You may have encountered Claire Keegan’sSo Late in the Day inThe New Yorker. Still,this jewel-like masterpiece almost demands to be reread and owning it in slender hardback doesn’t feel like an extravagance. Keegan is one of the greatest short-story writers in the world. I’ve yet to read a wasted word she’s written since her first collection,Antarctica,appeared in 1999. We follow a Dublin office worker,Cathal,on an ordinary day. A whiff of perfume on a bus home reminds him of an absent woman,and the tale unfolds into a perfectly formed prism of what was published in French under the titleMisogynie. Keegan is a sculptor of prose,a master of compression and resonance. The cadence of every sentence,the precision of her storytelling,the deep consideration behind each word choice (and no doubt the effort that goes into disguising that effort) lend a profound and haunting inevitability to her theme. I could talk for hours about this story,but readers should discover it for themselves.
Juja
Nino Haratischvili,Scribe,$32.99
Nino Haratischvili had an international bestseller withThe Eighth Life,and her debut Juja is now published for the first time in English. It’s a Borgesian labyrinth in which narrative truth and “the truth”,artistic development and traumatic experience,are interwoven into a strange literary mystery.
In 1953,teenager Jeanne Saré commits suicide by jumping in front of a train at Paris’ Gare du Nord. Her writings are belatedly published in the 1970s,triggering a spate of copycat suicides by readers who identify Saré‘s voice and her struggles as their own. When in 2004 two women from opposite ends of the Earth (Amsterdam and Sydney) converge on Paris,they chase shadows trying to discover the truth of Saré’s story. The harder they look,the more Saré melts away,and the more tenuous their quest becomes. Juja is postmodern gothic from an author whose powers of invention and command of drama (Haratischvili is also a playwright and theatre director) spiral into an unsettling meditation on,and experiment with,the indeterminacies of narrative art.
Summer of Blood
Dave Warner,Fremantle,$32.99
Musician and crime writer Dave Warner has written a thriller set during the Summer of Love. Martin is a young Australian college student with a powerful father. When he goes missing in California in 1967,strings are pulled at the NSW police to make sure he’s found. Enter detectives John Gordon and Ray Shearer,who fly into the heart of a counterculture marked by psychedelic drugs,free love,antiwar protest,and a musical revolution. But when Martin’s corpse is discovered,it seems he didn’t drop out and just drop dead. No,the evidence suggests he was on the trail of a serial killer preying on young women on the hippie scene,and the case falls to Gordon and Shearer to solve.Summer of Blood revisits characters from an earlier novel,although it can easily be read as a standalone. And you can tell the author has also written non-fiction about popular music. Warner is erudite about legends from the late 1960s,like Janis Joplin,Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane,and this trippy murder mystery’s immersion in their world will appeal to readers who share his passion.