Fellow Creatures by Emma Lowther (Quercus £20, 416pp) is that rare thing, a genuinely dazzling debut from a young writer with an alert intelligence and a real ear for dialogue. Lowther grabs you with the opening line: ‘My life is a clerical error’. Her down-to-earth but elegant prose propels the plot at pace to its devastating conclusion.
Set in a London drama school, the story describes the struggles of Shannon Bell, a young working-class student from Yorkshire. Her fight to fit in and find a place in an ultra-competitive environment dominated by privilege centres on her obsession with the beautiful, upper-middle-class Victoria. Shannon’s jealousy of Victoria soon takes centre stage but the book is packed with other disagreeable and believable characters. The reader begins to sense doom but never guesses exactly what type of disaster is looming. Lowther writes with originality and steers clear of all cliches. A dazzling drama of jealousy and obsession.
My Sister’s Secret by Jane Corry (Penguin £9.99, 480pp)
Amy and Rosy are sisters bound by a dark past they have vowed never to tell. But the sanctity of their secret is threatened when Amy starts to see a new, good-looking therapist, Dr James Starling, who has his own share of secrets. The plot accelerates elegantly when Amy becomes infatuated with James and he decides to get to the bottom of Amy and Rosy’s secret. The sisters couldn’t be more different and James expertly inserts himself in their relationship in sinister ways. The book asks disturbing questions about trust. A good psychological take on the jeopardy of family secrets.
Then She Lied by Alice Leigh (Canelo Crime £9.99, 336pp)
The story opens with Jane, a girl in a panic who thinks she is being followed in New York. You are immediately hooked into the tension that Leigh maintains until the end of this well-told tale. We learn that ‘Jane’ walked into a police station 20 years ago wearing a blood-spattered hospital gown and suffering from amnesia. She was given a new name and the chance to forge a new identity. But then a body is discovered in a Long Island pond and suddenly Jane’s whole future is threatened by what she might remember about her past. As the police investigate, she is confronted with decisions that will shatter who she thinks she is and was. Original, with an emotionally convincing conclusion.
