From Lissa Evans’ vivid tale to Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh and an emotive story by Thomas Keneally, this week’s best new fiction
V For Victory
Lissa Evans Doubleday £14.99
It’s late 1944 and an Allied victory is finally on the horizon, but with regular V2 attacks still battering London, it is a traffic accident that threatens to shatter the carefully maintained fiction upon which Vee Sedge and her 15-year-old charge, Noel, have built their lives.
Evans is on pithily fine form, splicing laughter with pathos as she weaves a vivid tale of secrets and dimly flickering hope, conjuring up spinsters, sirens and suffragettes.
Hephzibah Anderson
Blue Ticket
Sophie Mackintosh Hamish Hamilton £12.99
Mackintosh follows her Booker-longlisted debut with a dystopian fable about a young woman, Calla, who pursues motherhood even though it is forbidden to her. She has drawn a blue ticket in the creepy ceremony laid on for girls when they reach puberty in her world, prohibiting her from the life of child-rearing forced on white ticket-holders.
After rejecting her fate she’s forced to go on the run. A spare, haunting tale of autonomy and free will.
Gwendolyn Smith
The Dickens Boy
Thomas Keneally Sceptre £20
Published to mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s death, the latest novel from the author of Schindler’s Ark unfolds as a bustling picaresque tale built around the life of Dickens’s tenth child, 16-year-old Edward, packed off to Australia to build his character on a sheep station.
Keneally, who is also a historian, has a habit of waylaying the reader with detail, but there are some unforgettably vivid scenes in this rompy but emotive story of bruised youth.
Anthony Cummins