LITERARY FICTION   | Daily Mail Online

THE BASS ROCK

by Evie Wyld (Cape £16.99, 368 pp)

Evie Wyld’s powerful, intensely absorbing third novel is haunted by ghosts both metaphorical — the spectre of centuries of violence committed by men against women — and literal. The latter crops up in the grand Scottish home that 40-year-old Londoner Viv volunteers to look after following the death of her father.

Built on the desolate Musselburgh coast within sight of the lowering Bass Rock, it was once home to her grandmother, whose troubling fate comprises the book’s second strand. Meanwhile, a third thread reaches back to the 1700s, where a young girl is condemned as a witch.

As befits its subject matter, this is a dark, disturbing book, although not unrelentingly so. There’s more than a hint of Fleabag about the dysfunctional relationship between Viv and her elder sister, and Wylde is as gifted as Phoebe Waller-Bridge at capturing the hilarious, the excruciating and the absurd. But in the end there is no turning from the various terrible crimes that are threaded through these pages, and rightly so.

THE BUTCHERS

by Ruth Gilligan (Atlantic £14.99, 304pp)

In Irish photographer Ronan Monks’s best shot, a dead man hangs by his feet from a meat hook. Who is he, and what happened to him?

The slow-burning mystery that sustains this satisfying novel takes us back to Ireland in 1996, where young Una is saying goodbye to her father.

A ‘Butcher’, he travels the land by horse and cart, ritually slaughtering cattle to comply with an old curse. Meanwhile, the BSE crisis is threatening British farmers and the Irish beef barons are set to cash in.

But smallholder Fionn is less interested in making his fortune than raising cash to help his sick wife, while the couple’s son, would-be poet Davey, dreams only of escaping to Dublin.

Gilligan is a persuasive storyteller. Cleverly braiding Greek mythology, Ireland’s ancient traditions and its momentous recent history, she follows her characters as they negotiate with the past and their personal inheritances to realise their own identities.

COMING UP FOR AIR

by Sarah Leipciger (Doubleday £14.99, 320 pp)

Based on a remarkable true story, this novel follows three characters who initially seem unconnected.

We meet the first — a young, unnamed lady’s maid in 19th-century France — as she plunges suicidally into the black waters of the Seine.

In Fifties Norway, a toy-maker’s course is changed for ever by a terrible accident. And in present-day Canada, 40-year-old Anouk waits to receive a lung transplant.

This is a carefully patterned book whose larger design takes a delicious amount of time to reveal itself.

Leipciger is a beautiful painter of place, from the bustling boulevards of springtime Paris to the sunflowers and slow meanders of the Ottawa Valley, but her real interest is in exploring what makes a life: the things that give it value, the things that are left behind, and the legacies which endure.

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