LITERARY FICTION
ONE SMALL VOICE by Santanu Bhattacharya (Fig Tree £14.99, 400 pp)
THIS pleasingly messy novel is the story of Shubhankar, or Shubby, who is ten when he witnesses an act of appalling violence during a Hindu wedding at a time when Hindu-Muslim relationships in India are at boiling point.
Two decades on, now an adult, he still struggles to comprehend what happened and his family’s refusal to discuss it. He restlessly tacks back and forth between past and present, via his adolescence as an engineering student, desperate to put his past behind him in newly booming Mumbai.
Then comes the ‘incident’, an event that occurs in 2008 while he is in Mumbai, and the significance of which we only learn later in the book.
Bhattacharya’s hotly tipped novel serves up an intoxicating portrait of modern India, riven with internal political and cultural tensions, caught precariously between its colonial past and its ruthlessly modernising future. Shubby, meanwhile, is a character whom it becomes impossible not to root for. A terrific novel.
BAD CREE by Jessica Johns (Scribe £14.99, 272 pp)
JESSICA JOHNS is a member of a Canadian First Nations tribe and is thus a rare voice in contemporary fiction. Her debut novel similarly carves out a unique space, drawing on ancestral premonition and real-life horror through the story of Mackenzie who, semi-estranged from her family and living in Vancouver, is plagued by disturbing dreams as the first anniversary of her sister’s death approaches.
Realising that unresolved issues concerning her sister — who disconcertingly appears to have started texting from beyond the grave — must lie behind them, she returns home, to discover members of her family have been experiencing similar.
Clearly something happened to her sister shortly before she died, but what? Johns’ novel gets increasingly bogged down in First Nations mysticism and folklore as the plot thickens, not to mention some pretty purple, overwrought prose. Yet she also sprinkles her story with enough tantalising mystery and atmosphere to keep her readers hooked.
THE SILENCE PROJECT
by Carole Hailey
(Corvus £16.99, 400 pp)
THIS unusual novel has an intriguing premise: it’s the story of Rachel of Chalkham, a wife and mother, who in 2011 burns herself to death having years previously taken a vow of silence, on her daughter’s 13th birthday, no less.
Her silence began as a one-woman protest against a society increasingly unwilling to listen, with Rachel swapping the family home for a tent in the garden, yet soon spreads into a worldwide women’s protest movement.
Now, 11 years after her mother’s death, with her legacy corrupted by what the community she built has become, Rachel’s daughter sets out to tell her story, drawing on both documented evidence and personal testimony.
Yet perhaps because of the quasiprocedural format, it’s nowhere near as exciting or resonant as it ought to be. Hailey neither exploits the power of silence as a poetic idea, nor grapples with it on a practical level: it’s never very clear, for instance, what Rachel and her followers actually want to achieve. Disappointing.