“Ireland is a haunted country,” we are reminded at the beginning of Amy Clarkin’s debut novel, What Walks these Halls (O’Brien Press, €12.99). “The Famine, the Civil War, the Magdalene laundries ... Ireland has a history of pain leading right up to the present day.”
This makes it, of course, an ideal place for ghosts to linger, and this is where Paranormal Surveyance Ireland (PSI) comes in – a family-run business that 18-year-old Archer has just relaunched. Following in his parents’ footsteps, he and his team are here to assess allegedly haunted locales, drawing on both scientific measurements and personal responses.
“We’re not spoofers pretending every creaky floorboard is something ghostly,” he explains to a recruit, Éabha, a girl whose religious parents view her “episodes” as a symptom of mental illness. Her psychic gifts, finally allowed to breathe, prove essential in the company’s latest job: to determine whether or not Hyacinth House is haunted. But PSI, like many fictional organisations dealing with the supernatural, is more than just a company: it is a family, and a space that particularly welcomes those who, like Éabha, have been shunned by their family of origin.
Clarkin, whose non-fiction writing has included explorations of disability, chronic illness and sexuality, handles inclusivity with a gentle touch. These young people may be growing up in a haunted Ireland, but they have already cast out any sense that the unfamiliar or different is to be feared – in part, of course, because being associated with “weird” things has already made them outsiders. This spooky novel has some sinister elements (certain chapters are best read with the light left on) but it is also endearingly hopeful and wholesome.
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The impact of disability and chronic illness is more to the fore of The First Move (Penguin, £8.99), the debut from Northern Irish writer Jenny Ireland. Juliet – who resents the Shakespearean and romantic associations with her name, believing love stories are for other girls – has been living with juvenile arthritis since she was 12. A positive mindset can take a girl only so far; a flare-up over the summer has left her on a new medication “despite my needle phobia” and caught in a “vicious cycle” of being told that exercises will strengthen her muscles while being too in pain to exercise. It makes her feel like “even more of a failure than I already did”.
There are ways of helping to manage her condition but they come with a trade-off; early nights mean missing out on the parties that provide all the gossip at school the following week. Her oldest friend referring to her as “Crutch Girl” at one of these events doesn’t help, and Juliet takes refuge in the online world instead. Playing chess on an app mightn’t be the coolest pursuit ever – this is noted within the text, lest anyone think that it’s what all the young folk are at these days alongside their TikTok and what-have-you – but it lets her befriend a fellow player.
If it is slightly improbable that said player, Ronan, is the cute new boy in school, there’s enough meat in the plot to make up for it. Unlike storylines of this kind in the heady early days of instant-messaging, the characters discover one another’s real identities well before the end – as befits those who have grown up with the internet. But there are other challenges to their happy ending, including a secret Ronan’s been keeping about his family. This is a romance with substance.
Nikesh Shukla’s Stand Up (Hodder Children’s, £7.99) explores racism and discrimination, as readers of his previous work for both teens and adults might expect, though the focus in this latest novel is more on stand-up comedy and family drama. Think The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, albeit with a brown 17-year-old British girl at its heart. Madhu is in her last year of school and finally works up the courage to take part in an open mic session – and completely chokes. It feels like the end of her dream to be a comedian, but then a rant at her best friend’s ex goes viral, and she’s catapulted to a certain level of “internet fame” – her parents may not be terminally-online enough to know about it yet, but she’ll be making a late-night television appearance alongside her idol.
Alongside sharp commentary on the need to “tick those diversity boxes” and the impossibility of doing the right thing when strangers on the internet have opinions about you (“If I do anything at all, I lose, I lose, I lose”), there’s a moving account of working through a family estrangement, culminating in a hopeful but realistic ending.
Sarah Underwood joins the recent wave of feminist retellings of Greek myths with her first novel, Lies We Sing to the Sea (Electric Monkey, £14.99), which imagines a world several centuries after Odysseus’s return (and the hanging of his wife’s 12 maids). Musings on destiny (“My life is not a strand of yarn for Lachesis to measure, for Atropos to cut”) and the omission of women from historical record (“In such a grand palace, filled as it was with its statues and tapestries and vases, she had not seen the slightest sign that any of these girls were remembered or mourned or even acknowledged for the great sacrifices they had made”) are interspersed with a slightly unconvincing romance and revenge plot. It is the ideas, rather than the characters, that are likely to stay with the reader.
Pacy, high-concept thrillers should be no surprise from Marie Lu at this point; her latest, Stars and Smoke (Penguin, £14.99), blends glamour and murder in a delicious, page-turning mix. Winter Young is an international superstar before his 20th birthday, but he wonders about the meaning of it all: “Was he worth the world’s adoration? Was he deserving of their love that he so desperately craved?” The lack of approval from his own mother and the loss of his elder brother years earlier feed into this sense of lacking true purpose.
It possibly goes without saying that both the characterisation and plot rely heavily on tropes. When “the Jackal” Sydney is assigned as Winter’s bodyguard, we know that she too has a secret of her own and that initial disdain will give way to love. As wise readers know, though, these things need not disrupt the joy of the story; Lu keeps us sufficiently distracted with how much fun we’re having.
The same might be said of Aimee Carter’s Royal Blood (Usborne, £8.99), which begins as a fish-out-of-water tale and morphs into a murder mystery, set against an alternate history of the British monarchy in which Edward VIII never abdicated the throne. Evan, the illegitimate daughter of the English king, is referred to as “that insubordinate parasite” by his wife; as an American who has only recently moved to the palace, she is well positioned to note the strangeness of royal customs and the archaic nature of monarchy while also benefiting from the glamour and wealth that goes with it. With the thrill – and minus the tawdriness – of tabloid scandals about privileged shenanigans, this is an addictive read.
