The Party

By Elizabeth Day

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Paperback £8.99

Sophisticated, luxurious and decadent, Ben Fitzmaurice’s 40th birthday party is symbolic of his success in life. The party is hosted at Ben’s newly acquired residence, Tipworth Priory, personalised canapés and elaborate cocktails are in abundance and rumours circulate that the Prime Minister will be in attendance.

Despite the opulence of such an event, the book opens with the night being accounted for in a police station, as some as yet undisclosed occurrence has left someone in hospital in a critical condition. The man under question is Martin Gilmour, Ben’s ‘best friend’, their friendship dating back to school days.

In The Party, Elizabeth Day (former winner of the Betty Trask Award) has created a gripping novel full of suspense, leading the reader tantalisingly through the events of the night but also delving deep into the history of Ben and Martin’s relationship. Martin’s account is also contrasted with that of his wife, Lucy, who harbours no illusions about her husband’s infatuation with Ben and his world. As the police question Martin and scrutinise his past, sinister secrets emerge about his friendship with Ben, and the night of the party.

Life Among The Savages

By Shirley Jackson

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Paperback - £8.99

First published in 1953, Life Among The Savages is an autobiographical work from American writer Shirley Jackson. Best known for her tales of horror and mystery, Jackson enjoyed a prolific career and remains an inspiration for many writers today. Since she first broke onto the literary scene with her novel The Road Through The Wall, she has shocked and thrilled readers for decades.

Although Life Among The Savages diverges from such works, Jackson manages to record everyday events from her own life and furnish them with her wry sense of humour in a way that is highly entertaining. Whether it be going into hospital to give birth, dropping her daughter off at a birthday party, or taking her son to buy clothes, Jackson is able to take an ordinary occurrence and make it worth reading.

Jackson’s husband and children star as an amusing and enjoyable main cast; the author describes altercations over dinner, problems at school with children, parents and teachers, and the general imaginative elaborations of the whole family. This classic portrait of a mid-twentieth century American family still has the potential to delight and enthral.

The Tobacconist

By Robert Seethaler

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Paperback - £8.99

Robert Seethaler’s fourth novel The Tobacconist is a depiction of a young man’s struggle to find his place in pre-war Austria. As the novel begins, the teenage Franz Huchel is sent to Vienna, to take up the trade of tobacconist under his mother’s friend, Otto Trsnyek. 

Seventeen and unused to the ways of the city, Franz is set by his employer to learn the trade of a tobacconist, and he is captivated by one customer in particular: the aged professor, Dr Sigmund Freud. On Freud’s instigation, Franz is to fall passionately and desperately in love with the somewhat indifferent Bohemian girl, Anezka. 

Absorbed by his fascination with Freud, Franz finds that he and his employer are the focus of the growing anti-Semitic feeling manifested in Austria in the late 1930s, simply for agreeing to serve the Jewish doctor. He must struggle to defend the shop against physical and verbal attack, Otto against prosecution by the state, and Dr Freud against the spread of Nazism in the build up to the war.

Seethaler’s writing is beautiful and evocative, his characters are vivid, and his novel is well worth the read.