LITERARY FICTION  | Daily Mail Online

CLEANNESS 

by Garth Greenwell (Picador £14.99, 240 pp)

Greenwell’s exquisitely written debut, What Belongs To You, followed an aspiring poet who moves from Kentucky to Bulgaria, where he forms an intense sexual attachment to a homeless labourer while working as a teacher.

This less dramatic, more episodic follow-up revisits the same unnamed narrator, prior to his return to the U.S.

He tags along at a political protest, enters into a series of anonymous hook-ups online and gets uncomfortably close to a former student after the collapse of a long-term relationship with a man from Portugal.

Greenwell is trying to find a way to write about sex that portrays minds and bodies with equal candour. But while his endlessly twisty sentences unspool with admirable fluency and control, I can’t truly say I never found myself bored.

Even more than his debut, this is an airlessly solemn affair, with a nagging sense that life’s emotional range is being muzzled for the sake of a rather willed melancholy.

PEACE TALKS

by Tim Finch (Bloomsbury £16.99, 224 pp)

While monologues of a male midlife crisis aren’t exactly alien territory for literary fiction, Tim Finch’s deceptively straight-talking new novel has a trick or two up its sleeve.

It’s about a lonely, half-Norwegian diplomat, Edvard, who reports on his attempt to broker an end to the violence between two unspecified warring parties in the Middle East, now breaking bread at a luxury Alpine resort.

Edvard’s chatty, companionable narration unfolds as if in imaginary dialogue with his late wife, Anna, an eminent psychiatrist shockingly beheaded on a London street in a brutal terrorist attack — an event that, to his shame, has turned him into a minor celebrity, as well as the object of female attention he can’t quite resist.

As well as shining a light on the conflict resolution industry, Finch plays a canny game with our assumptions about the motives behind Anna’s murder, in a smart tale slyly engineered to warn against the perils of nationalist tub-thumping.

THE GLASS HOTEL

by Emily St. John Mandel (Picador e-book out now, £13.95; hardback £14.99, to be published August 6)

A few years ago I interviewed a writer who told me he had binned his planned novel about the disgraced financier Bernie Madoff because he realised he couldn’t find anything new to say.

His admission came to mind while reading Mandel’s new book, which draws heavily on the scandal, only to tie the reader in knots by trying to put its own stamp on the tale with a fatiguing medley of characters and subplots.

The New York fraudster here is Jonathan, who unwittingly puts himself at risk when he embarks on a May-to-December relationship with Vincent, a young female employee whose rackety half-brother has a drug habit.

While mystery hangs over how Jonathan’s exposure affects his unlikely late-life companion, the novel’s developments rarely feel as earth-shattering as they’re plainly meant to be — not least the story behind some ominous graffiti.

Fans of Mandel’s hit pandemic thriller Station Eleven may find it all rather a fussy mess.