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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
You know a writer has got your attention when you arrive back in your driveway from an errand and remain in the car listening to the words spool out of the radio. That happened to me when I heard Wendy Erskine’s “Mrs Dallesandro”, from her second short-story collection Dance Move, and felt transported to a Belfast beauty salon and the inside of a rich, middle-aged woman’s head as she looked back on her youth. Now Erskine has written a novel, The Benefactors (Sceptre, 9 hrs 44 mins), co-opting her considerable skills as a miniaturist to create a longer, highly patterned and textured piece of fiction.
Erskine reads the audiobook herself, but that’s only the start of the story. A gifted creator of monologues, she asked more than 50 readers to bring them to life, alighting mostly on family and friends with little or no previous recording experience — a bold move in the competitive world of audio narration. It pays off. The Benefactors — the title refers to an adult live-streaming service — is propelled by the number and variety of its characters and the play between them. Its naturalistic voices, capturing the lives of teenager Misty and her circle, ranging over intimate friendships, alienated and distanced online encounters, frayed family dynamics and painful confrontations, are the novel’s entire point and its great achievement. Highly recommended.
Sometimes, though, a single voice, and an experienced one at that, is precisely what is needed. Florence Knapp’s debut novel The Names (Phoenix, 9 hrs 41 mins) has a strikingly suggestive premise: three different futures are imagined for one baby boy according to which name his mother registers shortly after his birth. I’m mildly resistant to fiction that coheres — or doesn’t — around an overt device, and I was unprepared for the raw emotional power of Knapp’s exploration of the life-long ramifications of domestic violence.
Actor Dervla Kirwan’s expert narration ensures that this sombre subject matter doesn’t overwhelm the story. She gives as much weight to the love and joy that connect brutalised Cora to her daughter Maia and her son, who is variously called Gordon, after his terrifying father, Julian, Cora’s choice, or Bear, the spirited name that Maia chooses for him. Kirwan navigates with ease not only the outcomes created for each name, but also the time shifts that move us forward seven years in each section. Her ability to evoke the claustrophobia, impotence and fear of Cora’s circumstances, and to weave in her moments of defiance and quiet power, is impressive, memorably demonstrating Knapp’s insistence that it’s not the name that matters, but the environment in which it is chosen.
Taylor Jenkins Reid has something quite different in mind for readers who have lapped up her absorbing and enjoyable novels Daisy Jones and the Six and Malibu Rising. This time, she’s space-bound, in the company of a group of 1980s astronauts preparing to set out from Houston. Atmosphere (Penguin Audio, 9 hrs 57 mins) is rich on period detail, homing in on the dizzying excitement and thirst for the new that characterised matters astral before the billionaires got their hands on them.
The story is warmly and engagingly delivered by Kristen Dimercurio and Julia Whelan, revolving around the character of Joan Goodwin, an astrophysicist suddenly seized by the desire to ascend to the heavens, leaving behind the niece for whom she cares. As central a figure as she is, the action necessarily takes place in the context of a team, with all the egos, motivations and personality clashes that entails. It also makes for a sprightly, fast-moving ensemble piece that is highly enjoyable, even if you’re more firmly wedded to terra firma.
Seán Hewitt’s Open, Heaven (Penguin Audio, 6 hrs 27 mins) is his first novel, following acclaimed books of poetry and a gripping memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. The novel is structured around a man becalmed in adulthood, looking back to an emotionally turbulent teenage period in which he became enthralled by a new arrival in his enclosed village community. Hewitt blends the story’s grittier aspects — rural poverty, the illness of the protagonist’s younger brother, families caught in painful quietness — with its lyrical evocation of the landscape and the turning seasons.
Narrator Sebastian Croft is attentive to Hewitt’s manipulation of silence; what James does not reveal to his parents and friends, or to the boy he is agonisingly attracted to, is as important as what is said. Affecting too is the sense of yearning that he conveys — not merely for the touch or word of a love object, but for the life yet to come, in times and places lying at the edge of imagination.
And for more of the natural world, this time in non-fiction, Jenn Ashworth’s The Parallel Path (Sceptre, 10 hrs, narrated by Melanie Crawley) is out in a couple of weeks’ time. Setting off on Alfred Wainwright’s coast-to-coast walk after lockdown, Ashworth finds herself negotiating both the highways and byways of England, and a radically altered mental landscape. I’ve long loved Ashworth’s uncanny fiction, and this memoir is filled with her characteristic understanding of the connections between the physical world and our interior lives. Wonderful for taking on a walk yourself.
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