PLEASE MISS
Grace Lavery
Daunt, £14.99
Subtitled “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis”, Please Miss is a gender-transitioning memoir like no other. Rocking a finely-honed, larger-than-life authorial persona, Lavery introduces herself by announcing she’s found a solution to her “penis problem”, and is continually drawn away from her scholarly discourse – albeit of the wildest, most irreverent kind – to explore endless digressions in the shape of erotic stories, imagined dialogues, discourses on Dickens, her obsession with a clown cult, dissociative masturbation (it involves thinking hard about the Guardian) and several pages spent discussing why trans people love Little Shop of Horrors. For all its freewheeling wildness, the readers who will get the most out of Please Miss are those who can follow her academic trains of thought. The rest of us may be left nonplussed or even exhausted by Lavery’s scattershot energy and breathless narration, but unable to deny that she’s shattered expectations with an inventive and provocative memoir.
MY FATHER’S DIET
Adrian Nathan West
And Other Stories, £10
An American translator living in Spain, West sets his debut novel in the late 1990s, with an unnamed narrator who has been living with his mother since childhood, but when she hooks up with a man he calls The Weirdo decides to try living with his father instead. He’s surprised that his dad is so receptive to his new wife’s spiritual leanings that he’s opening a holistic health centre with her. But then his dad embarks on an extreme diet he believes will give him a ripped body and a new life in 12 weeks, asking his son to help. Our narrator is a product of malls, low-status jobs and faded dreams, and West’s wry, precise tone captures the monotony and inertia of his daily life. But what could have been a cruel satire is elevated by his empathy for his characters and an outlook that’s compassionate rather than condescending.
ASYLUM ROAD
Olivia Sudjic
Bloomsbury, £8.99
Anya, now a PhD student in London, lived through the siege of Sarajevo as a child, and the experience has left lasting psychological scars, manifesting in flashbacks and varied phobias. Since moving to the UK, she has sought to assimilate herself into “civilised” British life, and her forthcoming marriage to boyfriend Luke promises security and stability. After an excruciating stay with Luke’s xenophobic Cornish parents, they fly to Split so that he can meet her family, but the disappearance of Anya’s passport and PhD notebook is a shattering loss to her sense of self that prompts her defences to crumble and traumatic memories to flood back. With nods to Brexit and vaccine scepticism, as well as the commercialisation of tragedy, Asylum Road’s dark mood intensifies as Anya’s identity begins to fragment; a bleak, discomforting but thematically rich novel concerned with trauma, but also a plea to remember history truthfully and respect its victims.
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