DEBUTS
TRUE STORY by Kate Reed Petty (Riverrun £16.99, 400 pp)
TRUE STORY
by Kate Reed Petty (Riverrun £16.99, 400 pp)
A rowdy campus party in 1999 ends with two boys driving a girl home, then dumping her, drunk, on the doorstep of her parents’ house.
At first, they boast to friends they assaulted her, but later deny it. The girl, Alice, can’t remember what happened.
Rumours spread through the student community, with accusations and rebuttals flying. The consequences of this event reverberate through the adult lives of the people involved, most importantly of Alice herself. Knocking on the door of horror, mystery, thriller and memoir, this campus novel is threaded through with scripts, college entrance essays and emails.
Inventive and readable, it asks questions about truth and what defines us.
ORDINARY HAZARDS
ORDINARY HAZARDS by Anna Bruno (Scribner £14.99, 272 pp)
by Anna Bruno (Scribner £14.99, 272 pp)
Financial whizz Emma sits in the Final Final, ‘the last bar on the edge of town’, nursing a whisky as the regulars arrive to drink, chat, play pool. As she engages with them, she says: ‘There are two of me: the woman I am and the woman I used to be.’
The narrative flips back and forth in time, examining both women, particularly her relationship with her ex-husband, Lucas, whom she met five years earlier in the same bar. What brought her to this point?
Quiet but emotionally engaging, this atmospheric novel has a raft of enduring characters who prompt her memories.
Bruno has a gift for observation which she uses to produce a haunting examination of love, loss and grief.
THE MISSING PIECES OF NANCY MOON by Sarah Steele (Headline Review £18.99, 416 pp)
THE MISSING PIECES OF NANCY MOON
by Sarah Steele (Headline Review £18.99, 416 pp)
A woman takes the boat-train for Europe, but who she is and her reasons for leaving are shrouded in mystery. Decades later, the novel takes up the story of Flo who, after her grandmother’s funeral and the ending of her marriage, finds a box of dressmaking patterns in her grandmother’s belongings.
Inside each packet is a fabric swatch and a photo of ‘Nancy’ wearing them in different locations, a woman neither her grandmother nor her friends have ever mentioned.
Having made up the dresses for herself, Flo retraces Nancy’s European journey. At each stop, she recreates the photo, hoping to discover more about who this woman was and how she fitted into her grandmother’s life.
The stories of these two women are alternated and, as Flo discovers more about Nancy, she also learns about herself. This is an engaging novel, strong on character and place, that kept me wanting to know more.