It is an engaging tale, all at once funny, raw and moving, and as the ironic title reveals, brutally honest about the elusiveness of happiness. I was also captivated by Isabelle Dupuy’s superb debut novel, Living the Dream which takes us into the affluent but fragile worlds of Naomi and Solange, two immigrant women from Colombia and Haiti living in London in the Brexit era.
Meticulously researched, it is an indispensable book for confronting colonial amnesia and shallow post-imperial jingoism, and the racism which typically lurks beneath. Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland is an absorbing, sober and witty reflection on the ways in which its imperial past has shaped so much of modern British life – its politics, education, culture and language, and, of course, its ethnic composition. Travelling far without moving much has been one of the challenges we have all faced over the past year, and my two recommendations of books to get lost in allow us to view our familiar landscapes in a new light. Winner of the Wolfson History prize for Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture ( Allen Lane )
She is also a generous and big-hearted writer, not afraid to dive into the intriguing, yawning gap between what people say and what they think. Her description of a children’s birthday party, featuring a middle-aged magician who possibly steals the hostess’s bra and demands a hug on departure, actually made me guffaw in the middle of the night (and I never guffaw). Heiney is hilarious, as anyone who has read her will know, and she can skewer a character with one succinct observation. A recent bout of insomnia has been rendered much less dull by rereading Katherine Heiny’s short story collection, Single, Carefree, Mellow. With her fierce and shapeshifting mermaid, Roffey has created a modern myth about belonging and the bonds humans form with each other and with their land, single-handedly bringing magic realism up to date. It is a daring, mesmerising novel that continually unseats expectation – I was deliciously unsure, throughout, what would happen next. I have just finished Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of the Black Conch. Winner of the Women’s prize for fiction and the British Book awards fiction book of the year for Hamnet ( Tinder Press )
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