hatched a plan to kill their father. But to band together and go through with it they’d have to put aside their differences, which in this family are considerable. It’s wickedly funny, clever and dark, and the fact that Moses wants to televise the family gathering to revive his flagging TV career brings mounting dread and delight as the end draws nearer.
THE DINNER PARTY
Joshua Ferris (Penguin, £8.99)
Anxiety runs through all eleven of these short stories by New Yorker Joshua Ferris. Opening the book, the title story draws back the curtain on a couple’s social life, showing how narrow the divide is between social awkwardness and real emotional pain, and by the third story, “The Pilot”, we feel we’ve got the measure of the author, albeit too soon. These are stories about ordinary people (overwhelmingly men) feeling dissatisfied and isolated, as if waiting for some purpose and direction in life to present itself to them. They philander, bicker and obsess, getting neurotic about things they have or haven’t done. And in Ferris’s fiction relationships are inscrutable, transitory things, so couples can’t even rely on each other. The consistently downbeat mood can pall quite quickly, so it might be an idea not to binge on these stories, but intersperse them with more optimistic fare. Stories like “The Breeze”, “A Night Out” and “A Fair Price” shine brightest in isolation.
A FORGER’S TALE
Shaun Greenhalgh (Allen & Unwin, £8.99)
With a little help from his mum and dad, Shaun Greenhalgh produced paintings and sculptures in his Bolton shed that fooled some of the most prestigious art institutions in the world. Probably Britain’s most notorious and prolific art forger, he was sentenced to four years and eight months in 2007, and this autobiography was largely written in prison. But even before then he was, in the words of Waldemar Januszczak’s introduction, a man “enslaved by art”. Despite never having been to art school or tried to pursue a career as an artist, he developed a staggering knowledge of the technical side of painting and sculpting. He could create Leonardos, Lowrys, Hepworths, even Anglo-Saxon silverware capable of convincing experts. He reveals a few of his techniques for fakery here, useless to the non-artist but a great insight into his mind and methods. As memoirs go, it’s a bit unpolished and meandering, but its rough-hewn charm carries it along nicely.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
ISBN numbers
Tell Me How This Ends Well: 978-1-4721-5296-1
The Dinner Party: 978-0-241-97998-3
A Forger’s Tale: 978-1-76029-528-8
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