“What I do is art, nothing less. Like a geisha, you know?” Vinda (short for Vindaloo) is longterm unemployed. She pays the rent at her aunt’s house by whipping and abusing an overpaid lawyer — but sweaty Derek is her only client and she is not a career whore. And her cousin, Angel, is not Elvis, although he spends his life impersonating the great man. Angel has just returned from the US and his murky adventures at a certain church are catching up with him. Shiroma Pinto’s first novel is fast, blackly funny and so cool that it hurts.

THINGS IN THE NIGHT
by Mati Unt translated by Eric Dickens
Dalkey Archive Press, £8.99

Mati Unt, who died last year, was one of Estonia’s most influential writers — this tiny and beleaguered nation has a rich and flourishing literature. Things in the Night is set in post-Soviet Estonia at the end of the millennium and is a sort of postmodern meditation on electricity in all its forms. It sounds quite incredibly dull but turns out to be unexpectedly gripping. The author’s voice is observant and delicately ironic. Unt has a splendid detachment and a rampant imagination. His translator, Eric Dickens, has written an excellent afterword, outlining the cultural and historical background of Unt’s long career.

THE DRIFT LATITUDES
by Jamal Mahjoub
Chatto & Windus, £14.99

Jade is an architect and the daughter of a beautiful West Indian girl and a German inventor. Rachel, the half sister whom she has never seen, has made her life in the Sudan. A man known simply as “Thursday” has died during the construction of one of Jade’s projects. In Mahjoub’s world, people are separated by their widely different histories, and shaken together in the rich, accidental mosaic of modern society. There is a beautiful density and control to his writing — he jumps in and out of the heads of his characters with impressive confidence and ease.

KATE SAUNDERS

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