Dangerous Children by Kenneth Gross (University of Chicago Press, £22)
The eight child characters from literature featured are Carroll’s Alice, Collodi’s Pinocchio, James’s Maisie, Barrie’s Peter, Kafka’s Odradek, Hughes’s Emily, Bowen’s Portia and Nabokov’s Lolita. Their fascination for Gross lies in their “playfulness, wilfulness, capacity for survival and transformation, bluntness and violence, unpredictability” and “fierce curiosity about the adult world” while refusing to accommodate to its rules. He believes they make us think differently about innocence, how it can get lost or endure or change form. His character choice is personal, as is their impact on him. For example, of Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, he writes: “I keep going back over the book in my mind, trying to give shape to that sadness, to say where it lies.” An original – and fruitful – approach to literary criticism. Brian Maye
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Mrs S by K Patrick (4th Estate Books, £14.99)
In the intense heat of a hot summer, a young woman moves from Australia to the UK to work as a “matron” in an elite all-girls boarding school. Before long, she begins a clandestine affair with the headmaster’s wife, Mrs S – the only named character in the novel. What follows is the story of aching longing and queer desire. The rhythm of the prose is a taut staccato, that of short sentences and unconventional grammar quirks; stilted like a teenage romance. This can serve, however, to distance the reader from the world of the novel; we remain onlookers to the illicit affair. While Mrs S is not short on heat – the sex scenes throb lasciviously – the novel does at times lack warmth. Nonetheless, Mrs S is a daring tale of the physical and psychic agony of lust. Brigid O’Dea
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From Far Around They Saw Us Burn by Alice Jolly (Unbound, £18.99)
The title story, about the Cavan orphanage fire (1943) in which 35 girls perished, is heartbreaking and fury-inducing – like so many of these powerful, stunning stories that evoke strong responses. Most of the protagonists are female, many are lonely, outcasts or misfits, and the thematic range and diversity is stunning. There’s a possible warning about the mass extinction of species and the coming apocalypse; a moving story about friendships breaking up under trying circumstances; an excellent insight into the wife of the painter Edward Hopper; a terrifying story about a man who gives a hitchhiking girl a lift, comes close to raping and killing her but changes his mind, and one story asks what a rescued, rather ugly toy symbolises (seeing beyond appearances?), (a talent for survival or…?). Brian Maye
