LITERARY FICTION | Daily Mail Online

THE END OF THE DAY by Bill Clegg (Cape £14.99, 320 pp) 

U.S. literary agent and former crack addict Bill Clegg made the Booker Prize longlist when he turned from drug-hell memoir to fiction with his debut, Did You Ever Have A Family.

He doesn’t quite reach the same heights with his new book — a knotty chronicle of buried secrets told from the perspective of three women looking back 50 years to their youth in rural Connecticut.

There’s Dana, an heiress out to renew contact with her wronged childhood friend, Jackie; then there’s Lupita, the daughter of the Mexican maid employed by Dana’s father.

A hushed-up tale of racism, abuse and adoption emerges from a jigsaw-like narrative in which the raw ingredients are fabulously rich and compelling.

Trouble is, the novel’s rather plodding storytelling drains any sense of momentum. Overly reliant on backstory, Clegg treats the narrative like a synopsis as if he’s waiting for a film crew to start work (be sure to catch it if they do).

JACK by Marilynne Robinson (Virago £18.99, 320 pp)

Hailed by Barack Obama, Robinson is the Pulitzer-winning author of the Gilead series, a spiritual, slow-burn saga about the families of two Midwestern preachers.

A delicate tale of love against the odds, her new novel — a prequel to the series — follows Jack, the troubled god-son of the pastor who narrated Gilead.

He’s a drinker and a thief, roaming the streets when he falls for a teacher, Della, after helping her in the rain.

Romance blossoms after a night spent talking Shakespeare and God. But it’s the era of segregation — he’s white, she’s black — and, as a homeless jailbird, Jack hardly seems a catch to Della’s well-connected family.

While readers of the previous books will know how badly their story ends, Robinson concentrates on the almost unbearable sweetness of Jack’s seesawing hopes.

It’s tender, but also monotonous and narrow — we never quite get what Della sees in him, as if she’s merely a tool for his personal salvation.

EARTHLINGS by Sayaka Murata (Granta £12.99, 256 pp)

A bestseller in Japan, Murata scored a sleeper hit in English a couple of years back with the terrifically off-kilter Convenience Store Woman, about a misfit supermarket worker evading sexist social norms.

Tackling a similar theme in more lurid fashion, Murata’s new novel is narrated by Natsuki, a girl who thinks of herself as an alien under threat from a shadowy ‘factory’ growing boys and girls as ‘tools’ to breed.

So far, so kooky, until her worst fears about so-called ‘earthlings’ are confirmed when she suffers a brutally grim injustice at the hands of a sinister male teacher, prompting Natsuki to exact grave revenge.

As she finds herself drawn into ever more cataclysmic acts, it’s Murata’s achievement to make her behaviour seem a wholly proportionate response to her environment. As a coded portrait of adolescent anxiety, it’s savagely pointed. Still, for all that I admired it, I’m not sure this disconcerting fable ever rises above shock value.