What’s Left of Me Is Yours by Stephanie Scott

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought Of It:

All of these stories, photographs and facts reside within me. There are tangible tings that remain: the stub of her plane ticket to Hokkaido, her shoes, her packets of scent, his letters. These things tell the story of a life, of many lives intertwined, but I am the point at which they meet.

Sumiko has always been told that her mother died in a car accident, the year after Sumiko started at school. She has been brought up by her grandfather and has followed his path into a legal career. But just as she is about to qualify as a lawyer, she receives a phone call that changes everything she thinks she knows about her life - because it reveals that her mother was in fact murdered by her lover.

Under Japanese law as it stood at the time of her death (in 1994), very little about a trial was in the public domain, nor was much information made available to the victims’s family - the so-called Forgotten Parties). But Sumiko is determined to find the truth.

From then on, the narrative weaves between Sumiko’s searches, and the story of Rina and Kaitarō, the two lovers. But how much of their story was true? Kaitarō was a Wakaresaseya Agent, a kind of private detective, hired by Rina’s husband not merely to find evidence of adultery but to create that evidence via seduction. So is he truly in love, or is it all part of a cruel deception?

The plot in a large part hinges on the details of a legal framework that will be entirely unfamiliar to many readers. Scott’s research for this book took her so deep into the Japanese legal system that she has actually been made a member of the British Japanese Law association.

But equally, the novel is about love, passion and intimacy. The ability to be completely oneself with another person – and what can happen when that trust is violated. It is also about memory – childhood memory especially – and what the mind chooses to retain and how it interprets it.

Rina and Kaitarō are both photographers, and the visual imagery in the book is spellbinding. A storm is described as “turning the clouds the colour of mussel shells.” A lover’s body is seen “rolling into her like a wave curling on the shore.”

A complex novel that demonstrates the power of crime fiction at its very very best – both revealing something transcendent about human nature, while rooting itself within a specific time and place.

Longlisted for the 2021 Jhalak Prize. Shortlisted for the Author's Club Best First Novel Award 2021.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: All My Lies Are True by Dorothy Koomson

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories exploring relationships that culminate in male violence

Perfect Accompaniment: Skewers of grilled halibut flavoured with yuzu, followed by red bean ice cream

Genre: Crime Fiction

Buy This Book Here

Love after Love by Ingrid Persaud

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It

Set in more-or-less present-day Trinidad, with its complex mixture of races and religions - and in particular among the largely Christianised descendants of Indian bonded labourers brought to the island when it was a British colony - Love After Love follows the lives of Miss Betty, her young son Solo, and her gay lodger, Mr Chetan.

Reading it feels like being privileged to dip at intervals into personal diaries of the three protagonists. Their Trini voices ring out strong and true and full of humour.

“If you bounce up your ex after all this time I find God should arrange it to be in a crowded supermarket on a Saturday morning. He and the wife should be vex with one another and the child throwing a tantrum on the floor.”

The narrative is layered and richly textured. Every time you think you know which way the story is going, it gives itself a little twist and flies off in a new direction – but one that, once you’ve found your feet again, feels completely right and true. 

Persaud captures the paradoxes of Trinidad, the beauty side by side with violence.

“We followed the coast road, taking in the beauty of mile after mile of beach lined with coconut trees. If this country didn’t have five hundred plus murders last year alone we would be in paradise.”

She examines the special nature of the relationship between a single mother and her only son – and what happens when that breaks down. And she picks apart toxic attitudes that encourage, or at least turn a blind eye to, homophobia, domestic violence and alcoholism. 

This is a novel that will make you laugh and cry and catch your breath in your throat. So assured are the voices that it is hard to believe that this is Persaud’s debut novel. Mind you, the author has already won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017 and the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018, so perhaps it should be no surprise that Love After Love is on the shortlist for the 2021 Costa First Novel Award.

An explosively strong debut novel and a welcome addition to the pantheon of fabulous Trinidadian writers like Michelle Innis (She Never Called Me Mother) and Claire Adam (The Golden Child)

Shortlisted for the Author's Club Best First Novel Award 2021

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Golden Child by Claire Adam, The Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards

Avoid If You Dislike: Novels writing in dialect

Perfect Accompaniment: Curried cascadoux (Trinidadian fish)

Genre: Contemporary, Caribbean literature, LGBT

Buy This Book Here

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It

Yet another spellbinding book of which I first heard an extract at the Asian Writers Festival 2018.

Deepa Anappara is a journalist who spent a long time investigating cases of children going missing in the bastis (or slums) of Indian cities – where (as Anappara notes in her Afterward) as many as 180 children are said to go missing every day. But within the restrictions of news articles, she could never find a way of conveying the “resilience, cheerfulness and swagger” of the children she encountered during her investigations.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is her attempt to put that record straight. When their friends from school start to go missing, and the police seem wholly uninterested in helping the distressed families, nine-year-old Jai and his friends Pari and Faiz decide to take matters into their own hands and conduct their own investigation. Jai is an avid watcher of police dramas on television and is sure that he knows exactly what needs to be done. But will their zeal just bring them into danger themselves?

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line takes horrifying statistics of missing children and personalises them, reminding us that, for each and every one, there is a family grieving.

“Inside that house sadness sticks to me like a shirt damp with sweat on a hot summer’s day.”

The child viewpoint here is wonderfully drawn and Anappara has indeed captured the irrepressible cheekiness of her protagonists. But don’t be fooled. This is not the Famous Five transported to a unnamed Indian city, and the evil that lurks in the basti is no comic book villain who could have got away with it if it wasn’t for those pesky kids. The journalist in Anappara knows the truth is far darker than that.

As the story unfolds, it takes in the vast gulfs of inequality in modern Indian society, the fragility of life in the basti, and how suspicion leads only too easily to sectarian mistrust and, ultimately, violence.

A heart-breaking story that nonetheless captures the joyous resilience of children living on the brink.

Longlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2021

You Will Enjoy This If You Loved: The Baby Ganesh Agency series by Vaseem Khan, Freedom by Catherine Johnson, Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories of missing children; child narrators

Perfect Accompaniment: Dahl and roti

Genre: Literary Fiction, Crime Fiction

Buy This Book Here