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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Funmi Fetto’s impressive Hail Mary (Magpie £16.99) is made up of nine stories which taken together have the heft of a novel. Each focuses on one Nigerian woman’s experience, collectively giving a portrait of varying temperaments, backgrounds, situations and settings. A central character in one story might turn up as a walk-on part in another but for the most part they stand alone. “House Girl”, the most poignant, focuses on Nkechi, maid to an imperious and lazy Lagos socialite. Gradually we see the abuses and assaults Nkechi has to suffer, learn how she got into the situation, and how much is stacked against her socially and culturally.
In “Dodo Is Yoruba for Fried Plantain”, a new widow who has lived in Gloucestershire for a quarter of a century luxuriates in the exotic produce in Brixton market, wondering where life will take her next. The superficially sweet Mary of the title story homes in on new arrivals in London with offers of help that have a sting in the tail. Switching easily from humour to sadness to outrage, Fetto crops the stories, leaving her readers to determine each outcome.
The reader also has work to do in Issa Quincy’s well-titled Absence (Granta £14.99). An unnamed man recalls conversations and stories told by family, friends and more distant connections, linked together by his own associations. Photographs give rise to memories; tales are inwoven with other tales. It’s done rather in the manner of Rachel Cusk, but without her incisiveness. Instead Quincy delivers vignettes that are all the more haunting for being indistinct: a boy drowns at sea, drug-addicted brothers met by chance recount their history, a donkey is flogged to death, an elderly Arab woman relates the fate of her brother at the hands of French authorities in Algeria.
Descriptive passages display Quincy’s lyricism, for example the man’s visit to a remote and decrepit country manor in search of yet another puzzle piece. The narrator conceals himself behind the stories of others, but a framing device hinges on his obsession with a poem that reminds him of his mother (unnamed, but clearly Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis). Plotless (there’s a lot of sitting and wandering around), the novel acts as a meditation on time, meaning and forgetfulness.
There’s a more tangible mystery to be solved in Louise Hegarty’s sparkling yet sad Fair Play (Picador £16.99): the sudden death, on his birthday at New Year, of the protagonist’s brother. Abigail has gathered a group of friends to a grand old house she’s hired for a Roaring Twenties-themed murder mystery party. Suitably clad, the friends join in the fun but quiet Benjamin is found dead in bed next morning.
The text suddenly splits in two: an investigator arrives straight out of the pages of a Golden Age detective story to elucidate the mystery in true period style; while in the real world, the friends all go home leaving Abigail to deal with the reality, rather than the fiction, of death, so lightly doled out in crime novels. Fair Play acts as both witty deconstruction of a genre and portrait of unbearable grief and loss.
A father and son lose pretty much everything in the black comedy Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino (Pushkin One £10.99, first published in the US by Simon & Schuster last year). Luckless David Rizzo runs a gun shop on the border of legality in a rundown mall out in the Arizona desert. His son Nick — his only hope for continuing the ailing business — is a recovering addict. In a fuzzy attempt to do good, and differentiate Rizzo’s Firearms from the competition, David links sales to a charitable endeavour to combat the opioid crisis with a series of groundbreaking viral ads. However, selling an assault weapon to a minor who uses it in a school shooting derails their entire programme. The fact that the shooter, as incompetent as everyone else in the novel, fails to kill anyone is by the by.
Opening just prior to Trump’s first presidency, Last Acts combines a flip, sardonic take on marginal white working-class lives with a real fondness for characters such as failed but eternally hopeful businessman Buford Bellum, while moments of transcendence regularly arrive courtesy of the wide desert vistas.
Short story writer Saba Sams’ tender first novel, Gunk (Bloomsbury Circus £16.99), set in Brighton, looks at what happens when two dissimilar young women reinvent motherhood and partnership. Jules works in a grungy club with her scuzzy ex Leon, who gets a young barmaid, Nim, pregnant. She resolves to have the baby and hand it to Jules, who was never able to conceive. An unconventional liaison ensues, which turns out not to need any formal definition to work. Sams’ poignant tale parks issues of identity as essentially unknowable, and simply glories in the mess of life — the gunk.
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