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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Think back to a time when Shoreditch, in east London, was cappuccino- and sourdough-free; when the brattish Young British Artists boozed and puffed their way from squat to rave to dole office while plotting to up-end the art establishment. The setting seems so distant that it almost makes Peter Carty’s debut Art (Pegasus £10.99) a historical novel.
Carty inventively substitutes Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin with his own fiercely competitive and hedonistic fictional counterparts: already pulling ahead of the pack is the Hirst-like, death-obsessed Kevin Thorn. Trying to keep up are Tania Russell-Smith, a “post-punk Wife of Bath”, and Becky Edge, a solipsistic video artist. Enigmatic curator Alastair Given, who runs the Idiot Savant gallery in Hoxton (east London again), holds the scene together. On the outside looking in is wannabe art critic Billy McCrory, whose appetite for a story is matched by his lust for drugs.
Carty evokes the grimy urban pool from which these lotuses bloom with a fastidious, fascinated disgust, just as he documents his characters’ kinky sex lives and the undercurrent of crime and violence their insouciance rubs up against. Bouncers, villains, derelicts, millionaires and strippers people a tale of monstrous vitality, which nevertheless maintains a passionate faith in the transformative quality of art.
The opening pages of Piglet by Lottie Hazell (Doubleday £16.99) offer a vision of a bland, unexceptional middle-class existence in Oxford. The food-mad heroine, an editor at a publishing house devoted to cookbooks, is preparing to get hitched to Kit, the adored son of a wealthy couple. Despite the fact that she comes from a different social class, the in-laws love her, a fortune has been lavished on the celebrations and an enviable life seems about to begin.
Yet just before the nuptials, Kit makes a shocking confession. Conflicting advice from the bride’s confidantes seems to be more self-serving than disinterested. Do those advising her to dump Kit understand Piglet’s emotional needs? Do those who counsel going ahead simply want her to conform? The childish family nickname is itself an expression of an identity imposed by others. Dress fittings and menu plans take on a nightmarish comic edge. Under the will-she, won’t-she drama is a cunning critique of the expectations that society continues to heap on young women.
With Ava Anna Ada (White Rabbit £18.99), Ali Millar deposits the reader in the near future, in a coastal community racked by fears of rising sea levels. Inhabitants are assessed by means of a meter installed in each house. Anna, a “High Value” influencer married to Leo, a surgeon, is spotted by a follower repeatedly kicking a pet dog. The young woman, a “Low Value” sex worker, resembles Anna’s dead daughter Ada and takes on the name Ava to infiltrate the family. What follows is a sinister dance, where power shifts from player to player and where Anna and Leo’s remaining child Adam becomes both prize and victim. This is a perverse, dark tale of shifting identities, deceit and manipulation.
Ambiguous identities and juggling of social roles are also central to Winter Animals by Ashani Lewis (Dialogue Books £18.99), which could be subtitled “Ski bums turn feral”. Elen, in her mid-thirties and newly single, is taken on as a kind of mascot by a bunch of feckless English teenagers as they pass through Bend, Oregon. When the group heads north to Canada in search of slopes new, Elen tags along, intrigued by their dynamic and urged on by sexual curiosity. Hardened ski squatters, in Banff they discover an abandoned but luxuriously furnished cabin. One of the boys, Luka, is attempting to create a philosophical utopia according to the theories of the early 19th-century French philosopher Charles Fourier, whose theories of sexual liberation were tinged with misogyny; their new den makes for the perfect lab experiment. The Fourier subplot is not fleshed out, however, and beautiful writing doesn’t inject much energy into a tale of rootless, affectless characters whose main drive is “whatever”.
By contrast, the stakes could barely be higher in Leo Vardiashvili’s propulsive page-turner Hard by a Great Forest (Bloomsbury £16.99). Saba, who left Georgia as a child, is compelled to return to the country after his father Irakli vanishes, swiftly followed by his brother Sandro, who has gone in pursuit. The contemporary Tbilisi that Saba encounters is almost unrecognisable: escaped zoo animals prowl the parks, there is little trace of their former life and Sandro leaves a series of enigmatic clues designed to help Saba while throwing the secret police off the scent.
Saba’s only ally — a questionable one — is Nodar, an eccentric taxi driver who enthusiastically joins the quest. Taking its title from a line in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Vardiashvili’s sprawling narrative, part comic, part tragic, abounds in mysteries, monsters, magic and terrors. It’s a spellbinding achievement.
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