First Thoughts

The Impossible Lives Of Greta Wells

Andrew Sean Greer Faber and Faber £14.99, eBook £5.03

Review: by Rebecca Flitton

Many people may feel, at some points in time, that their lives have become impossible. None more so than Greta Wells — her brother has died following his long battle with Aids and long-term partner has left her following an affair with a younger woman. She appeals for help, and her doctor suggests a controversial electro-convulsive therapy. The results, however, are far more shocking than he or she could ever have imagined, submerging Greta into three eras — 1918, 1941 and 1985 — where she awakes in the same room, on the same street, with the same family members surrounding her.

She realises that what her aunt told her as a child may have just come to life. “You make a wish, and another world is formed in which that wish comes true, though you may never see it.”

The novel takes a beautiful journey through history, allowing us to consider what life may have been like had we been born in a different era.

Barracuda

Christos Tsiolkas Atlantic Books £12.99, eBook £6.02

Review by Kitty Wheater

From the author of The Slap comes Barracuda, a story about a misfit second-generation immigrant schoolboy who dreams of swimming to Olympic victory for Australia. Narrated in snatches at different points in Danny’s life, we learn early on that the dream went badly wrong.

Tsiolkas reveals what happened to this hungry, angry young man, against a backdrop of multilayered disillusion with Australian society: Danny’s teenage activist friends bemoan the country’s not-so-secret Aboriginal apartheid and endemic sexism, but grow up to be the average, status-seeking middle-class who try to redeem themselves with left-wing ranting over bottles of wine.

Barracuda is a book about failure. Emotionally an uncomfortable read, it loses its way structurally in the second half as Tsiolkas struggles to develop the plot of Danny’s life post-crisis. The plot loses narrative direction and the multiple time settings begin to grate.

Sharper editing and a substantive ending would have slapped this otherwise gripping book into shape.

Fear Nothing

Lisa GardnerHeadline £14.99, eBook £4.72

Review by Shereen Low

US author Lisa Gardner is back with her 21st novel and the eighth crime book featuring Detective DD Warren. Her latest thriller focuses on two sisters — one a successful therapist, Doctor Adeline Glen, who suffers from congenital analgesia (she can’t feel pain), the other, Shana Day, a serial killer serving time in prison for multiple murders. As daughters of mass murderer Harry Day, they now have to join forces to help DD catch a predator copying their late father’s modus operandi.

On top of it all, DD is at a disadvantage after being injured visiting a crime scene after hours, when she encountered the killer.

As Gardner’s novels go, Fear Nothing has upped the stakes. It is gorier (the murderer flays his victims’ skin in strips), creepier and will leave the reader guessing the identity of the killer until the end.

Down To The Sea Of Ships

Horatio Clare Chatto & Windus £20, eBook £11.99

Review by Alex Sarll

Despite sharing his name with Nelson, Horatio Clare was no seafarer; yet, fascinated by the great container ships without whose cargo “what we call normality would not exist”, he resolved to join their journeys, and tell the story of the men who maintain the arteries of international commerce.

Two voyages are recounted here; one around much of the world on the mighty Gerd Maersk, the other to the frozen North on the battered Maersk Pembroke. Both are enlivened with a miscellany of facts and reflections, covering humanity’s nautical history from the Bronze Age to the present.

Clare is rightly furious about the racial inequities, corporate malpractice and sheer baffling waste entailed in international shipping, but simultaneously seems determined to re-enchant life on the ocean waves.

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