THIS month sees the launch of Maia Press, an independent British publishing house. Its founders have had enough of the book industry publishing only best-sellers while others languish unread because they don’t shift enough copies. Redmon’s sixth novel, one of three fiction books that will kick-start the home-run publisher into business, is certainly not bestseller subject-matter. She takes on paedophilia. Treading very slowly and subtly, she approaches her difficult target via the complex figure of Harriet Washington, a prison visitor from the Home Counties whose life becomes entangled with a serial offender, imprisoned for reasons different from those she believes put him there. A terrible crime lurks behind the unfolding story, which is told in flashback. This is intelligent writing worthy of a large audience.

JAZZ, ETC
By John Murray
Flambard Press, £8.99; 261pp
ISBN 1 8732 2662 4
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MURRAY demonstrates once again his uncanny ability to give his readers’ stomach muscles a good workout as they attempt, while reading his fiction on public transport, to stifle paroxysms of uproarious laughter for fear of being thought unhinged. This paean to jazz, love and the strange things that occur betwixt the two is set partly on Murray’s home turf of West Cumbria, where Vince Mori, an Italian Cumbrian and founder member of a jazz band called the Chompin Stompers, mangles the English language in hitherto unimaginable ways. His son Enzo, growing up in the 1960s, discovers a superior form of jazz for himself and falls in love at Oxford with Fanny Golightly, shortly to be recognised as the finest jazz guitarist of her generation. Murray writes with passion about the music that moves him, and his phonetic rendering of Vince’s language is a comic masterpiece.

A HISTORY OF FACELIFTING
By Duncan Fallowell
Arcadia Books, £11.99; 354pp
ISBN 1 900 85079 6
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FALLOWELL’S novel opens with a nameless woman driving, in a hallucinogenically-described sequence, from London to her new home, a wonky cottage in a village called Milking Magna. She is here to take a job as conference organiser for an eccentric landed family who wish to turn their rambling pile into a business concern. Actually, to describe them as eccentric is simply not sufficient. Yes, we first meet her boss, the lord of the manor, as he darns his own servant’s socks — and rarely can darning equipment have been described in such sexualised terms — but this family, and in fact the entire cast of the book, go into the realms far beyond eccentricity. They, and Fallowell’s story, reside in those borderlands where the world appears to resemble the one in which we live but where crucial details reveal, almost to our relief, that it is not the same place at all. Such parallel universes provide a joyful vantage point from which to criticise and laugh at the foolishnesses of our own world.

Anthea Lawson

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