PICK OF THE WEEK
Land of Big Numbers
Te-Ping Chen, Scribner, $29.99

A Chinese girl living in Arizona wonders why her American boyfriend of eight years won’t marry her. A man in jail tells the terrible story of how he ended up there. An old man living in regional China builds an aeroplane from painstakingly collected junk. A new, addictive, mood-changing kind of fruit appears on the market. A crowd of people are trapped in an underground train station for months. Realism slides unnoticeably into surrealism and fable as the stories build up a portrait of a country and its people. Te-Ping Chen lives in Philadelphia and works as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, having formerly been its correspondent in Beijing and Hong Kong. Her background both as a professional writer and as someone with a deep knowledge of contemporary China and its history are both obvious in this stunning debut collection of stories.

A Net for Small Fishes
Lucy Jago, Bloomsbury, $29.99

In 1613 the British courtier and poet Sir Thomas Overbury died in the Tower of London. For two years the death was assumed to be due to natural causes, but in 1615 it began to be suspected that he had been poisoned. An inquiry resulted in several people being imprisoned and four of them hanged. It’s far too complex a story to summarise, but Lucy Jago uses it as the basis for this historical novel focusing on the friendship between two women. Mistress Anne Turner is the wife, later the widow, of a London doctor, while Frances Howard is a member of the aristocracy. Like much historical fiction it drops from time to time into an excess of cod-historical dialogue, but the narrative is cinematic and intense. Jago focuses on the difficulty and precarity of women’s lives in that time and place, as well as on British society’s obsession with class and caste.

A Bright Ray of Darkness
Ethan Hawke, William Heinemann, $32.99

The hero and narrator of Ethan Hawke’s third novel is a movie star who has just wrecked his marriage with a burst of what seems fairly pointless infidelity to his soon-to-be-ex wife. Against this background, he is about to make his Shakespearean stage debut, playing the appropriately named Hotspur, and this is where Hawke’s writing really shines: the account, by an insider, of stagecraft and drama and the mysteries of acting is mesmerising and utterly convincing. Surely someone at William Heinemann must have protested that this novel’s title is a scrap of pretentious, overworked meaninglessness, but if they did, they were overruled. Hawke has written a skilful novel, both gripping and charming, about theatre, acting, masculinity, celebrity and, not least, marriage, but the many people who will be put off by the title will never get to read it.

The Smash-Up
Ali Benjamin, Riverrun, $32.99

In this portrait of a marriage and of a country in crisis, an American couple are struggling on a number of fronts. Both are self-employed, Zo as a maker of documentaries and Ethan as a web designer, but neither is feeling inspired by current projects and both are preoccupied with their 11-year-old daughter Alex, diagnosed with ADHD and a handful on a daily basis. The fourth member of their household is the millennial Maddy, an oddly attractive character whose favourite word is “whatever”. Against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s presidency, the #MeToo movement and the Justice Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, the wheels start coming off the household. The novel takes the setting and characters of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome as its starting point but it has its own power as a stand-alone read.