THE SHADOW OF THE OBJECT by Chloe Aridjis (Chatto & Windus £16.99, 192pp)
Aridjis is a virtuoso of the gorgeously written art novel that somehow seems to go nowhere and everywhere all at once.
The recipe isn’t always successful – but this time it is.
Flora, who polishes silver at a London jewellery shop, has her hand bitten by the family dog while visiting her parents in Mexico.
Laid up in hospital there, she befriends an elderly German toy collector, soon to die – a turn of events that plunges Flora into a relationship with the dead woman’s son back home in London.
Cue a digressive and symbolically rich meditation on the nature of storytelling, sparkling with zany detail while also haunted by the spectre of the Holocaust.
Our interest ultimately lies less in the story Aridjis tells than in her immersive phrase-making and the space it opens for contemplation.
NO SUCH THING AS MONDAY by Sian Hughes (The Indigo Press £14.99, 240pp)
Hughes, 60, made the Booker longlist in 2023 with her first novel, Pearl, a 20th-century coming-of-age tale which drew on a medieval poem to explore the fallout from postnatal depression.
Her new novel, set in the West Midlands, plumbs similar emotional terrain to unspool a brutally harsh tale of exploitation and survival, glinting with gallows humour to sustain us through grim lows.
The protagonist, Steffie, is a fiftysomething woman working as a dry cleaner when the death of her ex-convict father uncorks a flood of trauma as she searches for her long-lost sister to tell her the news.
Abuse, poverty, addiction and prostitution are among the trials itemised in a series of poignant episodes dating back to Steffie’s 1970s girlhood. By the end, the redemptively sunny finale feels more than hard-earned.
ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME IV by Solvej Balle (Faber £12.99, 208pp)
On The Calculation of Volume is available now from the Mail Bookshop
With three more still to go, this is the fourth instalment in a Danish philosophical puzzler about a bookseller trapped in a recurring cycle of the same mid-November day.
One of the joys of the series is how Balle ever more ingeniously complicates the premise. The drama of the narrator’s initial confusion has given way to recognition that her crisis is shared by growing numbers of people gathering together around Europe.
Holed up in a villa outside Bremen, her own cohort forms a rota for chores and holds meetings to discuss their plight. For the reader, the peculiarity of the predicament is a gateway to considering everyday mysteries of consciousness, as Balle’s so-called ‘loopers’ brainstorm ways to order their disrupted experience of time.
