Fifteen-year-old Mel is the sort of girl teachers like and parents approve of, planning to study theoretical physics at university. So, when she falls for a classmate on the verge of dropping out, it’s not what anyone expects. “Me and Sid are counterintuitive. We’re a paradox. We’re one of the Great Unsolvable Mysteries of science. But I don’t care. I’m hit all over again by how good he smells as I breathe him in.”
The stakes of this unlikely romance hit the stratosphere when Mel discovers she’s pregnant. For Sid, it’s in many ways the making of him – for the first time in his life, he has a purpose, and he takes on various part-time jobs to provide for his future family (and, if he’s honest, to prove his mother wrong). Meanwhile, Mel is uneasy about how her religious parents have set out a plan for them. “Somehow this is happening. We’ve gone from pregnant to childcare and no one’s even mentioned any alternative. Maybe there is no alternative. Maybe that’s only in the movies.”
Little Bang (Walker Books, £8.99) is the much-anticipated second novel from the award-winning Kelly McCaughrain (Flying Tips for Flightless Birds), and despite its very particular setting – Northern Ireland in 2018, before the decriminalisation of abortion – it is, like many texts involving reproductive rights, likely to remain relevant for a very long time. (As per the author’s note at the end, “as we’ve seen in America with Roe v Wade, it’s dangerous to assume progress can’t be reversed”.)
McCaughrain uses the backdrop of the Repeal the Eighth campaign south of the Border to good effect; members of Mel’s family are planning to travel to Dublin to protest, while it also serves as a credible reason for the Debate Club at school to delve into some of the talking points. In one particularly astute move, a boy Mel expects to cite religious objections instead focuses on how society could and should support women more effectively. This is a nuanced and thoughtful engagement with the issues, rather than a polemic; the teenage and adult characters are fully developed and complex. A smart, deeply moving book.
Stronger by Nicola Hanney: An unputdownable memoir about escaping coercive control
Gliff by Ali Smith: Part allegory, part dystopian fiction, altogether thrilling
Shattered by Hanif Kureishi: Darkly funny insights into the indignities and anguish caused by sudden incapacitation
The Myth of American Idealism & America’s Fatal Leap 1991-2016: a gateway drug for critics of US foreign policy and a more complex critique
Speaking of dystopian settings in which women’s freedoms are severely curtailed, historical-mystery writer Polly Crosby makes her YA debut with This Tale Is Forbidden (Scholastic, £8.99), set in a city where fairy tale virtues inform the law. Men are expected to exhibit “strength, chivalry, valour, power” while women must demonstrate “grace, humility, beauty, obedience”.
Enter Nesta, a girl who has lived a sheltered life in the woods, has heard the real fairy tales – Cinderella as a “powerful political rebel who challenged the king, making him lower the taxes on the poor”, Snow White as a brilliant chemist testing out ways to poison an apple and get a pesky prince to leave her alone, Goldilocks as a brave adventurer who lived among bears (“she didn’t steal their bloody porridge!”).
The dangers of censorship, and the power it offers to those who select, tweak and control history, are explored with a light touch. This is an extremely pleasing page-turner, with magic woven through.
“Houses were not sentient; they did not wake their inhabitants or torture them in the night with sinister sounds that made them question their sanity. I was delirious with tiredness, that was all.” At Archfall Manor, home to the mysterious Cauldwell family, 17-year-old Helena tries to be rational rather than give in to superstition. She is, after all, there as a governess, albeit under false pretences; she also needs the money to free her mother from debtors’ prison. And yet the longer she stays, the more she senses that this isolated house has been calling to her.
HF Askwith’s second gothic thriller, A Cruel Twist of Fate (Penguin, £8.99), deposits us in the Victorian era with its specific mix of the spiritual and the scientific. The long-lost Edwin Cauldwell had been experimenting with the arches that give the manor its name, using them as possible gateways through time; this innovative bent is seen in the rest of the family, with strange inventions a part of daily life in the household. The question of whether these might be mystical or mundane fades into the background when a murder occurs, however. Despite the body count, this is a fun read.
Sutherland’s luscious writing makes this twisty, gruesome story a dark delight
The same could be said – perhaps even more so – for Krystal Sutherland’s The Invocations (Hot Key Books, £8.99), which opens on “a sloe-black, moonless night. The kind that beckons demons out of the liminal world and brings them into this one, hungry to feed on the souls of the living.” Someone or something is murdering young women with strange symbols on their bodies, and while the link is not yet clear, two teenage girls very much want to figure out what’s going on. Zara’s hoping to track down the killer – her sister was the first victim, and she’s determined to bring her back from the dead, if only she can find a necromancer.
Jude, on the other hand, wants to find a way out of her own tangled mess, and her previous encounters with the supernatural. “To be cursed is haunted. Dying things come to Jude in the night. Spiders crawl from their holes and contort into twitching knots as she sleeps. Flying insects fall out of the air in her wake. Plants yellow in her presence, their leaves puckered like leather.” Despite her wealth, Jude is isolated from her family (think the sort of media empire that we can now only ever imagine as headed by Brian Cox), due to complications from having your soul tethered to demons. Sure, we’ve all been there.
When the two girls meet, they track down a third: Emer, who writes spells and curses in various ancient languages and has her own dark past as the sole survivor of a massacre. Sutherland’s luscious writing makes this twisty, gruesome story a dark delight.
Faron, one of two sibling protagonists in Kamilah Cole’s debut, So Let Them Burn (Atom, £9.99), can relate to the idea of being cursed; at the age of 12 she was chosen by the gods as their Child Empyrean to save the island nation of San Irie from its oppressors. Five years on it is a mantle she wears uneasily, particularly when the gods remind her, “You don’t stop being the chosen one just because the war is over.”
The threat of war rises its ugly head once more at a peace summit, complicated by her beloved sister Elara forming a psychic bond with a dragon owned by the country’s former colonisers. Her training will take her away from the island, which is bad enough, but the dragons may be a danger in their own right – which means saving San Irie will involve Faron having to kill her own sister.
The magical, political, and personal intrigue for both sisters is situated very firmly within the context of colonisation; this Caribbean-inspired setting allows for occasional overt reminders about how oppressors “rewrite your history when you’re too young to know what you’re giving away, and before you know it, it’s too late to reclaim what you’ve lost”, but without demonising the entire population. A complex, thought-provoking, thoroughly enjoyable read.
