“A story changes with each telling. Even a story about yourself. And even when you tell it differently to someone, there’s always a part of you that knows the real truth.” Fourteen-year-old Mati thinks a lot about things, but it doesn’t mean she’s prepared to offer up her true story just yet. On a family road trip across Zimbabwe following the unexpected death of her mother, she watches how her siblings and her father have reacted to loss, and squabbles with the mysterious, ghostly Meticais, who’s constantly pushing her towards revealing what lurks in her “dark corners”, her “behind spaces” (while also always being fabulously, glitteringly attired).
The careful, elegant plotting in Blessing Musariri’s debut YA novel, All That It Ever Meant (Zephyr, £14.99), is one of its many pleasures; the twists are skilful, subtle and worth reflecting on beyond that initial gasp of surprise. Musariri, who has also published work for children and adults, presents her home country of Zimbabwe – in both its beauty and its frustrations – through the clear eyes of a British-born teenage girl who feels both of it and distant from it, caught between two lands in the same way her mother was. “In England,” Mati reflects, “she had to be a character in a story about Africans who came to live in England”. Mati herself often feels like “two people – one who has to walk within the lines and another who doesn’t know about lines.”
This thoughtful, moving book explores in-between spaces, identity and grief as Mati works through “The Death” which “stains everything . . . there’s no washing it out”. Her complex relationship with her tetchy older sister is particularly well-drawn; this is absolutely the kind of novel that rewards rereading.
A significant road trip also features in American author Deb Caletti’s latest novel, Plan A (Labyrinth Road, £15.99), and while it’s a device she’s used previously, along with a focus on women sharing their stories with the teenage protagonist, all familiar tropes gleam in expert hands. Sixteen-year-old Ivy gets pregnant while living in a small town in Texas, a place where on her way home from work or school she passes “City of Hope Church of God, Life Horizons Baptist Church, and Fellowship Pointe Christian, and just beyond us is New Redeemer Christian”.
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Here, girls inevitably become “the thing that happened to them”, and Ivy may want children one day but not now, not this way. She sets off with her adorable-yet-haunted boyfriend on a multi-stop voyage to her grandmother’s house in Oregon, the two “a pair of fugitives seeking an illegal-in-their-state abortion” but also trying to hit some interesting spots along the way. If this device seems a little cutesy, rest assured it is challenged and threatened as the story goes on.
As Ivy stays with distant relatives and family friends, others share their own stories about pregnancy and choice. For an Irish reader, there is something particularly striking and haunting about encountering the line “It was a different time” – in this country, far more likely to appear as a quasi-defence of abuse – to refer to an era when reproductive rights were greater rather than lesser. Caletti does occasionally, via older characters, get didactic on the “issue” here, but it feels forgivable in context; she also resists the temptation to turn a story like this into a polemic and instead offers us a nuanced, complex, messily-human narrative.
Messy humanity is also the focus of Amber Smith’s The Way I Am Now (Rock The Boat, £8.99), a dual-narrative account of two exes reconnecting and a follow-up (though it can be read as a standalone) to Smith’s debut novel, The Way I Used To Be, about the aftermath of rape. Eden is “better” now, allegedly, but still – as the trial approaches – feels like “He did what he did because I had done something to make it happen. I could never quite put my finger on what it was . . . My head could disagree all day, tell me it wasn’t my fault, but my heart knew, always, it was me.”
Her ex-boyfriend Josh, who has been through his own struggles, tries to be supportive, but is never quite sure how; the two stumble back and forth between friendship and love and misunderstanding in an authentic, compassionate look at the early college years. The delicate balance between romance and recovery is calibrated magnificently here.
Even more messy compassion and humanity emerges in Iranian-American author Abdi Nazemian’s latest title, Only This Beautiful Moment (Little Tiger, £7.99), in which three generations of an Iranian family struggle with – and against – the expectations of their time. We begin in 2019, where Moud explains, “Hiding pain is a deeply Iranian thing, and my dad is deeply Iranian”. On a trip to see his dying grandfather, things begin unfurling – about his own life, and his identity as a gay teenager about to visit a country where hiding that identity is a legal necessity, but also about his father’s experience as a student protester in the lead-up to the 1979 revolution, and his grandfather’s stint under contract to a giant Hollywood studio in 1939 while also enthralled by a queer underworld.
This is a stunner of a book that invites thoughtful consideration of countries that may be summarily dismissed as “bad” by western social-justice activists – epitomised by Moud’s boyfriend, who co-hosts a political podcast and frequently confuses empathy with condescension – while still grimly realistic when it comes to the consequences of being “found out” in such places.
If that’s all too much, gothic escapism is available in the form of Nicholas Bowling’s The Undying of Obedience Wellrest (Chicken House, £8.99), a gripping and evocative account of gravediggers and dark magic in 19th century Britain. As one character puts it, “Once upon a time, there was little difference between what we call science and what we call magic. Do they not have the same ends? To lay bare the things nature keeps hidden from us? To look beyond the veil, as it were?” Creepiness will, of course, ensue in this page-turning historical thriller.
Finally, French fantasy author Christelle Dabos filters classroom politics through a surrealist lens in Here, and Only Here (Europa Editions, £13.99), translated by Hildegarde Serle (who also translated Dabos’s acclaimed Mirror Visitor quartet). “There are tons of rules here. Too many to make sense of them most of the time. And almost every week, a new rule suddenly hits us, just like that, and we’re not sure from who and we’re not sure why, but a rule’s a rule, we follow it pronto.”
In this unnamed school, several young people (via a rotating narration) struggle and chafe against the strict social stratification, in which a “prince” rules the final year and must be obeyed at all costs, while other students vanish, walk on the ceiling, or become prophets. School serves as “the place where one disappears, where one murders, where one revolts, and where one is born all at the same time. As long as one survives the place.” It’s pleasingly weird, while also conveying an essential truth about these intense spaces: so often, the end of the world really does seem imminent. Because, in that moment, it is.
