LITERARY FICTION
Supper Club by Lara Williams (Hamish Hamilton £12.99, 272pp)
Supper Club
by Lara Williams (Hamish Hamilton £12.99, 272pp)
Naturally, every publisher is now in search of ‘the new Sally Rooney’ —though Rooney, who’s still in her 20s, is hardly past her sell-by date.
But, while her influence on this debut is obvious, Lara Williams is very much a talent in her own right.
Like Conversations With Friends, Rooney’s chart-topper, the focus is the friendship between two young women — here, narrator Roberta and arty Stevie.
The twist is the ‘supper club’ they decide to form, an anarchic project involving guerilla dinner parties, scavenged food, politicised weight gain and a defiant reclaiming of that most terrifying thing: female appetite.
Roberta’s recipes offer themselves as piquant metaphors for her predicament, which includes a bruising love affair with an older man, but the club itself ends up feeling like a side dish.
The real meat is Williams’s smart, zeitgeisty, but genuinely affecting, coming-of-age tale.
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Zed by Joanna Kavenna (Faber £16.99, 384pp)
Zed
by Joanna Kavenna (Faber £16.99, 384pp)
Imagine a denser, intellectually chewier and very British version of dystopian tech satire The Circle, by Dave Eggers, and you’ll have some idea of this. Beetle, the internet giant at the heart of Zed, is a horrifying Google/Apple/Facebook hybrid.
Not only does it operate unchallenged by the Government, but its algorithms are so sophisticated it can map out the future, or ‘lifechain’, of any given ultra-surveilled citizen.
Which means, among other things, that ‘criminals’ can be convicted before they’ve ever committed a crime. So far, so 1984.
But then there’s a spate of ‘glitches’ and a series of gruesome, unaccountably unforeseen events threatens to bring down Beetle.
Free will, determinism and quantum theory are all grist to Kavenna’s mill and, while the rabbit holes she peers down can be dizzying, Zed manages to be snort-inducingly funny, too.
Needless to say, it’s also chilling: not least because it’s set not in the far-off future, but in 2023 . . .
The Travelers by Regina Porter (Cape £14.99, 320 pp)
The Travelers
by Regina Porter (Cape £14.99, 320 pp)
This American debut has been the subject of lavish pre-publication praise.
Spanning six decades and three continents, with a cast of characters extensive enough to merit a list, it’s held together not by plot, but an elegant web of connections.
At its centre are James Vincent and Agnes Miller — the former a prosperous Irish-American attorney whose granddaughter nearly drowns on his watch, and the latter a beautiful college student, who, in 1966, is the subject of a devastating, racially motivated assault.
The Travelers is full of literal and metaphorical journeys, and Porter has a striking habit of telescoping time to chart individual trajectories. But it’s at its best when exploring race, class, prejudice and desire close up.
A lesser novel would have been scuppered by the absence of a narrative arc, but here, the often breathtaking immediacy and assurance of Porter’s prose carries you through.
