OF STONE AND SKY
Merryn Glover (Polygon, £9.99)
Missing and presumed dead, shepherd Colvin Munro is nevertheless a constant presence in this Highlands saga.
As it opens, he is being remembered by his foster-sister Mo, who became a church minister before returning home to buy the village pub, and his brother Sorley, who fell into a drink-fuelled decline when his hedge fund collapsed.
Since Colvin disappeared, some of his possessions have been found strewn across the countryside, each with its own significance. Around this, Glover has woven a novel with a cast large enough to let her explore the workings of a Scottish estate from multiple angles, taking in the perspectives of everyone – from foresters and gamekeepers to conservationists – who has a stake in it.
Of Stone and Sky unfolds impressively and with a sweeping scope, dispelling romantic notions of the Highlands to acknowledge its material realities, and doing it through diverse, well-developed characters, before capping it with a satisfying ending.
THE MAD WOMEN’S BALL
Victoria Mas (Penguin, £8.99)
Presided over by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, in 1885 the Salpêtrière Asylum is a Paris institution. Many of the women interned there, though, aren’t mad at all, but committed by their families for the sake of convenience. Geneviève has nursed there faithfully for 20 years, but her dedication takes a knock when she discovers that 17-year-old patient Eugénie, who claims to be able to see and hear the dead, is actually telling the truth.
Every year, the Parisian elite attend the voyeuristic Mad Women’s Ball at the hospital, and Geneviève reckons the event will be the perfect cover to sneak Eugénie out to freedom.
Mas highlights the camaraderie among the inmates, and her depiction of Salpêtrière is reasonably even-handed – for some patients, it’s a refuge from a much worse fate outside – and in this sumptuous tale of injustice and defiance, she endows the asylum with all the vividness she brings to her characters.
BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY
Violet Kupersmith (Oneworld, £8.99)
Twenty-two-year-old Vietnamese-American Winnie arrives in Saigon with the intention of reconnecting with her Vietnamese heritage while (badly) teaching English. But she feels as much of an outsider in Saigon as she did in the US.
Dogged by depression and self-loathing, she gets involved with a doctor who has a weird thing for snakes before disappearing altogether.
But Winnie is only part of a much larger and stranger narrative, sliced up into loosely-connected vignettes and interspersed with her own.
She shares the pages with another missing woman, a schoolboy from 1945, three friends from the 1990s and ghost hunters from 2011 in a commentary on Vietnam’s French colonial history which is steeped in magical realism and horror and can’t help but evoke comparisons with women’s ownership of their own bodies.
Possibly diluted by having so much going on at once, it’s still a rich, atmospheric novel.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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