Nobody’s Looking at You
Janet Malcolm
Text Publishing £12.99, 256pp
The latest collection of essays from the provocative grande dame of US journalism is spiky and prescient, predictable only in its near-constant ability to surprise: no matter how transparently Malcolm renders her nimble thought processes, each piece winds up somewhere unexpected. Who else could make a profile of Eileen Fisher, the designer whose studiedly muted clothes inspire a “cult of the interestingly plain”, read like a kind of missing person mystery? Other subjects range from MSNBC presenter Rachel Maddow’s storytelling ability to Tolstoy’s use of dream logic in Anna Karenina, and there’s plenty of savvy engagement with aspects of contemporary life as varied as email and sexual harassment.
Cygnet
Season Butler
Little, Brown £14.99, 256pp
The teen narrator of this potent debut novel is a castaway, abandoned with her grandmother on tiny Swan Island, a separatist retirement community off the coast of New Hampshire. Now her grandmother is dead and her welcome is wearing thin: dare she return on her own to the mainland? Themes of mortality and ecological catastrophe bulk out a slim plot, and while some scenes feel overblown, Butler nicely captures the likes of floorboards “dark and serious enough to be part of a musical instrument”. A strange, promising beginning.
Where Shall We Run To?
Alan Garner
HarperCollins £8.99, 208pp (paperback)
Gollop, mither and mardy-arse are just a few of the local words that flavour celebrated author Alan Garner’s pungent memoir of a wartime boyhood in the Cheshire landscape that’s shaped him. Strung together from vignettes, it flits like memory itself. Air-raid shelters smell of slugs, shrapnel is playground currency, summer nights are for sleeping with your feet dangling out of the window. During a bout of near-fatal illness, he teaches himself to read. It’s revelatory, but when he later wins a scholarship to a Manchester grammar school, a neighbour’s chippy response lets him know that his education will come at a cost. “I felt something go and not come back,” he writes.
• To order Nobody’s Looking at You, Cygnet, or Where Shall We Run To?, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
