By the Shore. By Galaxy Craze. Jonathan Cape. £10 in UK
This deceptively simple first novel telling of an eccentric childhood is written with beautiful and subtle precision. Twelve-year-old May lives by the sea in a disused girl's boarding school in England, with her small half-brother Eden and their complex young mother, Lucy. Lucy runs the place as an unconventional and haphazard guesthouse.
The novel relates, through May's clear, true voice, the story of what happens to them all in the winter when she is 12, and two long-term guests, Rufus and Patricia, come to stay and May's own absent father pays a visit.
By the Shore examines the discomfort of being a child who does not fit neatly into a prescribed pigeon hole of society. Craze captures sibling rivalry, the awkwardness of approaching adolescence, the insecurity of being the children of absent parents, and the gradual flowering of love between Lucy and Rufus, with remarkable freshness and skill.
This is a novel as unexpected and romantic as a message washed up in a bottle. To read it is to reclaim the long-lost perspective of childhood. (And yes, Galaxy Craze is her real name.)
Rosita Boland
A Certain Age. By Tama Janowitz. Bloomsbury. 317pp. £12.99 in UK
Tama Janowitz made her name chronicling the lives of Manhattanites in Slaves of New York, a collection of stories that took a satiric - and at the time original - look at the city and its social habits. She hasn't strayed too far from this territory in A Certain Age, the sorry story of a beautiful, desperate, and desperately shallow, woman in search of a husband. Florence Collins makes a worrying central character, a woman so obsessed with snaring a rich mate that she allows herself to be abused - both physically and psychologically - and victimised by the ghastly society she yearns to be part of. The scene is set by a disastrous chain of events and, at the outset, the reader's sympathy lies with Florence because she seems so naively blind; but as she loses her ability to judge, reason, even feel, it becomes impossible to regard her with anything other than frustration and contempt.
Of course, Janowitz's skill lies in her cool, detached narration of her anti-heroine's spectacular downward spiral. Her caricatures of New York's social hierarchy are chillingly accurate, her humour dark and deft. She also tackles the Zeitgeist issue of conspicuous consumption, reducing Florence's life to a minutely detailed inventory of clothes worn, restaurants eaten in and transactions made - a somewhat tedious technique similar to that of Bret Easton Ellis in Glamorama. Still, there's no question that it works - the details reel you into the superficial world Florence inhabits, but ultimately, it's a world that leaves you cold.
Catherine Heaney
Catherine Heaney is the books editor of Image magazine