OCEANS OF TIME
By Merete Morken Andersen
Maia, £8.99

Johan and Judith, divorced for more than a decade, are forced to meet one another again when their 16-year-old daughter, Ebba, hangs herself. Andersen’s novel divides the majority of its attention between two first-person narrations by Johan and Judith which place the reader in an at times unbearably close proximity to their grief. Ebba herself arises compellingly, albeit darkly, from these long, anguished reveries; darkly because her parents have no idea why she should have wanted to die. In the process of remembering their daughter, Johan, a computer programmer, and Judith, a violinist, come to reflect on both their meeting and painful parting, Andersen proving as adept at perceiving love’s intricacies as she is at parenthood’s. Compared with novels where the pain of death is lessened by the cosy narrative conceit of having characters tell their stories from its far shore (two recent examples being Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Glen Duncan’s Death of an Ordinary Man) Andersen’s, ably translated from Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland, is a bravely clear-eyed study.

PLAY TO THE END
By Robert Goddard
Corgi, £6.99

In literature’s great feast there is something reassuringly beans-on-toastlike about Robert Goddard. His latest novel, in which the declining actor Toby Flood becomes embroiled in the perturbate affairs of a wealthy Brighton family that will shortly include his soon-to-be ex-wife, is heartily reliable fare, twists happening as and when they should and pages fluttering speedily by. That it’s as memorable as an individual haricot is, I suppose, neither news nor reason for alarm.

ENVY
By Yuri Olesha
NYRB, £7.99

Olesha’s vertiginously odd novella, in which a young intellectual taken in by a Communist Party official becomes consumed by envy and conspires to destroy his benefactor, is a thinly veiled attack on Communist bureaucracy as it was in 1927. Olesha, as the brilliance of his prose demonstrates, is a tantalising nearly man of Russian letters, his career curtailed by Stalin’s demand for socialist realism; Olesha’s boundless exuberance came to fruition at the wrong time.

VILLA INCOGNITO
By Tom Robbins
No Exit, £7.99

Robbins has always seemed to be more a fantasising essayist than a novelist. His plots range from the faintly ridiculous to the ludicrous, and can often be completely discounted in favour of his real strength: expatiating on whatever demi-real weirdness takes his fancy at the time. Villa Incognito, featuring a trio of MIA (missing in action) Vietnam veterans who have made a new life for themselves in Laos, is not his finest, but fans will lap it up.

FANNY: A FICTION
By Edmund White
Vintage, £7.99

As a period romp Fanny has some fine moments, with amusing cameos from the Brownings and Stendhal. In part it also contrives a satisfyingly complex narrative framework, the novel being an imagined manuscript by Fanny Trollope (mother of Anthony and author of the scabrous Domestic Manners of the Americans), complete with her own comments on revisions. But, to the book’s cost, such absorbing slyness is eventually sacrificed in favour of a merely diverting straightforwardness.

Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson

TOMORROW’S PEOPLE
By Susan Greenfield
Penguin, £7.99

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