Esther Freud is back in our picks for the best Literary Fiction out now: MY SISTER AND OTHER LOVERS by Esther Freud, FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi, THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG by Leila Mottley
This slim but capacious novel begins with narrator Lucy preparing for a premiere. Although not named, it's obvious that the film is Hideous Kinky, adapted in 1998 from Freud's largely autobiographical debut novel of the same name which featured the then five–year-old Lucy as the protagonist.
Lucy's bruising but always engrossing passage from child to adulthood provides the arc here, and we're deeply with her at every moment, whether she's watching Eric and Ernie at Christmas while her beloved sister injects drugs upstairs, or suddenly discovering three previously unknown half-brothers (Freud's father, the artist Lucian, was rumoured to have 30 children).
Freud's alternately painful and funny story may cleave close to her fascinating life, but it begs larger questions too as Lucy's insight grows into the lasting legacy of her rootless bohemian upbringing.
FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape £20, 464pp)
Spanning decades, oceans and political ideologies, the drama in Choi's epic novel takes place on the largest and most intimate of stages.
At the centre are the Kangs: Serk, Anne and Louisa. Though born in Japan, Serk doesn't discover he's ethnically Korean until the end of the Second World War. He subsequently emigrates to America, where he marries Anne and fathers Louisa.
Rage, not love, is default in this fractious family, which keeps the novel's first half at a roiling boil.
Then a family trip to Japan takes an apparently tragic turn. The truth, however, is far stranger than fiction – cue a spoiler-forbidding plot that draws on an incredible episode in late 20th-century geopolitics.
It makes for an expanse of narrative ground to cover, but Choi's startling, bristling characters power this journey, which plays in the reader's mind with cinematic intensity.
THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG by Leila Mottley (Fig Tree £16.99, 352pp)
Motley's debut, Nightcrawling – written when she was just 17 – earned her a Booker Prize longlisting.
Her ample talent is on display again in this loose sequel, which follows an improvised sisterhood of mostly teenage Floridian moms, 'the Girls'.
Shunned by their small town's community, they provide each other with support. But when pregnant, would-be Olympic swimmer Adela arrives, the dynamic is disturbed.
Clever Emory, who dreams of college admission, finds in the newcomer the friendship she's been starved of. But the unwitting Adela is on an explosive collision course with the Girls' ringleader, Simone.
Motley's tough, vital lyricism drives a fiercely compassionate novel about survival, hope, and love.
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