EDINBURGH
Alexander Chee (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
Chee’s debut novel has only a tenuous connection with the city of Edinburgh, kicking off in Maine in the 1990s, when a 12-year-old Korean-American boy, Aphias (Fee) Zhe, joins a choir run by a man who subsequently sexually abuses several choirboys at summer camp and on tour. Fee isn’t one of them, but a fellow chorister he’s fallen in love with becomes one of the victims, and Fee has to ask himself if the real reason he didn’t report the abuse was to keep his own sexuality a secret. The latter two-thirds of the book concerns the aftermath of the events in his childhood, as Fee struggles for years to come to terms with the guilt he carries around and sees a possible path to redemption. It’s a bold and hard-hitting novel, but one written with sensitivity and held together with delicately threaded imagery as Fee’s guilt and self-destructiveness is intermingled with his exploration of his Korean spiritual heritage.
THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE 3
Riad Sattouf (Two Roads, £18.99)
Cartoonist Riad Sattouf’s comic-strip memoir of his childhood in the Middle East in the 1980s continues to enchant. The third volume follows Riad from the ages of six to nine, with his French mother tiring of life in Syria and a new baby brother and a long-delayed circumcision both on the horizon. We can empathise with the way young Riad feels like a foreigner everywhere he goes, and smile as he and his friends act out their Conan the Barbarian obsession, but, as with previous volumes, Sattouf’s complex and magnificent characterisation of his father is the real star turn. A French-educated academic who considers himself a “modern Muslim” while remaining rooted in tradition, Riad’s father is a perpetually compromised man hungry for all the modern world can offer him but unable to tear himself away from the culture in which he grew up. The illustration and pacing is first-class, Sattouf’s comic timing and wry eye for detail affectionately undercutting his father’s pomposity.
PROMISE ME, DAD
Joe Biden (Pan, £8.99)
In 1972, shortly after he was elected senator for Delaware, Joe Biden’s wife and daughter were killed, and his two sons badly injured, in a car crash. In 2014, by which time Biden was Vice-President to Barack Obama, tragedy struck again: his eldest son, Beau, Delaware’s Attorney General, was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer. Promise Me, Dad tells, in Biden’s own words, the story of an awful year, in which he juggled his responsibilities as Vice-President with spending as much time as possible with his dying son. This was during the period when Obama and Biden were tackling the Crimean crisis, working towards gay marriage and, inevitably, visiting shooting survivors in hospitals, where Biden’s experience of loss helped bring solace to survivors and bereaved. Permitting us access to his family life as well as the workings of the White House, Biden’s account is far more readable, focused and humanising than a typical political memoir, but for the saddest of reasons.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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