WHEN WE WERE BAD

by Charlotte Mendelson

The Rubin family seems “doomed to happiness”, but, in Mendelson’s wryly humorous novel, dissatisfaction simmers beneath the surface of perfection, like the crumbling house in which Claudia, a trail-blazing rabbi and a voluptuous family goddess, serves sumptuous Passover feasts. When her eldest son, Leo, abandons his bride at the altar, the whole Rubin family starts to unravel. Norman, Claudia’s husband, works frenetically and furtively on his latest book; their eldest daughter Frances is unable to conceal her irritation with her tedious husband and difficult stepdaughters; the youngest two children dabble in drugs and homosexuality and live off their mother’s salary from the shul. Mendelson combines a scattering of Jewish vernacular, wit, and appealing character portraits in her warm prose.

We envy, despise, and ultimately care deeply for this extravagantly dysfunctional family

(Picador £7.99). ES-B

THE WELSH GIRL

by Peter Ho Davies

“The sadness of geography” is a phrase used by Michael Ondaatje in his Booker-winning fiction The English Patient to express the invisible borders of nationhood that keep individuals apart. A similar theme reverberates through Davies’s involving novel, which is set in north Wales during the second world war and focuses on a well-drawn cluster of characters whose paths cross and diverge with varying degrees of sorrow and regret. Among them is Esther, a spirited 17-year-old chafing at the fetters of farm life and coping with the consequences of being raped by an English squaddie. Another character, Karsten, an honourable German prisoner of war, escapes his jailers but not his sense of duty or capacity for sacrifice. Then there is the ambiguous Rotherham, a German Jew working for the allies, whose questioning of fugitive Nazis takes him along his own troubling lines of self-inquiry. Although the novel never quite fulfils its early dramatic promise and its focus fluctuates, its protagonists’ vulnerable natures are delineated with compassion (Sceptre £7.99). TL

THE MUTINY

by Julian Rathbone

Rathbone captures wonderfully the heat and savagery of the 1857 Indian Mutiny in this convincing and pacey novel. Set in northern India, the story is told through the life of Sophie Hardcastle, married to Tom, a lawyer with the East India Company, the organisation that administered the country for the British. During the uprising of the mutiny, Sophie’s young son Stephen becomes one of a group of children who are separated from their parents. As Sophie desperately searches for the child, she witnesses terrible sights from both sides, including the killing of British women and children in Cawnpore and the terrible reprisals that follow. Rathbone makes clear that the mutiny was caused not just by the British, who had forced the Indian sepoys in the Army to use cartridges greased with cow and pig fat, thus making them unclean to the Hindus and Muslims, but also by the arrogance of the East India Company and the casual contempt with which the Indians were treated

(Abacus £7.99). SB

LIES

by Enrique de Heriz

An elderly Spanish anthropologist is assumed to have been killed in the jungles of Guatemala. Temporarily hiding out in a remote shack, she has time to reflect on the myths that her family has constructed over the decades and on the meanings of the tribal rituals she has spent her life studying. Meanwhile, back in Barcelona, her daughter is struggling to come to terms with the supposed bereavement of her mother and with her own obsession with family history. De Heriz’s narrative of the lies a family tells itself is elaborately constructed and unfolds with painstaking precision, but a novel that proclaims the central importance of stories to all our lives would work better if the tale it told itself were more compelling.

(Phoenix £6.99). NR

SPECIAL ASSIGNMENTS

by Boris Akunin

In Erast Fandorin, his government special investigator in late 19th-century Imperial Russia, Akunin has created a character so protean that he can play his part in almost any type of crime fiction from imitation Agatha Christie to espionage thriller. The two long stories in Special Assignments deftly demonstrate the versatility both of Akunin and his creation. In the first, Fandorin’s encounters with a con artist and master of disguise are played almost entirely for laughs; in the second, although pastiche and parody are present, the mood darkens as the investigator confronts a serial killer who is roaming the streets of Moscow. Both stories, in their different ways, provide Fandorin fans with the cleverly constructed period pleasures they have come to expect

(Phoenix £6.99). NR

ANIMAL’S PEOPLE

by Indra Sinha

The place names have been changed, but the tragic backcloth to Sinha’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel is unmistakable: the 1984 toxic-gas leak in Bhopal, India, that left a terrible legacy of death and deformity. The author measures the fictional disaster’s aftershock through the consciousness of one of its victims, a quick-witted, potty-mouthed and likeably lustful young man whose hideously warped spine has forced him to go around on all fours. With the narrator torn between his hatred of the culpable American chemical firm, his desire for one of the campaigners seeking justice and his conflicted feelings about a do-gooding American doctor, the action builds to a feverishly powerful finale. It is a shame then that, in overplaying the hero’s otherness, the novel loses some of its emotional focus and political purposefulness

(Pocket Books £7.99). TL

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