CONTEMPORARY   | Daily Mail Online

GROWN UPS 

by Marian Keyes (Michael Joseph £20, 656 pp)

I am a long-time fan of Keyes’s hilarious, alternately heart-warming and heartbreaking, novels. She excels at exploring and unpicking various emotionally difficult but all-too-common scenarios with kindness, humour and wisdom.

Here, brothers Johnny, Liam and Ed are very different personalities but close, spending endless weekends together with their families celebrating birthdays and anniversaries.

It’s typically Johnny’s wife, Jessie, who organises and pays for these shindigs, thanks to the successful business she owns. Ed’s wife, Cara, is struggling to hide her bulimia while Liam’s wife, Nell, is beginning to wonder why she married him in the first place.

Secrets, lies, tension and inappropriate crushes simmer underneath the glossy veneer, eventually bursting out in the most dramatic way. I loved everything about it.

THEFT 

by Luke Brown (And Other Stories £11.99, 320 pp)

It’s 2016, around the time of the Brexit referendum. Paul lives in trendy, gentrified East London but is uncomfortably aware that he’s older than most of his neighbours and is also uncomfortable about the huge disconnect between how his current community feels about the result (uniformly horrified) and how those he grew up with in a depressed Northern seaside town feel about it (uniformly elated).

He befriends Emily, a celebrated and reclusive novelist, who lives with Andrew, a famous, much older historian. Paul can’t help but compare his own lack of ambition with Andrew’s confidence, contacts and evident wealth. This is brilliant on divisions between people and places, tribalism and the death of debate, how almost accepted it has become to attack white men and silence their voices, and about how lonely they can be. I raced through it.

SAVING MISSY 

by Beth Morrey (HarperCollins £12.99, 384 pp)

The publisher’s hype declares this book ‘2020’s most astonishing debut’ and that’s a shame because it really isn’t.

For example, it’s not a patch on Kiley Reid’s extraordinary Such A Fun Age, to which I gave a glowing review last month and still think about.

What this is, in my opinion, is quite a basic, schmaltzy read about Missy, a lonely older woman who wishes she had a bigger life but is so chippy and defensive she keeps pushing people away. When miserable Missy is press-ganged into looking after a dog, her existence opens up and it’s not long before she’s forging all sorts of meaningful relationships in the community.

She’s then able to forgive herself and her family for the saddest aspects of her past.

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