Elizabeth Strout's latest novel, The Things We Never Say (Viking £18.99, 208pp), marks a triumphant return to form after a few missteps in her previous works, which some critics found overly folksy. This short, standalone scorcher centers on Artie Dam, a popular Massachusetts history teacher, in the lead-up to the 2024 American election.
Dam feels estranged from his adult son Rob, who, a decade ago, was involved in a fatal car accident and is now consumed by suicidal thoughts. A near-death boating accident paradoxically reawakens Rob's will to live, but then he reveals a secret concerning Artie's wife Evie, forcing Artie to reassess everything he thought he knew. The reader's perception is similarly in constant flux throughout this deceptively gentle novel, as Strout folds in tiny devastating details that bring even peripheral characters into indelible focus.
The result is a damning portrait of an ideologically lost America and a brutal novel about the loneliness at the heart of every life. The Things We Never Say is available now from the Mail Bookshop.
Uprising by Tahmima Anam
Tahmima Anam's Uprising (Canongate £16.99, 208pp) is set on an unnamed island off the coast of Bangladesh, where a group of trafficked women service men from the mainland under the gimlet eye of their madam, Amma, a former slave. Their story is told through the eyes of their children, all girls (the boys are shipped off at birth), who know the same fate awaits but dream of being saved by a mysterious woman spirit haunting the forest.
Then arrives Kusam, an educated girl sold by her parents who refuses to accept sexual servitude as her future and dares to imagine another way. This stealthy novel, in which the children serve as a chorus, has the uncanny atmosphere of a fable, yet its premise—excellently executed in short scenes of shocking power—feels all too wretchedly plausible. Uprising is available now from the Mail Bookshop.
Fieldwork as a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy
In Fieldwork as a Sex Object (Octopus £16.99, 240pp), an Indian woman living in London discovers a deep-fake sex video featuring herself has gone viral back home, eagerly shared among others by scurrilous 'auntie' WhatsApp groups. She pulls out all the stops to find out who is behind it, except the truth lies discomfortingly close to home.
Kandasamy's polemic lays into a rapacious digital economy predicated on both the sexual exploitation of women and the medieval piety of militant moral crusaders with snarling, disaffected fury. However, it feels like a poorly edited, strung-together sequence of internet ramblings intent more on parading attitude than executing a coherent narrative. Much of it is unreadable. Fieldwork as a Sex Object is available now.
