A Town Called Solace: ‘Will break your heart’ Graham Norton

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With a psychology degree in hand from McGill University, Lawson took a trip to Britain and ended up accepting a job as an industrial psychologist. In every way it was coming to seem more real than Toronto, with its endless malls and traffic jams and high-powered jobs. Debut novel The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris has been a smash in the US: a revisionist take on civil war history, with a sweeping treatment of forbidden gay love and the aftermath of slavery. I sometimes suspect that I was actually found abandoned in a tree, adopted and raised as a family secret. This book is set in rural Toronto in 1972, and the landscape and weather affect the mood of the story.

It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year and selected for the Richard and Judy book club. By chance, he has been given a house on the edge of town by an elderly woman, who befriended him when he was a little boy. That meant the boxes didn't have necessary things in them, things he needed straight away like pyjamas, or he'd have unpacked them. It must be challenging to describe a 7-year-old girl with a lot of problems and a newly divorced male character in his thirties at the same time.Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward (Virago) is razor-sharp on any number of things, above all the insoluble ravages of time. As the novel progresses, it carries echoes of a friendship which developed 30 years before, between Elizabeth and the four-year-old Liam. Seriously ill in hospital, Elizabeth looks back on her life, addressing her reminiscences to her recently deceased husband. Enter thirtyish Liam Kane, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, where he promptly moves into the house next door–watched suspiciously by astonished and dismayed Clara, whose elderly friend, Mrs. Soon, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of the townspeople, and in particular the nervous Clara.

In Mrs Orchard’s case, that earthquake arrived in the form of a little boy and the aftershock continued for decades afterwards, proving that a single moment and one bad decision can leave a shadow on a life that can be hard to shake off.Enter Liam Kane, mid-thirties, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, who moves into Mrs. On the novel front, I could not recommend more strongly Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms(Granta): flinty, bracing, exquisite. It is so subtle and yet so clever as it creates a kind of mystery within the individual story of each character.

Though she has lived in England for most of her adult life, all her books, including this new one, are set in rural Northern Ontario, far from anywhere. But the subplot doesn’t bring a lot to the story, which is at its best when the focus is on the old lady leaving Solace, and the young man arriving. As we cycle through these three characters’ perspectives in alternating chapters, we gradually come to understand the connections between them. It’s noteworthy, too, that though fiction is increasingly engaged with the urgent subject of global warming, on this longlist only Richard Powers explicitly tackles the climate crisis.I also enjoyed the social historian Patrick Joyce’s Going to My Father’s House (Verso), a haunting meditation on Ireland and England, war and migration, Derry and Manchester. Mercilessly anatomising privilege, creativity and ambition, male-female relationships and lockdowns Covid-driven and emotional, Cusk is brutally funny and honest about shame, ego and our sense of self.