OLDER BROTHER
Daniel Mella (Charco Press, £12.99)
Dani is 37, prone to depression and separated from the mother of his children, and he’s just found out that his younger brother, the happy-go-lucky surfer Alejandro, has been killed by a bolt of lightning while sheltering from a storm in a lifeguard’s hut. Alejandro was always the upbeat, positive son, and Dani can’t help but wonder aloud whether it should have been him, the gloomy one, who suffered an untimely death instead. Uruguayan author Mella’s fourth novel is a blend of autobiography and fiction, an uncompromising account of his family’s reaction to the death of his brother. But it also probes into his motivations for becoming a writer in the first place, as an attempt to shake off the influence of his parents and create his own space. Cathartic and soul-searching, with an undertone of self-destructiveness, it’s a book raw with grief which strips bare the author and his family in an unsettling but compelling way.
WHAT SHE ATE
Laura Shapiro (4th Estate, £9.99)
On the basis that “while extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary women, food makes them recognisable”, Shapiro takes six women from history to see what we can learn about them from their attitudes towards dining. She buries the myth that Eleanor Roosevelt derived no pleasure from food, deducing what probably lay behind that claim; speculates on the significance of the single mention of black pudding in Dorothy Wordsworth’s diaries; evokes the “charmed space” around Eva Braun and Hitler when they dined; celebrates how novelist Barbara Pym quietly chronicled the eating habits of mid-20th Century England; scrutinises Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, who was obsessed with food but never gave the impression she actually ate any; and writes a potted biography of Edwardian caterer Rosa Lewis, for whom food was inextricably linked with social advancement. Focusing on aspects of life considered trivial by many serious historians, she’s come up with six insightful and ridiculously readable essays with a great deal to say about their subjects.
THE LADY AND THE LITTLE FOX FUR
Violette Leduc (Penguin, £7.99)
Friend of, and collaborator with, Jean Genet, Violette Leduc wrote books which were, as Deborah Levy’s introduction admits, “works of genius and also a bit peculiar”. In this novella, she explores the mind of an impoverished and starving 60-year-old woman who, after “40 years of solitude and life in the wild”, talks to her furniture and hangs around in the Paris Metro in an attempt to feel connected to other people. One day, while rooting around in bins, she finds a fox fur scarf which has a profound impact of her life. Leduc admits us into this sad woman’s thought processes, letting us see her fevered, hallucinatory perceptions of Paris as they blend into memories, then imaginings, and back again. This short, densely-packed book can be hard going, but those with the patience to give Leduc’s prose the close attention it demands will be rewarded by a voice that’s bold and unique, even by the standards of 1960s France.
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