The sense that there is something very wrong in Lily’s home begins right at the start of Ella King’s debut novel, Bad Fruit (HarperCollins, £14.99, pp320). There’s the shouting and the fighting and the unpleasantness between her parents, but it’s the little things King quietly slips in that leave your skin crawling. How Lily’s mama likes to drink juice that is past its sell-by date because “she likes the fizz in it, the sour tang”. And how someone – Lily – “has to taste it to make sure it hovers in that sliver of perfection between expired and putrid”. How Lily eventually escapes to look in the mirror at the “Chinese version” of herself, before taking off her makeup, taking out her tinted contact lenses, to reveal herself as her Singaporean mother’s “whitest child”, her real self concealed by a mother who wants her daughter to be just like her. Lily is 17, a scholarship girl at her south London school who is off to Oxford once term starts. In the meantime, she’s living at home with her parents, escaping the “too still, too threatening” house when she can, placating her mother’s rages when she can’t. But now Lily is having memories that she believes belonged to her mother, memories that cast doubt on everything her mother has told her about her childhood in Singapore. Is Lily losing her mind, or are there secrets here that may be dangerous to dig into? “I know I’m a bad person, that there is something coiled and rotten in me,” she thinks, as her life starts to unravel. This is disturbing, poignant and memorable all at once – an exploration of a very dark relationship between a daughter and her mother.
Carole Johnstone also explores the fragility and dangers of unreliable childhood memories in The Blackhouse (HarperCollins, £14.99, pp400), in which Maggie Mackay returns to the remote village of Blairmore in the Outer Hebrides after her mother’s death. When she enters a bar packed with locals, everyone is initially friendly, until one of them lurches towards her: “You’re Andrew fucking MacNeil. I’m right, right? Right?” Johnstone’s setup is eyebrow-raising at first. Maggie, it turns out, has believed since she was a child that she is Andrew MacNeil, a man she says was murdered in Blairmore years earlier. Her certainty brought a media storm down on the village, but there was no trace of an Andrew MacNeil, and besides, no one had been murdered.
