Moon and the Mars
By Kia Corthron
Seven Stories Press, £13.99
At just under 600 pages, Moon and the Mars is an immersive read, propelling the reader into New York's Five Points district between the years 1857-1863, as the nation marches towards Civil War. It is a story of racism, women's rights, slavery, poverty, immigration, death and young love.The story is told through the eyes of Theo, a young biracial orphan who lives between her Irish Grammy Cahill and Black Grammy Brook's homes. As the story progresses, our protagonist evolves from child to teenager. As she does so, the world around her changes, and so too does her understanding of this world and her position within it. Author, Corthron, a critically acclaimed playwright, effectively draws from this experience bolstering the story with song, props – letters, news bulletins – and spirited dialogue, to make the novel intimate and immediate. – Brigid O'Dea
Hard Like Water
By Yan Lianke, translated by Carlos Rojas
Vintage, £16.99
Hard Like Water is by eminent Chinese writer Yan Lianke and translated by Carlos Rojas, whose excellent translator's note contextualises the novel within the tumultuous Cultural Revolution period. The novel tracks the small-time revolutionary career of the former solider Gao Aijun in his quixotic campaign to position the rural backwater of Chenggang at the vanguard of Maoism. Aijun's passionate affair with the beautiful Hongmei becomes inseparable from their shared revolutionary cause, and their relationship is characterised by a satirical mix of hot sex and grandiloquent communist rhetoric. In true Yan Lianke style, the more absurd the story, the more realistic it is, with humour masking a deadly seriousness. Another layered and insightful novel from this world-class literary figure. – Rónán Hession
The Poets of Rapallo
By Lauren Arrington
OUP, £25
How Mussolini's Italy influenced British, Irish and US writers is the subject (Yeats and Thomas MacGreevy are the Irish, Basil Bunting and Richard Aldington the British and Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky the American writers). Between 1928 and 1935, all of them gathered at Rapallo, at Pound's instigation, and their interaction affected their thinking on poetry and politics, as did the fascist background of their location. There are two aspects of particular interest. One is the attention paid to the women artists and writers Dorothy Pound, George Yeats and Brigit Patmore (where the importance of their work is emphasised). The other is the extent to which they all subsequently sought to distance themselves and their work from Pound and fascism. Meticulously researched and clearly and comprehensibly written. – Brian Maye
