This month’s best paperbacks: Colm Tóibín, Maggie O’Farrell and more | Books

A Guest at the Feast Colm Tóibín

A writer’s roots

In one of the essays in A Guest at the Feast, Colm Tóibín declares: “God represents a real problem for the novelist. The novel is happier in a secular space.” He is writing about Marilynne Robinson, a writer skilled, as he says, at “making religious thought easy” – easy for the reader, however unbelieving, to accept. It is a skill he admires. Yet his own novels hardly inhabit a “secular space”. Catholicism is a live presence in all the ones set in Ireland, while his interest in Christian myth even led him, in The Testament of Mary, to create the first-person narrative of Jesus’s mother as she nears death.
These essays, published over the course of more than 25 years, confirm his interest in religion and religiosity. “Religiosity” because he restlessly documents the hypocrisies and misdeeds of the Roman Catholic clergy. Yet he does so with the mingled perplexity and outrage of one who is steeped in Catholicism. “I was born in Ireland and brought up a Catholic.” Almost every one of these essays is shaped by one of these two facts, sometimes by both.

There are plenty of memories of repressiveness in these essays. Tóibín once lived in an Ireland where novels were readily banned. In the title essay, he recalls, as a child, finding “three forbidden books” on the top of his mother’s wardrobe: novels by Edna O’Brien and John McGahern, plus John Updike’s Couples. There is a separate piece on McGahern, whom Tóibín knew well, which is much taken up with the banning or near-banning of his novels in his homeland.

In the longest piece in this collection, Tóibín wanders around Enniscorthy noting the locations he has used in his fiction. Describing the housing estate on the edge of town where he grew up, he recites the names of the other families who lived in the street, “from number one to number twenty-two”. He claims to remember them all, half a century later. This is rootedness, with a vengeance.

These essays speak in the first person, but are not introspective. It is only in the opening piece, an account of his treatment for testicular cancer, that you get much self-revelation. This essay brilliantly describes the trance states induced by his enforced dependence on pharmaceuticals, through intensive chemotherapy and steroid treatment. Here, as throughout the collection, it is the droll, melancholy elegance of the prose that guarantees the reader’s enjoyment.

John Mullan

£9.34 (RRP £10.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Carrie Soto is Back Taylor Jenkins Reid

A tennis hero returns

Carrie Soto is a retired tennis champion whose grand slam record is about to be broken. With her father as coach, she comes out of retirement to defend her status as the world’s greatest tennis player. Emotionally damaged by the death of her mother when she was a child, Carrie struggles to form personal relationships and this entertaining and enjoyable novel follows Carrie’s professional and personal journey towards self-fulfilment.

Hannah Beckerman

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Takeaway: Stories From a Childhood Behind the Counter Angela Hui

The life of a Chinese takeaway kid

According to Angela Hui, “the Chinese takeaway in the UK deserves respect, not just for functioning in hostile environments, but because it’s a unique thing in itself.” Hui grew up in the village of Beddau in the South Wales Valleys. Her parents came to the UK from Hong Kong in 1985 to find a better quality of life. Her mother was five during the Cultural Revolution and fled mainland China to escape the ensuing famine. Both parents were essentially uneducated and had no knowledge of English. After working in manual jobs, they saved up and opened a Chinese takeaway called Lucky Star on the luckiest day of the century: 8 August 1988 – the number 8 signifies wealth, fortune and prosperity in China, “three key factors needed for a young, growing immigrant family”.

The Hui family – Angela and her two older brothers – lived above the shop in Beddau: “I was that kid you saw running around behind the counter with toys spread out.” She began helping out in the shop aged just 8, serving customers on top of a stool. In this heartfelt memoir, Hui admits that she has always found it difficult to talk about her experiences working in the family business: “all my life I’ve hated being East Asian, especially a Chinese takeaway kid”. But motivated in part by the terrible upsurge in racism towards the East and Southeast Asian community after the pandemic, Hui finds her voice in this wonderful book, which is filled with love and pride for her immigrant parents.

Hui also offers a rich insight into Cantonese culture and especially food. Her parents did the cooking in the takeaway, but Hui and her brothers helped prepare food – peeling, slicing, dicing, whisking, as well as washing and taking orders. Hui even travelled back home at weekends while at university, in order to work in the takeaway. It was backbreaking work at unsociable hours, and she says her parents only did it to fund the children’s higher education: “we were their investments…my parents came to cook, so that we didn’t have to”.

Although food was their means of survival in a sometimes hostile country – the family had to endure racist comments and vandalism directed against their shop – food was also the thing that bound them together as a family: “to my parents, food is love and food symbolises family”. Hui writes brilliantly about the food her family cooks and eats – even including detailed and delicious recipes – making a distinction between the types of food they sell in the takeaway and the more authentically Cantonese dishes they love as a family. These include her father’s slow-cooked pork ribs, a special sweet, sour, umami, off-the-menu dish, and sweet potato congee, a dish her mother ate during the famine and one that makes Hui proud to be her daughter: “as I look into the steaming bowl in front of me, I realise how privileged and blessed I am, knowing that I’ll never go hungry like she did.”

PD Smith

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

After Sappho Selby Wynn Schwartz

In praise of visionary women

In Selby Wynn Schwartz’s bold and original novel, Virginia Woolf is part of a chorus that forms the narrative voice, calling for a collective, transhistoric experience of female being. The book comprises biographical fragments of the lives of historical women, moving us mainly forwards through time from 1880s Italy, where the baby who will grow up to be Italian poet Lina Poletti first throws off her swaddling blanket, to 1920s Paris and London. We encounter Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Nancy Cunard, Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall. Poletti has a leading role and is Schwartz’s great discovery – shape-shifting, visionary, apparently seducing most of the great women of her age.

Schwartz’s most original move is to make her first-person narrator speak as “we”. She takes this from Woolf and from Sappho, who also wrote into the future (“someone will remember us / I say / even in another time”). She has Poletti urging her companions to form a chorus, “taking different aspects of the character in different centuries”. Schwartz’s “we” encompasses all the women who have transgressed by asking for freedom and by loving other women. It allows her to create an oracular collectivity out of these narratives.

In the Sappho-Cassandra dialectic Schwartz brings something new and necessary to the dance across time, and it’s a dialectic in which our embodied lives are central. At once breathlessly, carnally beautiful and doomed to assault by medical neglect and male power, the female body emerges here prepared to fight for itself in endlessly flexible, sensual forms of collectivity.

Lara Feigel

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Games People Played: A Global History of Sport Wray Vample

The importance of sport

“Sport is more than mere games,” says Wray Vamplew, Emeritus Professor of Sport History at the University of Stirling. His magisterial study of sporting history certainly demonstrates this, exploring the subject from every possible angle, placing sport in its wider social, political, economic, environmental and cultural contexts. The history of sport is, he argues, as mainstream as any other historical topic, one that informs our understanding of key debates on race, gender and international relations.

The importance of sport is reflected in our everyday language. For example, the origin of the phrase “it’s not cricket” is obvious. But what about “come up to scratch” or “throw in the towel”? According to Vamplew, the former comes from pugilism, where a fighter could lose a bout if he was not ready to fight, with his foot on a line scratched into the ring. The latter phrase was also from boxing, describing how a second could signal that their man had had enough.

Vamplew says his 450 page book is “a personal record of what I believe has been significant in the development of sport”. He does not shy away from controversial views, admitting that he has given up watching athletics because of the drugs. He also says he is a “sceptic” on the idea – common since Greek antiquity – that sport is a force for good in society, as it often sets communities and nations against one another.

Vamplew rejects the notion that sport builds character: “I think it more likely that it accentuates existing character traits…If you cheat in life, you will try to cheat in sport.” It’s not even particularly beneficial for health, he says: “swimmers drown, joggers have heart attacks and all sports people suffer injuries”. To support this view, he cites the somewhat extreme example of the backwoods’ “rough and tumble” fighting from early 19th-century America, “where testicles and ears could be pulled off and eyes gouged out”.

He also enjoys dispelling sporting myths, such as the idea that the late Victorian era was a Golden Age of sport: he notes that this was when sport became commercialised, resulting in “shamateurism, foul play, drug use, gamesmanship and crowd trouble”. It was also an era of class discrimination and sexism, with half the population excluded due to their gender.

It’s clear this is not just a dry academic subject for Vamplew, who played his last game of cricket aged 69 but now focuses on golf and lawn bowls. The result is an entertaining study, full of illuminating details drawn from antiquity to the current era. He also notes that as far back as 1500 BCE, the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica played games with rubber balls – although shockingly matches would sometimes be followed by human sacrifices that could include the entire winning team. Vamplew’s is an impressive global history that should be essential reading for every sports fan.

PD Smith

£14.07 (RRP £15.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Euphoria Elin Cullhed, translated by Jennifer Hayashida

Inside the mind of Sylvia Plath

Euphoria, a much-garlanded novel by Swedish writer Elin Cullhed, is an account of Sylvia Plath’s final year, flooded with Plath’s own imagery and written from a perspective deep inside her head. There’s a massive audacity to it. Effectively Cullhed tries to do in more capacious, domestic and worldly form what Plath succeeded so spectacularly in doing in her final poems – writing all the pleasure and pain of maternal and sexual love in a world at once ordinary (baking, gardening, sleeping children) and feverishly charged.

Cullhed’s contribution is to grasp the sanity that novelistic description can bring to the marital pyrotechnics, slowing things down and adding a suppleness and dimensionality that Plath and Hughes don’t seem to have been capable of themselves within the marriage. The audacity is necessary: without overpowering confidence of the kind on display here, there would be no point doing this at all. Cullhed succeeds in creating a book for our times, translated into English with just the right mixture of casualness and lyricism by Jennifer Hayashida; this isn’t yet another dissection of a time long past.

Indeed, there’s such fiery confidence here, such cleanness – something of the cleanness of Plath’s own poems – that it doesn’t necessarily matter that it’s about Plath. Cullhed has the poet resolve that “I would never again ask for permission to write”. This is a book about the precipitous, high-stakes relationship between creative genius and domestic life, centred on the lure and dangers of freedom.

Lara Feigel

£8.49 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

The Marriage Portrait Maggie O’Farrell

A dark Renaissance fable

In 1558, Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, was married to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. A year after entering her husband’s court in 1560, aged just 16, she died. Poison was suspected. Several portraits of Lucrezia survive. Nearly 300 years after her death, Robert Browning wrote My Last Duchess, a dramatic monologue in which Duke Alfonso displays a portrait of his late wife and allows the reader to deduce that – insanely jealous – he murdered her. In her Women’s prize shortlisted novel, O’Farrell has shuffled historical fact, portraiture and poetic fantasy together and used them as the basis for a piece of fiction in which a simple tale, of a girl forced too young into a dynastic marriage, is overlaid and embellished with elements from fairytale and myth.

Admirers of O’Farrell’s previous historical novel, Hamnet, may be nonplussed by this one. Where Hamnet’s emotional punch (read it and weep) was powered by its psychological and social realism, The Marriage Portrait is set in a world as fabulous as that of a millefleurs tapestry and inhabited by beings as flatly emblematic as embroidered ladies and their unicorns. There is a virgin heroine whose floor-length red hair, modestly confined in a pearl-decorated net, hints at rebellious energy. There is a devilish duke, handsome and cruel. Sisters come in pairs – the good (beautiful) one and the cross, ugly one. There is an old nurse whose gruff manner masks a kindly heart. There is the pure-hearted young man who might, perhaps, offer rescue.

O’Farrell’s prose, as fluent as ever, is more ornate than in earlier books. She alternates passages of plain prose with others rich in musical cadences and lavishly decorated with imagery and heightened vocabulary. A river laps at its banks “with lassitudinous ochre tongues”. A dress speaks a “glossolalia all of its own”, rustling and creaking, becoming an orchestra, or the rigging of a ship. Finely written and vividly imagined, The Marriage Portrait is far from being simplistic, but there is an engaging simplicity to it that makes it feel not quite like a grown-up novel. Rather, it is a very good one to be read, as publishers used to say, by “children of all ages”.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Retrospective Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated by Anne McLean

Mao, movies and me

Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s eighth novel explores the life story of living Colombian film director Sergio Cabrera, director of Time Out, Ilona Arrives With the Rain, The Strategy of the Snail and many others. Vásquez uses as a framing device a 2016 retrospective of Cabrera’s films held in Barcelona, at which time Cabrera’s father, who acted in many of his films, had just died, and his marriage was faltering: exactly the kind of moment at which many of us would look back and try to make sense of our lives.

The fact that a Colombian teenager destined to become a lauded film director first became a Red Guard in Mao’s China is astonishing, as is the fact that, when summoned home to find both parents working undercover for the revolution, both Sergio and his younger sister become guerrilla fighters, convinced, as few are today, that the world order could successfully be overturned, and willing to die to bring it about. The story of their political indoctrination, active deployment, growing unease and ultimate disillusionment is both fascinating and terrifying, and many today will recognise in it the tendency of the left to prioritise ideological purity over concrete action, get lost in the weeds of theory and language, and ultimately turn on itself.

Melissa Harrison

£10.55 (RRP £11.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

The House of Fortune Jessie Burton

Bold and thrilling sequel to The Miniaturist

After two more or less contemporary novels, The Muse (2016) and The Confession (2019), and two books for younger readers, The Restless Girls (2018) and Medusa (2021), Burton has returned to the world of The Miniaturist for her fourth novel for adults. We now leap forward 18 years to a very different Amsterdam. Ill-judged wars and poor investments have weakened the Netherlands and the city is under a cloud. We open on Thea’s 18th birthday, in a home that feels both claustrophobic and dogged by tragedy: “joy in this household is laced always with a fear of loss.” Thea is the narrative engine of this book as Nella, her sort-of-aunt, was the engine of the previous novel.

It’s always interesting when a writer returns to the storyworld of a book after some time away. The failures tend to outnumber the hits – for every The Testaments there’s two or three Imperial Bedrooms or a Fight Club 2. With Burton, though, you get the sense of a writer far more comfortable in her skin, one who in Thea has found a character to reanimate the physical and emotional landscape of early modern Amsterdam. Thea is wilder and more wilful than Nella ever was and, despite the financial troubles that dog her family, this is a book with a warmer heart than the slightly chilly original. The titular Miniaturist of Burton’s debut makes a return here, leaving gifts that point to a supernatural ability to see past facades to deeper truths – a conceit that always seemed to gesture towards the power of the author.

In The House of Fortune, Burton has done that rare thing, following up a successful debut with a novel that is superior in both style and substance. What’s cheering is that, after a host of adventures, Thea and Nella are left staring out on a new world, suggesting there is more to be told of this boldly unconventional Dutch family.

Alex Preston

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

A Guest at the Feast Colm Tóibín

A writer’s roots

In one of the essays in A Guest at the Feast, Colm Tóibín declares: “God represents a real problem for the novelist. The novel is happier in a secular space.” He is writing about Marilynne Robinson, a writer skilled, as he says, at “making religious thought easy” – easy for the reader, however unbelieving, to accept. It is a skill he admires. Yet his own novels hardly inhabit a “secular space”. Catholicism is a live presence in all the ones set in Ireland, while his interest in Christian myth even led him, in The Testament of Mary, to create the first-person narrative of Jesus’s mother as she nears death.
These essays, published over the course of more than 25 years, confirm his interest in religion and religiosity. “Religiosity” because he restlessly documents the hypocrisies and misdeeds of the Roman Catholic clergy. Yet he does so with the mingled perplexity and outrage of one who is steeped in Catholicism. “I was born in Ireland and brought up a Catholic.” Almost every one of these essays is shaped by one of these two facts, sometimes by both.

There are plenty of memories of repressiveness in these essays. Tóibín once lived in an Ireland where novels were readily banned. In the title essay, he recalls, as a child, finding “three forbidden books” on the top of his mother’s wardrobe: novels by Edna O’Brien and John McGahern, plus John Updike’s Couples. There is a separate piece on McGahern, whom Tóibín knew well, which is much taken up with the banning or near-banning of his novels in his homeland.

In the longest piece in this collection, Tóibín wanders around Enniscorthy noting the locations he has used in his fiction. Describing the housing estate on the edge of town where he grew up, he recites the names of the other families who lived in the street, “from number one to number twenty-two”. He claims to remember them all, half a century later. This is rootedness, with a vengeance.

These essays speak in the first person, but are not introspective. It is only in the opening piece, an account of his treatment for testicular cancer, that you get much self-revelation. This essay brilliantly describes the trance states induced by his enforced dependence on pharmaceuticals, through intensive chemotherapy and steroid treatment. Here, as throughout the collection, it is the droll, melancholy elegance of the prose that guarantees the reader’s enjoyment.

John Mullan

£9.34 (RRP £10.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Carrie Soto is Back Taylor Jenkins Reid

A tennis hero returns

Carrie Soto is a retired tennis champion whose grand slam record is about to be broken. With her father as coach, she comes out of retirement to defend her status as the world’s greatest tennis player. Emotionally damaged by the death of her mother when she was a child, Carrie struggles to form personal relationships and this entertaining and enjoyable novel follows Carrie’s professional and personal journey towards self-fulfilment.

Hannah Beckerman

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Takeaway: Stories From a Childhood Behind the Counter Angela Hui

The life of a Chinese takeaway kid

According to Angela Hui, “the Chinese takeaway in the UK deserves respect, not just for functioning in hostile environments, but because it’s a unique thing in itself.” Hui grew up in the village of Beddau in the South Wales Valleys. Her parents came to the UK from Hong Kong in 1985 to find a better quality of life. Her mother was five during the Cultural Revolution and fled mainland China to escape the ensuing famine. Both parents were essentially uneducated and had no knowledge of English. After working in manual jobs, they saved up and opened a Chinese takeaway called Lucky Star on the luckiest day of the century: 8 August 1988 – the number 8 signifies wealth, fortune and prosperity in China, “three key factors needed for a young, growing immigrant family”.

The Hui family – Angela and her two older brothers – lived above the shop in Beddau: “I was that kid you saw running around behind the counter with toys spread out.” She began helping out in the shop aged just 8, serving customers on top of a stool. In this heartfelt memoir, Hui admits that she has always found it difficult to talk about her experiences working in the family business: “all my life I’ve hated being East Asian, especially a Chinese takeaway kid”. But motivated in part by the terrible upsurge in racism towards the East and Southeast Asian community after the pandemic, Hui finds her voice in this wonderful book, which is filled with love and pride for her immigrant parents.

Hui also offers a rich insight into Cantonese culture and especially food. Her parents did the cooking in the takeaway, but Hui and her brothers helped prepare food – peeling, slicing, dicing, whisking, as well as washing and taking orders. Hui even travelled back home at weekends while at university, in order to work in the takeaway. It was backbreaking work at unsociable hours, and she says her parents only did it to fund the children’s higher education: “we were their investments…my parents came to cook, so that we didn’t have to”.

Although food was their means of survival in a sometimes hostile country – the family had to endure racist comments and vandalism directed against their shop – food was also the thing that bound them together as a family: “to my parents, food is love and food symbolises family”. Hui writes brilliantly about the food her family cooks and eats – even including detailed and delicious recipes – making a distinction between the types of food they sell in the takeaway and the more authentically Cantonese dishes they love as a family. These include her father’s slow-cooked pork ribs, a special sweet, sour, umami, off-the-menu dish, and sweet potato congee, a dish her mother ate during the famine and one that makes Hui proud to be her daughter: “as I look into the steaming bowl in front of me, I realise how privileged and blessed I am, knowing that I’ll never go hungry like she did.”

PD Smith

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

After Sappho Selby Wynn Schwartz

In praise of visionary women

In Selby Wynn Schwartz’s bold and original novel, Virginia Woolf is part of a chorus that forms the narrative voice, calling for a collective, transhistoric experience of female being. The book comprises biographical fragments of the lives of historical women, moving us mainly forwards through time from 1880s Italy, where the baby who will grow up to be Italian poet Lina Poletti first throws off her swaddling blanket, to 1920s Paris and London. We encounter Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Nancy Cunard, Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall. Poletti has a leading role and is Schwartz’s great discovery – shape-shifting, visionary, apparently seducing most of the great women of her age.

Schwartz’s most original move is to make her first-person narrator speak as “we”. She takes this from Woolf and from Sappho, who also wrote into the future (“someone will remember us / I say / even in another time”). She has Poletti urging her companions to form a chorus, “taking different aspects of the character in different centuries”. Schwartz’s “we” encompasses all the women who have transgressed by asking for freedom and by loving other women. It allows her to create an oracular collectivity out of these narratives.

In the Sappho-Cassandra dialectic Schwartz brings something new and necessary to the dance across time, and it’s a dialectic in which our embodied lives are central. At once breathlessly, carnally beautiful and doomed to assault by medical neglect and male power, the female body emerges here prepared to fight for itself in endlessly flexible, sensual forms of collectivity.

Lara Feigel

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Games People Played: A Global History of Sport Wray Vample

The importance of sport

“Sport is more than mere games,” says Wray Vamplew, Emeritus Professor of Sport History at the University of Stirling. His magisterial study of sporting history certainly demonstrates this, exploring the subject from every possible angle, placing sport in its wider social, political, economic, environmental and cultural contexts. The history of sport is, he argues, as mainstream as any other historical topic, one that informs our understanding of key debates on race, gender and international relations.

The importance of sport is reflected in our everyday language. For example, the origin of the phrase “it’s not cricket” is obvious. But what about “come up to scratch” or “throw in the towel”? According to Vamplew, the former comes from pugilism, where a fighter could lose a bout if he was not ready to fight, with his foot on a line scratched into the ring. The latter phrase was also from boxing, describing how a second could signal that their man had had enough.

Vamplew says his 450 page book is “a personal record of what I believe has been significant in the development of sport”. He does not shy away from controversial views, admitting that he has given up watching athletics because of the drugs. He also says he is a “sceptic” on the idea – common since Greek antiquity – that sport is a force for good in society, as it often sets communities and nations against one another.

Vamplew rejects the notion that sport builds character: “I think it more likely that it accentuates existing character traits…If you cheat in life, you will try to cheat in sport.” It’s not even particularly beneficial for health, he says: “swimmers drown, joggers have heart attacks and all sports people suffer injuries”. To support this view, he cites the somewhat extreme example of the backwoods’ “rough and tumble” fighting from early 19th-century America, “where testicles and ears could be pulled off and eyes gouged out”.

He also enjoys dispelling sporting myths, such as the idea that the late Victorian era was a Golden Age of sport: he notes that this was when sport became commercialised, resulting in “shamateurism, foul play, drug use, gamesmanship and crowd trouble”. It was also an era of class discrimination and sexism, with half the population excluded due to their gender.

It’s clear this is not just a dry academic subject for Vamplew, who played his last game of cricket aged 69 but now focuses on golf and lawn bowls. The result is an entertaining study, full of illuminating details drawn from antiquity to the current era. He also notes that as far back as 1500 BCE, the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica played games with rubber balls – although shockingly matches would sometimes be followed by human sacrifices that could include the entire winning team. Vamplew’s is an impressive global history that should be essential reading for every sports fan.

PD Smith

£14.07 (RRP £15.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Euphoria Elin Cullhed, translated by Jennifer Hayashida

Inside the mind of Sylvia Plath

Euphoria, a much-garlanded novel by Swedish writer Elin Cullhed, is an account of Sylvia Plath’s final year, flooded with Plath’s own imagery and written from a perspective deep inside her head. There’s a massive audacity to it. Effectively Cullhed tries to do in more capacious, domestic and worldly form what Plath succeeded so spectacularly in doing in her final poems – writing all the pleasure and pain of maternal and sexual love in a world at once ordinary (baking, gardening, sleeping children) and feverishly charged.

Cullhed’s contribution is to grasp the sanity that novelistic description can bring to the marital pyrotechnics, slowing things down and adding a suppleness and dimensionality that Plath and Hughes don’t seem to have been capable of themselves within the marriage. The audacity is necessary: without overpowering confidence of the kind on display here, there would be no point doing this at all. Cullhed succeeds in creating a book for our times, translated into English with just the right mixture of casualness and lyricism by Jennifer Hayashida; this isn’t yet another dissection of a time long past.

Indeed, there’s such fiery confidence here, such cleanness – something of the cleanness of Plath’s own poems – that it doesn’t necessarily matter that it’s about Plath. Cullhed has the poet resolve that “I would never again ask for permission to write”. This is a book about the precipitous, high-stakes relationship between creative genius and domestic life, centred on the lure and dangers of freedom.

Lara Feigel

£8.49 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

The Marriage Portrait Maggie O’Farrell

A dark Renaissance fable

In 1558, Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, was married to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. A year after entering her husband’s court in 1560, aged just 16, she died. Poison was suspected. Several portraits of Lucrezia survive. Nearly 300 years after her death, Robert Browning wrote My Last Duchess, a dramatic monologue in which Duke Alfonso displays a portrait of his late wife and allows the reader to deduce that – insanely jealous – he murdered her. In her Women’s prize shortlisted novel, O’Farrell has shuffled historical fact, portraiture and poetic fantasy together and used them as the basis for a piece of fiction in which a simple tale, of a girl forced too young into a dynastic marriage, is overlaid and embellished with elements from fairytale and myth.

Admirers of O’Farrell’s previous historical novel, Hamnet, may be nonplussed by this one. Where Hamnet’s emotional punch (read it and weep) was powered by its psychological and social realism, The Marriage Portrait is set in a world as fabulous as that of a millefleurs tapestry and inhabited by beings as flatly emblematic as embroidered ladies and their unicorns. There is a virgin heroine whose floor-length red hair, modestly confined in a pearl-decorated net, hints at rebellious energy. There is a devilish duke, handsome and cruel. Sisters come in pairs – the good (beautiful) one and the cross, ugly one. There is an old nurse whose gruff manner masks a kindly heart. There is the pure-hearted young man who might, perhaps, offer rescue.

O’Farrell’s prose, as fluent as ever, is more ornate than in earlier books. She alternates passages of plain prose with others rich in musical cadences and lavishly decorated with imagery and heightened vocabulary. A river laps at its banks “with lassitudinous ochre tongues”. A dress speaks a “glossolalia all of its own”, rustling and creaking, becoming an orchestra, or the rigging of a ship. Finely written and vividly imagined, The Marriage Portrait is far from being simplistic, but there is an engaging simplicity to it that makes it feel not quite like a grown-up novel. Rather, it is a very good one to be read, as publishers used to say, by “children of all ages”.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Retrospective Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated by Anne McLean

Mao, movies and me

Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s eighth novel explores the life story of living Colombian film director Sergio Cabrera, director of Time Out, Ilona Arrives With the Rain, The Strategy of the Snail and many others. Vásquez uses as a framing device a 2016 retrospective of Cabrera’s films held in Barcelona, at which time Cabrera’s father, who acted in many of his films, had just died, and his marriage was faltering: exactly the kind of moment at which many of us would look back and try to make sense of our lives.

The fact that a Colombian teenager destined to become a lauded film director first became a Red Guard in Mao’s China is astonishing, as is the fact that, when summoned home to find both parents working undercover for the revolution, both Sergio and his younger sister become guerrilla fighters, convinced, as few are today, that the world order could successfully be overturned, and willing to die to bring it about. The story of their political indoctrination, active deployment, growing unease and ultimate disillusionment is both fascinating and terrifying, and many today will recognise in it the tendency of the left to prioritise ideological purity over concrete action, get lost in the weeds of theory and language, and ultimately turn on itself.

Melissa Harrison

£10.55 (RRP £11.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

The House of Fortune Jessie Burton

Bold and thrilling sequel to The Miniaturist

After two more or less contemporary novels, The Muse (2016) and The Confession (2019), and two books for younger readers, The Restless Girls (2018) and Medusa (2021), Burton has returned to the world of The Miniaturist for her fourth novel for adults. We now leap forward 18 years to a very different Amsterdam. Ill-judged wars and poor investments have weakened the Netherlands and the city is under a cloud. We open on Thea’s 18th birthday, in a home that feels both claustrophobic and dogged by tragedy: “joy in this household is laced always with a fear of loss.” Thea is the narrative engine of this book as Nella, her sort-of-aunt, was the engine of the previous novel.

It’s always interesting when a writer returns to the storyworld of a book after some time away. The failures tend to outnumber the hits – for every The Testaments there’s two or three Imperial Bedrooms or a Fight Club 2. With Burton, though, you get the sense of a writer far more comfortable in her skin, one who in Thea has found a character to reanimate the physical and emotional landscape of early modern Amsterdam. Thea is wilder and more wilful than Nella ever was and, despite the financial troubles that dog her family, this is a book with a warmer heart than the slightly chilly original. The titular Miniaturist of Burton’s debut makes a return here, leaving gifts that point to a supernatural ability to see past facades to deeper truths – a conceit that always seemed to gesture towards the power of the author.

In The House of Fortune, Burton has done that rare thing, following up a successful debut with a novel that is superior in both style and substance. What’s cheering is that, after a host of adventures, Thea and Nella are left staring out on a new world, suggesting there is more to be told of this boldly unconventional Dutch family.

Alex Preston

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop