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The Leftover Woman follows Jasmine, a Chinese illegal immigrant in New York, who has left China to find the daughter her husband gave up for adoption. Undocumented and in debt to the Snakehead gang that smuggled her into to the United States, she works in a strip club as a cocktail waitress, hoping to earn enough money to repay her debts and reclaim Fifi, her daughter. Jasmine’s first-person account is interwoven with a third-person narrative centred on Rebecca Whitney, an editor at a prestigious publishing house and Fifi’s adoptive mother. Rebecca is also under pressure. Her professional reputation is precarious, her marriage is looking increasingly unstable and she is suspicious of her Chinese nanny Lucy’s relationship with her daughter and husband. Alternating between the two protagonists (including a not entirely unexpected revelation about two-thirds of the way through) the novel races along until a final climactic scene in which Jasmine must decide her daughter’s future.

The book is published by Viper, a Serpent’s Tail imprint dedicated to crime and thrillers. However, although referring repeatedly to Snakehead gangs and Triad crime syndicates, any real sense of jeopardy is absent. The gangs remain a thinly sketched plot device rather than real and present dangers. An improbable romantic sub-plot featuring Jasmine’s childhood sweetheart adds little to the narrative. The scenes in the cocktail bar raise uncomfortable questions about the fetishisation of Asian women and the vulnerability of migrant women. The Leftover Woman doesn’t quite seem to know if it wants to be a romance, thriller, psychological drama or social commentary; consequently, it does none of them entirely convincingly. Nevertheless, it is tautly plotted and written with enough energy and momentum to keep the reader engaged until the final dramatic scene.

The writing veers between the clichéd and the banal to the overwritten and even florid. A woman is described as having “muscles for days”. An acclaimed literary writer says she wants to take her writing and career to “the next level”. Elsewhere, an incident is characterised as “a complete upheaval of the axioms that form the basis of their marriage”. It was hard to keep a straight face as an encounter between Rebecca and her husband is recounted, breathlessly, as “the shape of him rising up to meet her, like echoes from a vast lake, the many ripples of the times they’ve touched each other, loved each other.”

Its literary inconsistencies notwithstanding, The Leftover Woman features a number of interesting moments. Rebecca’s relationship with Lucy is delicately delineated, raising uncomfortable questions about motherhood, race, class and white privilege. The nanny is at once invisible to Rebecca and annoyingly present. Rebecca talks sympathetically to an author about “the submerged part of the iceberg” of immigrant identity, yet is irritated by her Chinese nanny’s foreign-ness. She praises a book she wishes to edit as “a devastating critique of the way women can be treated as fetishised objects,” but worries that “the ironic distance might not be clearly delineated enough and that some readers might take this motif at face value.” Perhaps this is Kwok’s hint about how the reader should approach The Leftover Woman.

Katherine Muskett is a part-time academic, freelance writer and tutor

Naomi Alderman is a writer who really knows her stuff. Actually, she knows most other people’s stuff too. Demonstrably, in her fifth novel, The Future, she knows Elon Musk’s stuff, Mark Zuckerberg’s, Jeff Bezos’, the God of the Old Testament’s, and she knows your stuff too, Reader. And mine.

Plus, she designs video games; Bill Gates and Barack Obama both recommend her; Margaret Atwood is her mentor, and she’s won the Women’s Prize for Fiction (for The Power – which has been adapted by Amazon Prime). Many of us know this about her – and yet prepare, people, to be once again blown away by what a brilliant writer she is.

The Future ticks pretty much every box. It’s certainly a wild thriller about what to do at the End of the World. It’s also a religious meditation, and a brief history of human civilisation – and the lack of it. There’s a tender love story in there, a magnificent extended heist, nail-biting cliffhangers aplenty. The language and the plot are poetic, stirring and ridiculously clever. Glamour, prophesy, terror, lyricism and ecology are enlivened by much pulling of rugs from under the feet. It’s technological, sexy and very funny. Locations include Silicon Valley, London, Papua New Guinea, private jets, Canadian wilderness, penthouses, internet chatrooms, treetops, Sodom and Gomorrah, Madrid, Manilla, Lithuania… There’s a sub-theme about hunter-gatherers and the origins of farming, and a running thing about death by salt. And not for a moment does she lose control of any of it.

We have half a dozen protagonists at least, but our beloveds here are Martha Einkorn (apocalyptic-cult survivor, wilderness bear-killer and PA to mega-rich social media mogul Lenk Sketlish), and Lai Zhen, internet survivalist expert, who finds herself unexpectedly fighting an assassin inside the air-conditioning system of a giant mall in Singapore. Others include the heads of Fantail, Medlar and Anvil (Facebook/Apple/Twitter/Amazon-type empires,), and those closest to them (brother, soon-to-be-ex-wife, offspring, a rock of a PA). These, having noticed that the click-tastic, algorhythmic, turbo-capitalism which works so well for the moguls is destroying everybody and everything else, are about to take arms against their near and dear.

The stakes are, basically, the end of the world, and/or the end of humanity. The philosophy is in which of these would be worse, and in how we got here. The religion is in Lot, his daughters, and his wife; Abraham and Isaac: who gets to sacrifice who? The weapons are fantastical, owned and developed by those Ultra High Net Worth Individuals. Where many literary novelists think their characters out of a problem, here Alderman equips them. The vision of three of the most powerful people in the world stranded on a… wearing adapted Chinese sex suits because… Listen, I could give you a big handful of spoilers and it would spoil nothing. This book has plot coming out of its ears, escalating, twisting, leaping, landing perfectly each time. I’ve spent a lifetime finding fault with plots, and there is not one here.

I was so busy being swept away on this wild and beautifully choreographed ride that I had no opportunity to think closely about how she does it. That’s a pleasure for a second reading (yes, there will be a second reading). Through all the action and inventiveness and tension, one thing does stand out. Though they have between them a great many dislikable habits, attitudes and behaviours, not one of her characters is actually, ultimately, dislikable. The flags of context, nuance, intelligence and humanity fly high and bright in Alderman’s writing. Understanding something of why humans can be so dreadful to each other is a major part of that.

The oeuvre of Chuck Palahniuk has long been infamous for making people throw up, faint, and otherwise react extremely physically.

If you’re not a fan of this sort of thing, you may as well stop reading now.

Alas, if you are a fan of CP’s work… you may also want to stop reading now.

The notorious Northwesterner’s twentieth novel, Not Forever, But For Now is the tale of two narcissistic little rich shits, Otto (5, allegedly) and Cecil (3), “boy scions of a great county family”, who sit around the nursery, watching nature documentaries, “having it off” every chance they get, and flirting (literally) with death by writing to serial killers and paedophiles – “cinema monsters… nightmares of phrenology” – for a “lark”. They’re also big fans of The Right Honourable Lord Sir Richard Attenborough.

It’s quickly made clear that Otto and Cecil are in fact adult men – albeit ones still bathed (and, er, shaved) by their nanny. But they are plainly damaged and infantilised, and between their druggy, deranged mother (“a great killer”) and an absent, adulterous father, have nowhere to turn for guidance but to the staff whom they keep murdering, a Jesuit tutor whom they corrupt, and their grandfather who heads the super-secret family business responsible for every celebrity demise that you can think of, from Elvis to Princess Di, as well as Jonestown, 9/11, and the Stonewall Riots. These were, apparently “misdeeds that need[ed] doing” for… reasons- (industrial plastics have something to do with it, seemingly modelled on the Roman madness from lead poisoning).

Theirs is a world of quicksand, killer lakes, monster-houses, dead animals, faecal matter, and “manky acts of sexual deproduction”, described in a queasy blend of campy “horrids” and “daddies” and “iced cakes” and the grim, clinical vocabulary which is Palahniuk’s bread and butter (you always learn a thing or two with CP – though I wouldn’t Google “forcemeat faggots” on your work computer). Oh, and speaking of computers, you’ll need one to decipher all the jokes… in binary.

So far, so Palahniuk. His extraordinary, Bosch-like imagination is on full display here, as are his gifts for logical inversion and picking at the loose threads of societal complacency. Not Forever… has some very funny bits, some very disgusting bits, some very violent bits, and even some very sympathetic bits. As the boys’ grandfather says, “It’s not your fault you’re an abomination before the eyes of God.”

But what they are all strung together with, unfortunately, is a lot of bemusing bits.

Like, where – and when – do Otto and Cecil live? The jacket copy talks of two boys growing up “in the Welsh countryside”, but their address leaves no doubt that they live in Buckinghamshire. Why’s their Edwardian conversation spattered with Americanisms? How do the Hardy-esque peasants have smartphones? And why can no one tell the National Trust from English Heritage?

What is being satirised, specifically? In what broadly reads like an un-macho counterpoint to his earlier book, Fight Club (descriptors like “twee, fey little pre-male” occur a lot), there are repeated and successful swipes at TV violence, celebrity, the monied classes, toxic masculinity, conspiracy theories, and – this by an openly, but not particularly comfortable, gay man, NB – of the excesses of identity and/or queer culture.

Yet none of these are ever really unpacked, let alone woven into a coherent tapestry. Palahniuk has said elsewhere that the book began as – or in – several short stories, and I’m not convinced it’s quite survived those disparate beginnings.

The novel closes with a (modestly) consoling denouement and a genuinely sad coda, in which the author notes some readers may well want a second run at it. Few, I suspect, will bother – and even Big Chuck stans will mostly come away from this feeling that Palahniuk is just a little off his game. Not forever, one hopes – but for now.

Elspeth Barker is a writer whose work is so delightful there’s almost no point in reviewing it. Why not just fill the page with quotations?

“At the bleak time of year,” she writes, “how tempting it is to lie in bed, cosseted like bulbs.” And tells us of a beloved dog, who “for weeks would spend the hours of daylight brooding sombrely in his car, an abandoned 1915 Armstrong Siddeley which my brother had destroyed by reckless driving on the unmade hill roads.” “There can be no Heaven without dogs,” she writes later. “I know this for a fact. Our old vicar told me.”
Ah, you think. Nostalgic, rural, a trifle sentimental? Don’t be fooled. “Well, I certainly know that I wouldn’t want to go through childhood again. The anxiety, the nightmares, the foreverness of school, the longing to be a grownup, for they were always so nice to each other. And then the big jumps, university, boyfriends, utter disillusionment. In darkness lost.”

Those who have read Barker’s only novel, the semi-autobiographical O Caledonia, know the sweet bitterness and wild glitter of her writing. And they will recognise the territory in Notes From The Henhouse, a posthumous collection of Barker’s essays and articles that serves as a kind of memoir, certainly as a portrait of a life. This is probably where I should murmur elegiacally, “a kind of life that no longer exists”, and sigh for the dusty  alcoholic glamour of the literary 1950s and 60s. Whatever the problems, it just does all seem such fun: the ancient Scottish castle, the drink, the cold, the terrible cars, the sea, Norfolk, love, the scholarly asides from classical Greek texts, the passion, courage and lurking religion, the hilarity, the in-jokes, the standing at the top of the stone staircase with murder in mind. All the harshness and the loveliness, above all, of nature. Beauty radiating: donkeys being marshalled, rain getting in. Snowdrops. Babies, “lovingly attended by evil little swish-tailed” Shetland ponies. Of course, there is one in the kitchen, eating geraniums. In the hands of this timeless writer, the most absurd of incidents shine through with relevance and ubiquitous humanity.

Elspeth’s daughter, the novelist Raffaella Barker, writes the prologue here, and wove the selection into a kind of chronology which, she says, “was an experience as close as mortality allows to talking with my mother.” What a labour of love, not just from daughter to late mother (Elspeth died in April 2022) but also writer to writer. Raffaella’s own first (also semi-autobiographical) novel, Come And Tell Me Some Lies, gives its own angle on this domestic, bohemian, ramshackle, intelligent, artistic, sibling- and lurcher-packed, nature-loving life. And then there is the poetry of George Barker – Elspeth’s husband, father of her five children, and ten others, four of them with the Canadian poet Elizabeth Smart, who wrote By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept about him. What an opportunity, to be able to read about this intoxicating world in the round, from voices of such quality. It is a luxury seldom encountered.

But this is Elspeth Barker’s book, and a fine self-portrait too. I met her: she was enchanting in person and she is enchanting on the page. This collection is a breath of life from the dead; a window on a lost past, and a joy. “At other times,” Elspeth wrote, “I think I have lived as long as anyone could. My infancy is so far away, across a wide pale strand and at the end of the shore is darkness, a cave, origin. ‘Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with Ruth.’* But no malingering.”

(*From Milton’s Lycidas: the famous cry to the patron saint of sailors, St Michael.)

Cometh the country’s not so finest hour, cometh the man…

Producing more of a charge sheet than a book, O’Brien devotes one chapter each to those people he sees as responsible for the post-Brexit state of the nation: some for what they did (Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, Andrew Neil, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson, Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott) and others for what they failed to do (David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn).

The last and appropriately shortest chapter is on Liz Truss, whose excruciating 50 days as Prime Minister we are all too rawly familiar with. But, argues O’Brien, her “disastrous tenure in Downing Street was not, as many accounts have already concluded, some sort of aberration. It was an absolute and inevitable culmination of the forces and manoeuvres detailed, some conscious and deliberate, some accidental or unwitting, but all, ultimately, calamitous.”

Those forces, which he defines vividly, are diverse, slippery and mind-bogglingly interlinked: the right-wing media and its star performers (continually managing to get away with claiming it is the liberal left whose voice is dominant); the social network of privilege; richly and secretly funded lobby groups; a tragic BBC forced into false equivalences to avoid accusations of bias; ruthless use of hi-tech propaganda, verging on vote-rigging; top-down coarsening of behaviour; corruption and lies becoming the norm; and the complex revolving-doors connections between the media, politics and think tanks.

O’Brien sees Rupert Murdoch as driven not by any philosophy but by an obsession with money-making. He describes Andrew Neil as “vain beyond parody”. But he reserves his most withering takedown for what he sees as the bile, hypocrisy and cowardice of the Mail’s Paul Dacre.

“The most influential newspaperman of his generation thought nothing of attacking judges, journalists, academics and elected politicians. Or, more pertinently, the rule of law, freedom of expression, academic freedom and parliamentary sovereignty… He has done all this and more, while constantly congratulating himself on being a staunch upholder of British ‘values’.”

It isn’t just the Mail of course. The treatment of Meghan Markle and Caroline Flack are given as examples of trial by media. “People like [Jeremy] Clarkson, [Piers] Morgan and a surprisingly small coterie of columnists across Murdoch titles, the Telegraph, the Mail and Andrew Neil’s Spectator, have commoditised cruelty in a way that now appears completely normal to the British public.”

O’Brien takes a swipe at “think tanks” – not just for frequently being political mouthpieces for the wealthy, run by small numbers of staff with grandiose job descriptions; they also get a disproportionate amount of airtime, often “balancing out” the views of (now much derided) experts.

And he highlights the Sharp Foundation, personal charity of Richard Sharp, the BBC chairman who had to step down over involvement in facilitating a loan for Boris Johnson. “[It] made donations to another ‘think tank’, the Institute for Policy Research, which in turn gave money to the CPS, the TPA and, bizarrely for a future BBC chairman, ‘News-Watch’, an organisation dedicated to critiquing the BBC and accusing it of political bias.”

Dominic Cummings, treated almost sympathetically here, seems the one character motivated by belief not ambition. “[He] is every bit as embedded in the ecosystem of cronysim and manipulation as anyone else,” says O’Brien. “The only, almost endearing, difference is that he seems to despise almost everybody else in it.”

If you’re wondering about the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Dominic Raab, Andy Coulson, David Davis, Rebekah Brooks, Kelvin MacKenzie, Rod Liddle… Don’t worry, they all have walk-on parts – and none come out well.

How They Broke Britain is a thoroughly depressing story but told with such clarity and vigour and burning anger that it is an utter page-turner – and probably the closest most of the accused will ever get to being held to account.