From Maggie O’Farrell’s radiant novel to The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld and Anakana Schofield’s captivating latest, this week’s best new fiction
Hamnet
Maggie O’Farrell Tinder Press, £20
This radiant, immersive novel is anchored in its author’s fascination with Hamlet. It begins one summer’s day in 1596, when 11-year-old Judith comes down with a fever in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches desperately for help while his mother is tending her herb plot a mile away and his playwright father is off in London. Driving a narrative that shimmers with intimate insight is the forewarning that one of Shakespeare’s twins will not live beyond the week.
It’s a potent tale of marriage, creativity and grief, illuminating what until now has been a theatrical footnote.
Hephzibah Anderson
The Bass Rock
Evie Wyld Jonathan Cape, £16.99
Wyld’s chronicle of women ill-used by men weaves between three eras. Sarah is a girl in medieval times accused of being a witch; Ruth is a young wife in the Forties, faced with her husband’s infidelity; Viviane is a messed-up modern-day singleton who is befriended by a prostitute.
What links them is a place – a house on the North Berwick coast where things go bump in the night – and the fact that almost every man they meet is given to violence.
Wyld’s writing is always lively, but if ever a book laid its message on with a trowel, this is it.
Anthony Gardner
Bina
Anakana Schofield Fleet, £14.99
Bina, a 74-year-old Irishwoman, scribbles down a series of ‘warnings’ – a mix of eccentric cautionary tales and colourful memories – on scraps of envelopes, making for an ambiguous, fragmented first-person narrative.
Even so, it’s possible to make out a skeletal premise: Bina has been imprisoned after a long career of administering lethal injections to the sick. Schofield requires readers to do a fair amount of work to determine what’s going on, but this is nevertheless a captivating look at female friendship and how women’s voices go unheard.
Gwendolyn Smith