THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN
by Claire Messud
Picador, £7.99 £7.59 (free p&p)

Longlisted for last year’s Man Booker prize and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards, Messud’s ambitious novel, which has garnered ecstatic reviews from both sides of the Atlantic, is the latest in a string of works by American authors on the topic of 9/11. Like those in Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, her characters are young New York professionals, dabbling at the creative end of things.

Most sympathetic of these is Danielle Minkoff, a television producer whose attempts to engage with more serious issues prove as futile as her quest to find love. Marina, her best friend and the daughter of a celebrated journalist and TV pundit Murray Thwaite, is more vacuous, alternating between complaining about the difficulties of being born beautiful and trying to match up to what she perceives as her father’s impossibly high expectations. Julius Clarke, Marina’s gay best friend, is similarly conflicted, forced to choose between journalistic integrity and compromising his principles to keep his Wall Street businessman lover happy.

With the arrival in the Thwaites’ Manhattan apartment of Bootie Tubb, Marina’s cousin and an aspiring writer, things get even more interesting — so much so that it is almost a disappointment when the pin-sharp satire of New York media types at which Messud excels is interrupted by the cataclysm with which her book concludes. Suddenly, the bitchy goings-on don’t seem so important. A Bonfire of the Vanities for the 2000s, this is an utterly compelling read.

THE MATCH
by Romesh Gunesekara
Bloomsbury, £7.99 £7.59 (free p&p)

Gunesekera’s gently humorous coming-of-age novel is seen from the point of view of Sunny Fernando, a young Sri Lankan boy living with his widowed father Lester in Manila during the 1970s. Sunny’s main obsessions are cricket and his alluring classmate, Tina Navaratnam, whose overbearing father Rudolf is one of Lester’s colleagues. At a cricket match the barely suppressed rivalry between the two men becomes apparent. The scene displays the understated comedy that pervades the novel, and softens its more sombre moments.

When, after falling out with his father, whom he blames for his mother’s suicide, Sunny goes to England, the mood becomes darker, and the colourful landscapes of his childhood home are supplanted by the drabber settings of Liverpool and London. Ethereal Clara takes the place in Sunny’s heart that has been occupied by his first love, Tina, and the youthful optimism of the opening chapters gives way to resignation. Marriage and the birth of Sunny’s son fail to alleviate his sense that he has somehow failed to do what he wanted with his life. Only near the end of the novel, when Sunny is watching the Sri Lankan cricket team’s historic victory at the Oval, is he able to reconnect with his past, and with the happiness he has lost.

Cricket fans will enjoy the detail with which the 2002 Test match is described; but there are also pleasures for students of human nature, too, in this funny and engaging work.

A FINE DARK LINE
by Joe R. Lansdale
Phoenix, £6.99 £6.64 (free p&p)

Small-town America in the late 1950s is the backdrop for Lansdale’s evocative coming-of-age novel — although, as his narrator, Stanley Mitchell, observes, “people dressed and conducted themselves like it was the 1930s”. Sexual liberation has not yet reached Dewmont, Texas; nor has the civil rights movement made much inroad.

As the novel opens, 13-year-old Stanley has just moved with his family to their new home — a drive-in cinema. While his older sister Callie fends off the attentions of the local youth, Stanley is drawn into a mystery straight from the comic books he reads. His discovery of love-letters in the woods points towards the unsolved murder of two girls 15 years before. With Callie’s assistance, and later that of Buster Lighthorse Smith, the cinema’s projectionist, Stanley uncovers sinister secrets involving members of the town’s most influential family.

As shocking as this chronicle of violence and hypocrisy is the casual racism that affects every aspect of daily life, and of which Stanley becomes increasingly aware through his friendship with Buster, who is part black, part Seminole Indian. A family outing to see a “minstrel show”, with the performers got up in “blackface”, is one example. While the author pulls no punches in his depiction of less palatable aspects of Fifties America, his account conveys a nostalgia for a vanished world of soda-fountains, “double-features” at the drive-in, and boys borrowing their fathers’ Cadillacs to impress a date.

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