Elizabeth Little's smart, speedy thriller Dear Daughter [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] looks set to be this year's Gone Girl. Ten years ago, the LA party girl and heiress Janie Jenkins was incarcerated for her mother's murder – her daughter's name scrawled in blood at the scene of the crime, the dead woman's dying message to the world.
Her first-degree murder charge overturned as part of a larger investigation into the LA crime lab’s mismanagement of evidence, Janie leaves prison determined to discover the truth of what happened the night her mother was killed. Dodging the media, who are salaciously tracking her every move in a vigilante manhunt of their own, Janie follows the clues to a small town in South Dakota’s Black Hills – somewhere she’d have sworn her cultured socialite and philanthropist mother would never have been seen dead, but, it turns out, Janie’s mother was a woman with secrets.
With elements of both Paris Hilton and Amanda Knox, Janie's a sassy, modern heroine, and even though Dear Daughter is Little's first novel, it's grippingly fast-paced and page-turningly addictive.
For something more off the beaten track, Romain Puértolas's The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] is a modern picaresque with a big heart. A bestseller in Puértolas's native France, the author apparently composed the novel on his mobile phone while working as a border guard; and his fiction is clearly directly inspired by his work.
From India to France, to the UK, to Spain, then Italy, Libya and back to France again, Ajatashatru’s trip to his nearest branch of the popular Swedish furniture store to buy a new bed of nails is only the beginning of his adventures.
It’s eminently readable, despite a plot so fanciful that to call it unbelievable is generous, but within this whimsy Puértolas has packed some striking home truths about the reality of the lives of those forced to seek illegal entry into what they regard as Europe’s “good countries”.
Listening to the five Sudanese men tell him how they’ve come to be smuggling themselves into the UK hidden in the back of the truck where he meets them, Ajatashatru has an epiphany, realising that “there existed a much darker and more deceitful world than the one he had seen for himself” – and this is quite a revelation, considering the harshness of his own upbringing, not to mention the fact that his job as fakir is basically that of con artist.
Predictability then kicks in when, armed with this new insight, he attempts to make a difference to those who have shown him kindness in the course of his journey. The plot is definitely on the flimsy side, but it’s hard to be too critical of a story with so much heart.
The Table of Less Valued Knights [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk], Marie Phillips's Arthurian burlesque, is equally full of humanitarian goodwill (alongside the necessary beheadings and sword fights, of course). Continuing in the vein of her first novel – Gods Behaving Badly, in which the Greek gods were transported to contemporary London with varying degrees of comic effect – this time round her inspiration is Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and a motley cast of characters certainly not included in the original, from an undersized giant, a 12-year-old crone, a cross-dressing Queen and Sir Humphrey du Val from Camelot's Table of Less Valued Knights: a broken-legged piece of furniture, rectangular in shape as compared to the more famous Round Table, and home to "the elderly, the infirm, the cowardly, the incompetent and the disgraced" of King Arthur's knights.
Phillips's comedy is mostly to be found in transposing features of the contemporary onto these days of yore – a blacksmith's loyalty card scheme: "Buy nine suits of armour and the tenth is free"; a locum Lady of the Lake; and damsels seducing knights – but the dialogue is funny and the story entertainingly rollicking. Think Shrek with bad language, randy knights and a bit of blood and gore.
If you're looking for more than just a tickle to your funny bone though, both Maria Semple's This One is Mine [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] and Nina Stibbe's Man at the Helm [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] should be high on your reading list. Semple – a television writer who's worked on the likes of Saturday Night Live and Arrested Development – shot to fame with her novel Where'd You Go, Bernadette when it made last year's Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist, and This One Is Mine, a tale of haves and have nots in contemporary Los Angeles, combines the same winning mixture of contemporary social comedy and genuine heartfelt emotion.
Semple’s heroine is Violet Parry, wife of a successful band manager, mother to a gorgeous toddler and owner of a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills, who finds herself inextricably drawn to an ex-junkie, jobbing musician with questionable personal hygiene; the fallout has serious consequences for her family, most notably her self-obsessed sister-in-law Sally.
Perhaps not quite as laugh out loud as Bernadette, but that makes sense given This One Is Mine was actually written first (and this is the first time it's been published in paperback in the United Kingdom), all the same Semple's characters are densely three-dimensional, her plot believably contrived and the story infused with a warm wit and wisdom throughout.
Stibbe's Man at the Helm is another follow-up, from an author who's previously proved herself something of a comic genius. Stibbe's first book, Love, Nina – letters she wrote home to her sister while Stibbe was a nanny in London in the early 1980s – was without doubt the funniest thing I'd read in years. Man at the Helm may be a novel, but anyone who's read Love, Nina will recognise Stibbe's uniquely comical voice, even if it is filtered through her nine-year-old narrator Lizzie Vogel.
It’s set in the early 1970s, when Lizzie, her brother, sister and their mother find themselves negotiating the treacherous seas of a village full of narrow-minded neighbours who don’t take kindly to the arrival of a down-on-her-luck divorcee and her now fatherless children. “If a lone female is left, especially if divorced, without a man at the helm, all the friends and family and acquaintances run away,” Lizzie’s 11-year-old sister explains; it’s only once “a replacement man at the helm is in place, the woman is accepted again”.
Thus the "man list" is drawn up and their often ill-judged attempts to secure their mother a new husband begin. There are some brilliant episodes including Lizzie trialling a feather haircut for her mother – "I glanced at my sister. I saw a look of deep concern on her face, as if watching a disaster in slow motion and powerless to stop" – and a "semi-insane" pony getting trapped on the first floor of their house, but, as in Love, Nina, Stibbe's also able to inject an unaffected, spirited humour into the everyday and this runs throughout the book.
The acclaimed novelist Sarah Waters's new novel The Paying Guests [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] also concerns itself with the sphere of women without men, albeit in an earlier era – 1922 in post-war London. Waters turns her attention to the world of surplus women and the newly straitened conditions of the genteel upper middle classes. In order to maintain their large villa in South London's Camberwell, the widow Mrs Wray and her unmarried daughter Frances are forced to take in lodgers – Lilian and Leonard Barber, a young married couple not quite in tone with the rest of the street but the Wrays need the money and anyway, times are changing.
Initially picturing them as nothing more than "two great waddling shillings", Frances little realises quite how drastically Lilian's arrival will throw her life into disarray. Waters, of course, is already firmly established as a master storyteller, breathing life into previously dusty, overlooked corners of history, never losing the nuances of the period she's writing about but at the same time ensuring that her stories and characters feel bang up to date. She is on top form with The Paying Guests, too: her characters are so full-bodied as to leap off the page; her plot thrillingly readable; and, as Frances and Lilian find themselves caught up in a catastrophe of their own making but powerless to stop events hurtling out of their control, her creation and then control of tension is peerless.
Lucy Scholes is a regular contributor to The Review.