Kate Elizabeth Russell, Annalena McAfee and Nicolas Mathieu: This week’s best new fiction

Nightshade

Annalena McAfee                                                                    Harvil Secker, £16.99

At 60, Eve Laing is a famous artist in crisis. She’s working on what she believes is a masterpiece, but her marriage has ended in divorce. As she journeys across London one December evening, she looks back on her life, from her art-school days and an affair with a Lucian Freud-like older man to her time in New York and rise as an edgy painter. 

Above all, she dwells on her fatal romance with a handsome studio assistant. McAfee’s engaging novel combines a dark plot with a zestful skewering of the contemporary art world.

Anthony Gardner

 

And Their Children After Them

Nicolas Mathieu                                                                                     Sceptre £16.99

Mathieu won France’s prestigious Goncourt prize for this absorbing Nineties narrative set in a French valley community left stranded by the decline of industry. It’s loosely centred on Antoine, 14, who escapes his warring parents to dabble with booze and girls. 

When he borrows his dad’s motorbike to get to a party without asking, only to wake up to find it stolen, we’re primed to expect a plot-driven coming-of-age drama. Instead, the novel unspools in more leisurely fashion as a multi-viewpoint panorama of thwarted aspirations, spiced with breathy sex scenes and nostalgic detail.

Anthony Cummins

 

My Dark Vanessa

Kate Elizabeth Russell                                                            Fourth Estate £12.99

Shy Vanessa Wye is just 15 when 42-year-old Jacob Strane, her English teacher at an elite New England boarding school, starts paying her special attention. Plying her with poetry, he insists she’s a ‘dark romantic’ like him; a torrid affair ensues. 

Fast-forward 17 years and with the #MeToo movement gathering pace, another former pupil has accused Strane of sexual assault, forcing Vanessa to rethink what she’s always told herself was a formative love affair. 

Plunging deep into questions of consent and agency, this electric debut is as readable as it is psychologically acute.

Hephzibah Anderson