Happening / Flotsam / The Burning Chambers / Reviews

In brief: Happening; Flotsam; The Burning Chambers – reviews

Annie Ernaux’s memoir is painful and politicised, Meike Ziervogel’s novel evokes grief in 1950s Germany and Kate Mosse delivers another intricate hit

Happening

Annie Ernaux
Fitzcarraldo, translated by Tanya Leslie, £8.99, pp80

In 1963, Annie Ernaux was a university student in Rouen when she found herself pregnant. This is her memoir, recreating the experience through revisiting diaries from that time. Her harrowing attempts to get an abortion at a time when it was illegal in France begin with seeking the advice of male friends, who only show prurient interest, and end in a life-threatening backstreet procedure. Ernaux, who was longlisted for the Man Booker International prize last week for The Years, writes with clear, controlled precision that is as vivid as it is devastating to read, and which connects the pain and indignity of her experience to class, power and patriarchy.

Flotsam

Meike Ziervogel

Salt, £9.99, pp128

Meike Ziervogel’s novel begins with a schoolgirl, Trine, the protagonist of this dark, coming-of-age drama, standing over the dead body of her brother, Carl, by the seashore. Trine lives with her mother, Anna, in a cottage on the German coast and they are grieving the loss of Carl even as Trine’s schoolfriends – and bullies – begin to question her reality: “So, was Carl real? Did he exist?” Ziervogel, who is also the founding publisher of Peirene Press, grew up in Germany and this taut, mysterious novel not only conjures female subjectivities and grief, but it also paints a haunting portrait of the country in the 1950s Germany, with its greater sense of loss, and the looming spectre of crimes committed during the war.

The Burning Chambers

Kate Mosse

Pan, £8.99, pp608 (paperback)

It is 1862 in the South African town of Franschhoek and a woman stands over the graves of her ancestors – Huguenot settlerswho “found themselves here after years of exile and wandering” – when a gun is pointed at her neck. So begins this sprawling, absorbing historical novel with its backstory in 16th-century southern France. The central adventurer, Minou Joubert, is a 19-year-old Catholic in love with a Huguenot leader. Serious themes are navigated, from the choices made in star-crossed love, to exile, displacement and religious violence but never at the expense of fast, fluid storytelling. This book – the first in a new series – confirms Mosse’s talent for writing commercial fiction that is underpinned by rigorous research, a keen intellect and vividly drawn worlds of ordinary women, and men, who find themselves in extraordinary historical circumstances.

THE GUARDIAN