Speed Reading - fiction

Disenchantment, love and humour permeate Benjamin Markovits’s latest novel, The Rest of Our Lives (Faber), a nuanced portrait of an American law professor’s midlife crisis. After dropping his daughter off at college in Pittsburgh, Tom keeps driving - visiting old friends and a former lover - as he looks back on his long marriage to Amy. Tom recalls the affair she had twelve years earlier and the deal he made with himself to leave once their daughter turned eighteen. As he reflects on the past, Tom begins to question his choices, and the mysterious shifting symptoms that afflict him.

It took Claire Adam five years to write her quietly compelling sophomore, Love Forms (Faber). When Dawn Bishop - the 16-year-old daughter of Trinidadian fruit juice dynasty - falls pregnant, her family sends her to Venezuela to give birth and leave the baby with nuns for adoption. Forty years later, divorced with two adult children and living in London, she’s still haunted by the child she gave up. One night, she connects with a woman online who may be the daughter she left behind.

Saba Sams’s assured debut novel, Gunk, (Bloomsbury) also explores motherhood. Jules is the thirty-something manager of a seedy Brighton club called Gunk. The novel opens with her feeding colostrum to a newborn that is not her own. The story unfolds through a series of flashbacks: we learn Jules was briefly married to the club’s dissolute owner, Leon, before befriending Nim, a sparky young bartender. When Nim discovers she’s  pregnant, Jules faces an unexpected and thrilling possibility. 

Originally published by The Tablet