A Poisoner’s Tale, Cathryn Kemp’s fiction debut, reconstructs the life and death of Giulia Tofana, a notorious female poisoner in seventeenth-century Rome. Tofana, under the guise of selling beauty preparations and medicines, sold (or, if they were very poor, gave) women a poison with which to murder their abusive menfolk. The men’s deaths initially went unnoticed because the city was racked by plague, but the number of deaths of apparently healthy men eventually attracted the attention of the city’s authorities. Tofana and her associates were caught by the Inquisition and, after interrogation and torture, executed.
Imaginatively building on contemporary rumours and a few known facts about Tofana, Kemp weaves a compelling tale of female victimisation, resistance and rebellion in a society which granted women few rights, little protection and limited access to justice.

The novel begins in 1659 with a prologue in which Giulia and her co-conspirators mount the scaffold (in fact, it is far from clear that the historical figure on which the character is based was executed, with various sources claiming she died in 1651, 1659, 1701 and, improbably, 1730). Giulia, the novel’s primary narrator, likens the spectacle of her execution to “stepping on to the stage, the audience awaiting my first line”, and the story that follows – with its cast of whores, witches, abused wives and corrupt priests and cardinals – could indeed form the plot of a bloody Renaissance tragedy.

The teenage Giulia learns how to make the poison – referred to as acqua – from her mother, according to a secret recipe that has been passed from mother to daughter over generations. Living together in Palermo, her mother explains that she uses it to help women, victims of male violence, “who can’t help themselves any other way”. After her mother is executed for poisoning her own husband, Giulia flees to Rome, where – aided by a group of accomplices – she too makes and dispenses the fatal acqua to women trapped in bad marriages and abusive relationships.

Kemp’s chief protagonist is an attractive and engaging figure, encouraging us not to think too hard at first about the morality of her trade. However, as increasing numbers of apparently healthy men start dying, the sheer scale of the poisonings brings her activities to the attention of the Inquisition. Giulia sells the poison to a young noblewoman who murders her older husband so she can marry a younger, more attractive lover. A courtesan poisons her cardinal lover.

As the Inquisition begin to close in, Giulia becomes increasingly reckless, her ledger recording ever-greater quantities of acqua dispensed for free to the women of Rome. A note of moral ambiguity, perhaps quietly there all along, begins to emerge as what seemed initially to be a form of unofficial justice starts to resemble an indiscriminate killing spree. Contemporary records suggest the poisoners may have been responsible for nearly 600 deaths. Were all the victims violent abusers?

It is this unresolved tension that makes A Poisoner’s Tale such an enjoyable and fascinating read. Kemp’s Giulia is a compelling and strikingly modern character and it was hard not to hope that she and her accomplices, their murderous enterprise notwithstanding, might somehow evade the fate revealed in the prologue. “Murderer or saviour?” the strapline on the book’s cover asks, adding “You decide”. This reader remains undecided.

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

“My school was a viper’s nest of old Nazis,” recalls Irmin Schmidt, who gave up a lucrative career as a classical conductor to form a radical rock ensemble in 1968. He isn’t using the word “Nazi” as a lazy insult – all of Germany’s post-war institutions, including the police force, judiciary, government and schools, were infested with former Hitler supporters. Drummer Harald Grosskopf muses: “When it came to insulting strangers in the street, the good old Germans had no inhibitions… I kept hearing things like ‘They should put you in a labour camp’ or ‘In the old days they’d have picked you up long ago’.” Agitation Free founder Lutz Kramer was told by erstwhile Nazi generals: “You look like a girl. A boy with hair like that belongs in a crematorium.” At the same time, Hans-Joachim Roedelius was growing disillusioned with the Utopian chit-chat in his commune. “I’d look after the kids while the others discussed themselves to death.”

I could stop my review of Christoph Dallach’s Neu Klang: The Definitive History Of Krautrock right there, because you’ll already have a good idea what the book offers and demands. While Dallach interviews some players whose names ring a bell internationally – members of Can, Kraftwerk and so on – much of this tome is devoted to figures like Grosskopf, Kramer, Günter Schickert, Ulrich Rützel , Bernd Witthüser and Alexander von Schlippenbach. Gold dust for aficionados, but a steep learning curve for the newbie. If that’s you, the greater value of Neu Klang will be its insights into what life was like for the generation who came of age just after the Nazi catastrophe.

Michael Rother, guitarist of Neu!, is one of many musicians whose childhood was spent exploring the ruins of bombed houses. Kramer and his pals played cowboys and Indians in the rubble of Nazi mansions, complete with “swimming pools full of shrapnel”. Their schoolteachers were either traumatised POW veterans who would break down weeping in class, or unrepentant fascists. No wonder the hip youngsters were determined to build a wholly new culture and music that owed nothing to traditional German styles or to Americans’ blues.

Dallach doesn’t attempt to evoke krautrock’s sounds. He might argue that you don’t need him to describe what you can access on YouTube or Spotify at the tap of a finger. 1995, when Julian Cope published his hysterically over-the-top Krautrocksampler to provoke excitement about records most listeners could only dream of hearing, seems an awfully long time ago now. Indeed, krautrock itself – influential though it continues to be on today’s rockers – is receding into the mythology of ancient futurisms. It had already passed its peak by the time Dallach, a Sex Pistols and Stranglers fan from suburban Hamburg, discovered his own country’s greatest gift to modern music. We are fortunate indeed that he went on to conduct this book’s priceless interviews, especially as quite a few of the artists who open up for us here have since died.

Whatever the merits of previous studies of krautrock, they’ve all had the same drawback: they’ve obliged Germans to converse in English with Anglo interviewers and, in effect, “sell” themselves to foreigners. By contrast, Neu Klang is a translation of a book that first appeared in German in 2021. Everyone speaks with an ease and specificity that takes the conversation much deeper than we’ve ever seen it go before. Katy Derbyshire’s first-rate translation loses none of the bite, humour and poignancy of this collective memoir. (Pedants may object to Germans reminiscing about doing their “O-levels”, though.) Dallach also makes room for discordant opinions, such as when Asmus Tietchens disses “all those mumbling bumblers from the so-called Berlin school… Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel… dull as dishwater”. Neu Klang is anything but dull: it’s a treasure.

Four years ago, in 2020, Trinidad-born British novelist Monique Roffey won the Costa Book of the Year award for The Mermaid of Black Conch. It’s a marvellous book, poetic, tempestuous and funny, fully deserving of all the plaudits. So then she had, not the difficult-second-album problem (this is her ninth book and her eighth novel), but the difficult follow-that-huge-success problem. Where would she go now?

Intellectually, she’s still out there with the feminists and the fables, the hope and the fury. Geographically, she has crossed an imaginary Caribbean channel from Black Conch to the equally imaginary island of St Colibrio. Here, a young Japanese steel pan player, in love with the island’s music, and member of one of the bands that play during Carnival, is found murdered under a cannonball tree. She’s still wearing her costume: green-jewelled headband, flamboyant bikini, carnival band ID bracelet. As her spirit lurks in the tree’s branches, a journalist, an activist, a feisty aging sex-worker and, ultimately, the prime minister’s wife come together with her friends, bandmates and other women of the town of Port Isabella. In anger, in grief, in fits and starts, they are too late to protect this one young woman but determined to make their point: that the murder of women, by men, on the island might as well be legal.

Monique Roffey’s passions and beliefs shine through everything she writes. With some writers, this can be dispiriting: polemic becomes annoying when it masquerades as fiction. With Roffey, this is not a problem. She’s an irresistible story-teller with a poetic touch; the fire in her belly comes with strong narrative architecture and beautiful language. When the curled-up body of the victim is described as “a pale nest of arms and legs”, only a page away from the traditional “Inspector Loveday peered out across…” scene, you know you are in good hands, hands used to handling words in all kinds of ways. The sociopolitical points are fired at the reader across a driving narrative path.

Passiontide is a fable disguised as a crime story. It is highly moral: how the women come together, despite their differences, to make inept, apathetic, self-absorbed men take notice of how many women are murdered simply for being women. The setting is contained: an island (though the effects spread far and wide). The timescale is Lent: from the murder on Shrove Tuesday through the various feasts to Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The imagery is pantheistic, animistic, calling on African and Caribbean gods, Buddhism, Hinduism, but mostly Christianity: the spirit of the dead woman hanging out in the tree; death and rebirth; virgins, whores, sin, sacrifice and redemption. Goddesses abound. Characters dream their own happy endings: vegetable plots, time for yoga, how to love a damaged, kind and sexy man even though men in general are bastards.

But there is nothing black and white (wordplay intended) about it. Society and individuals are a mix-up like callaloo; intersectionality is real everyday life. People wear many masks and not just at Carnival. Roffey handles the subtleties of human beings well: her characters on  both “sides” are certainly serving a purpose, but they are themselves. The tart with a heart who finally falls for the john; the outspoken, nose-pierced, pink-haired lesbian activist; the repressed lady of rank who finally breaks: they’re not clichés. Instead, Roffey gives them a magnificent gift: she imagines what might happen if people in power listened to their fury, and found a way beyond pride and insecurity to take it on board. If you can’t be what you don’t see, then Roffey is showing something important here. Almost a fairytale ending – but why not? Why read thinking “Yeah, right, that’ll never happen”? Why not let it, in fiction? And there is an underlying echo: if we can imagine this in fiction, which helps us to imagine it in reality, then can we imagine solutions to climate crisis in the same way?

Sometimes when a writer wants to play with a striking proposition, it helps to make the world the experiment plays out in as close to our own as possible. In Fríða Ísberg’s debut novel, The Mark, Iceland is preparing for a referendum on whether to make the sensitivity assessment – a means of measuring someone’s empathy and their propensity for anti-social behaviour – mandatory. The near-future she presents has technology that is just a little more advanced than our own; characters use an efficient AI assistant called Zoé as a matter of course, messages are “grams”, and people are advised to invest in a security system called Chaperone. Those splashes of mild futurism help to bolster the idea that such a seemingly reliable sensitivity test could exist. This is our world but a few steps further down the track.

Even before the referendum takes place, Ísberg shows how the existence of the empathy test starts to change society. Ísberg takes her premise and teases it out across multiple lives. The novel shifts between the stories of four characters, including a strong advocate for making the assessment compulsory and a young man who doesn’t want to be subjected to it, who finds himself among the “unmarked” who are already being excluded from certain shops, buildings, and entire neighbourhoods. The idea of “marking” – determining those who are sufficiently empathetic to be allowed to have a full role in society – is a clever way of examining how people are already excluded today.

With short sentences and sparse prose, The Mark can feel oddly cold for a book so fascinated by the idea of empathy. It is almost as though Ísberg is a scientist observing her experiment from above, watching the characters move within the petri dish of the premise. There is a balance to the narrative, with no sense that any of the four characters she follows is more right in their argument than the others. That gives the story nuance and allows Ísberg to explore the social and cultural implications of imposing the test upon people but it also, ironically, makes it harder as a reader to feel empathy for the characters.

Eight years on from the Brexit referendum, the idea of a nation bitterly divided by a referendum feels all too familiar and perhaps more quotidian than dystopian. It also feels entirely feasible that a future British government of either hue would jump at the chance to impose the empathy test. Is it really that much of a leap from means testing and work capability assessments? That may explain why The Mark isn’t as shocking as it might be to a British reader. The world presented in the novel is perhaps less further off here than in Ísberg’s Iceland.

The Mark’s plotting is pacy, if a little predictable, and Ísberg’s turn of phrase, as translated by Larissa Kyzer, is striking (“Desire, she thinks to herself, is when longing and suffering combine.”) The novel succeeds in making you think about the implications of its central concept and wonder whether you might pass the test or fail and find yourself on the outside of polite society. But I did find myself getting frustrated as the narrative went on and the book circled the same ideas like a cat toying with some stunned prey.

The book’s promotional material suggests that it grapples with the questions of “where the rights of society and the rights of the individual benign” and “when utopia becomes dystopia”. Ísberg certainly asks them and skilfully waves together her protagonists’ stories at the conclusion, but she shies away from offering her own answers.