BIG SKY by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan £8.99, 512 pp)
BIG SKY
by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan £8.99, 512 pp)
For many years, Jackson Brodie has dreamed of returning to his Yorkshire roots, and in the fifth of Kate Atkinson’s novels about the policeman turned private detective, his wish has been granted.
He’s renting a cottage near Whitby, not far from his former partner, Julia, an actress, her 13-year-old son, Nathan (whose father, Julia has belatedly admitted, is Jackson) and their elderly labrador, Dido.
Jackson’s work is mostly low-grade debt tracing and surveillance, plus a lot of following cheating husbands on behalf of their suspicious wives.
But almost by chance he finds himself involved in a couple of much darker cases — a historic child sex abuse ring known as the ‘Magic Circle’, and a trio of local villains involved in sex trafficking.
Darkly funny and packed with vivid characters, Big Sky is a sharply observed account of the grotesque underside of what passes for ordinary life.
EVERYBODY DIED SO I GOT A DOG
by Emily Dean (Hodder £9.99, 304 pp)
‘When you wake up one day with nothing, in a sense you have everything,’ writes Emily Dean.
It may sound like a line from a self-help book, but for Emily, it was a devastating truth. In the space of three years, she lost her beloved sister, Rachael, to cancer, her mother to motor neurone disease, and her father to a stroke.
At her mother’s funeral, the priest remarked, ‘I did tell Emily that we must stop meeting like this.’
A journalist, podcaster and co-host on the Frank Skinner radio show, Emily is resilient, funny and engaging, but it is hardly surprising that this immense loss ‘had hurled up things that felt overwhelming’.
Her honest, compassionate and sparkling memoir describes the experience of love, loss and rediscovering joy with a shih-tzu named Raymond.
FRANKISSSTEIN
by Jeanette Winterson (Vintage £8.99, 352 pp)
On a rainy holiday in Switzerland in 1816, Mary Shelley had a dream about a scientist who creates a monster. The dream inspired her novel, Frankenstein, and the idea of creating an artificial life has fascinated and appalled humans ever since.
Here, Jeanette Winterson takes up Shelley’s theme, and gives it an exuberantly futuristic workout.
Her protagonist is Ry (short for Mary) Shelley, a transgender doctor and self-described ‘hybrid’, who attends a conference on robotics to interview Ron Lord, a sexbot manufacturer and a comically unreconstructed sexist.
Winterson’s playful and hugely ambitious novel explores questions of gender, love, the meaning of consciousness and the marvellous — or monstrous — creatures that might emerge in a future in which humans are no longer the cleverest in the universe.