Book of the week: American author's first novel is 'compelling and haunting'

What better way to enjoy the weekend than with a new book.

Our book of the week is History Of Wolves by Emily Fridlund. The story centres on Linda, 15, who lives with her mum and dad - at least she thinks they’re her mum and dad - in the rundown cabins of an abandoned commune, out in the icy, forested, lakeside wilds of northern Minnesota.

She’s left to her own devices most of the time, and out of school - where she is labelled ‘freak’ and lives a semi-feral existence of solitary mooching, kayaking, dog-walking and fish-gutting. Relief from this bleak existence appears in the form of the Gardners, an apparently normal nuclear family - mum, four-year-old boy and mostly absent dad - who take up residence in a cabin across the lake. Linda gets to know mum Patra and son Paul, becoming their long-term babysitter. In her desperation to be wanted, to be welcomed as part of something, she becomes a sort of benign stalker of the family.

And she also overlooks their increasingly odd behaviour when Paul falls ill and his condition worsens. The chilling plot is only part of the mesmerising power of this assured and striking debut.

Fridlund definitely builds atmosphere and evokes a sense of place, generates a terrible sense of foreboding, and creates a cast of characters of utterly credible complexity. Haunting and compelling, here is a first novel from yet another great new American novelist.

8/10 Dan Brotzel

Published in hardback by W&N, priced £12.99 (ebook £6.99) and is available now.

Hame by Annalena McAfee, is a tale about Mhairi McPhail who flees her crumbling marriage in New York by moving with her daughter to the tiny Scottish island that her grandparents left decades earlier, ostensibly to write a biography about its late nationalist poet, Grigor McWatt. Former literary editor McAfee’s second novel is a clever patchwork blanket of narratives, combining Mhairi’s story, excerpts of McWatt’s unpublished Fascaray Compendium, passages of Mhairi’s biography of the poet and his ‘translations’ of famous English poems into Scots. Questions of home (‘hame’), identity, social acceptance and the importance of family form the core, as Mhairi struggles to accept her own shortcomings while eking out information about the mysterious poet - against the backdrop of the Scottish referendum. It’s very convincing, despite being entirely fictional, but McAfee’s ambitious choice to structure her book like a research project undermines its tension - so by the time the denouement finally arrives, it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm.

6/10 Natalie Bowen

Published in hardback by Harvill Secker, priced £16.99 and is available now.

The Coroner’s Daughter by Andrew Hughes is published in trade paperback by Doubleday Ireland, priced £13.99 (ebook £9.49). Available now

Abigail Lawless always had a curious mind and it is a thirst for fascinating facts her doting father is always eager to feed. But when Abigail, the daughter of the coroner of Dublin in 1816, begins to dig into his business, there are sure to be dangerous consequences. As she goes deeper, drawing those around her into peril in the process, she encounters the seedier side of the Irish capital. Not forgetting she is the daughter of a well-to-do member of society, where dressing to be the belle of the ball is more regularly under the microscope of public scrutiny than the lives of the temporary residents of her father’s workrooms. As she investigates the secrets of a young mother who killed her own child, Abigail is brought to the attention of a mysterious religious sect with growing popularity and influence in the city. Andrew Hughes has already won acclaim for his debut novel, The Convictions Of John Delahunt, and with The Coroner’s Daughter, he will win more praise from lovers of forensic murder mystery.

7/10

(Review by Roddy Brooks)

Incendium by AD Swanston is the latest Elizabethan spy caper to hit the shelves in recent years. Incendium centres on the young (and, we are oft told, tall) lawyer Christopher Radcliff and his battles against both a Catholic plot to kill Elizabeth I and the petty intrigues of the monarch’s court. Fans of SJ Parris’ Giordano Bruno novels will find much comfort in Incendium’s plot and Radcliff, an erudite outsider with an unusual past, who turns state spy. The first in a planned series by Waterstones executive turned writer, Swanston, is a colourful and gripping read in which you can almost smell the filthy Tudor River Thames. But it also features one of the most signposted literary baddies I have read in some time.

7/10 David Wilcock

Incendium is published in hardback by Bantam Press, priced £16.99 (ebook £8.99). It is available now.

NON-FICTION

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick is published in hardback by Fourth Estate, priced £16.99 (ebook £10.99). Available now

If you’re expecting a rip-roaring ride through the wackily entertaining world of time travel films and TV shows, you could be in for a disappointment here. This book is more of a ride through the scientific and philosophical arguments about trying to define what time actually is, which takes some of the fun away, although science historian Gleick does sprinkle brief appraisals of some classic stories throughout the 313-page book. These include HG Wells’ groundbreaking The Time Machine from 1895, a bit of Back To The Future, and Ray Bradbury’s A Sound Of Thunder (a time traveller visiting the age of dinosaurs treads on a butterfly, producing the ultimate knock-on effect back in his own time). Thankfully, the American author, a time-travel sceptic, also deigns to squeeze in a summary of Doctor Who’s Blink, the first one with the Weeping Angels, although they’re not mentioned here. An interesting enough book, if you’re after a bit of an intellectual run-through of the thoughts of the likes of Einstein, TS Eliot, and Vladimir Nabokov.

6/10

(Review by Chris Gibbings)

CHILDREN’S BOOK OF THE WEEK

The New Adventures Of Mr Toad: A Race For Toad Hall by Tom Moorhouse, illustrated by Holly Swain, is published in paperback by Oxford University Press, priced £5.99 (ebook £4.99). Available March 2

Kenneth Grahame’s beloved animal characters have been brought up to date for a new generation of young readers. Since it was first published in 1908, The Wind In The Willows, which Grahame wrote for son Alastair, has charmed millions of children, with the magical adventure of Ratty, Mole and the irrepressible Toad of Toad Hall. In Moorhouse’s update, Toad has been frozen by the wicked weasels in his own ice house for 100 years - and is discovered snoring by his descendent Teejay and her pals Ratty and Mo (also relatives of the originals), when they fall down a hall and find a tunnel leading to Toad Hall. The country pile has been left to crumble for decades and now the weasels (operating as a company called Wildwood Industrious) want to bulldoze it and build new homes. Toad takes on a bet with the chief executive weasel that he can beat Stiggy the stoat in a car race - with only Teejay’s guardian Ms Badger’s old banger to hand. Packed with plenty of ‘poop-poops!’ and captured beautifully by Holly Swain’s muted illustrations, A Race For Toad Hall pays gentle homage to Grahame’s original, while creating a rip-roaring ride for the digital generation.

7/10

(Review by Kate Whiting)

BEST SELLERS FOR WEEK ENDING FEBRUARY 25

HARDBACKS

1. The Midnight Gang by David Walliams

2. Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

3. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

4. Happy Mum, Happy Baby: My Adventures Into Motherhood by Giovanna Fletcher

5. Double Down: Diary Of A Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

6. Deliciously Ella With Friends by Ella Mills Woodward

7. James Martin’s French Adventure by James Martin

8. City Of Friends by Joanna Trollope

9. Where’s Mr Lion? (Felt Flaps) by Ingela Arrhenius

10. Quantum Mechanics: A Ladybird Expert Book by Jim Al-Khalili

(Compiled by Waterstones)

PAPERBACKS

1. The Ashes Of London by Andrew Taylor

2. The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

3. Three Sisters, Three Queens by Philippa Gregory

4. The Romanovs: 1613 - 1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore

5. Who Let The Gods Out? by Maz Evans

6. Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

7. Mount! by Jilly Cooper

8. It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

9. Different Class by Joanne Harris

10. On The Other Side by Carrie Hope Fletcher

(Compiled by Waterstones)

EBOOKS

1. Silent Child by Sarah A. Denzil

2. Ripper by Patricia Cornwell

3. Who We Were Before by Leah Mercer

4. The Pick, The Spade And The Crow by Bill Rogers

5. Sister Sister by Sue Fortin

6. The Sixth Window by Rachel Abbott

7. Wrong Number, Right Guy by Elle Casey

8. Mad Love by Nick Spalding

9. Who’s That Girl by Mhairi McFarlane

10. His Kidnappers’ Shoes by Maggie James

(Compiled by amazon.co.uk)