Crushingly tender: The best Literary Fiction out now - Fulfillment by Lee Cole, Love Forms by Claire Adam, The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen by Shokoofeh Azar
FULFILLMENT by Lee Cole (Faber £18.99, 336 pp)
US author Cole didn't get the fanfare he deserved for his 2022 debut, Groundskeeping, so fingers crossed for this compulsively readable follow-up, a tragicomic tale of sibling rivalry between half-brothers, each nursing unsated ambition in early midlife.
Joel is a married essayist in New York, while Emmett still lives in their Kentucky hometown, scraping a paycheck in an Amazon-style warehouse, his own dreams of authorship firmly on ice.
Long-simmering grudges come to the boil after Joel's wife Alice, nudged into alcoholism by the pandemic, steals a tipsy kiss with Emmett behind closed doors at a family reunion.
As well as illicit sex, the plot involves a drugs heist, crank calls and a loaded gun, adding a crackle of jeopardy to Cole's gift for fizzy dialogue and killer comic timing as he gently takes the temperature of modern America. Strongly recommended.
LOVE FORMS by Claire Adam (Faber £16.99, 304 pp)
Adam made a splash with her prize-winning first novel Golden Child, about the unearthing of family strife when a teenager disappears.
Similar themes underpin this more ambitiously layered second novel, set in London and narrated by Dawn, a divorced mother who finds herself reflecting on the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption as a pregnant teenager in Trinidad.
Now 58, Dawn feels drawn to the online profile of an Italian biochemist who could plausibly be the grown-up child.
Adam pulls us into the murky tale with a deceptively unshowy style. She blindsides us with drip-fed revelations about Dawn's youth while laying out her daily grind in the narrative present as an empty-nester forced out of her job as a GP due to the hard yards of childcare.
Crushingly tender, the novel explores heavy subjects without fuss.
THE GOWKARAN TREE IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR KITCHEN by Shokoofeh Azar (Europa £14.99, 528 pp)
Previously shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Azar is an Iranian writer who lives in Australia as a political refugee, having been arrested several times on account of her work as a journalist.
Her sprawling new novel, set in Iran in the wake of 1979's Islamic Revolution, is a decades-spanning magic realist saga anonymously translated from Farsi for fears of safety.
We first see the narrator as the teenage daughter of a university teacher in Tehran. The multi-threaded plotline is lit up by a search for her brother, lost during the Iran-Iraq war, to say nothing of a love plot involving two cousins with violently opposed politics.
Lent urgency by the context, this is a busy, noisy, crowded book that compels you to take the rough with the smooth.
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