Todd Almond
Methuen Drama, £25, pp280
With Bob Dylan flavour of the month thanks to the new Timothée Chalamet biopic, Todd Almond’s fascinatingly detailed examination of the recent Broadway staging of the musical Girl from the North Country could not be published at a better time. Although Conor McPherson’s play was not about Dylan himself, its use of his songs was crucial to its success, and Almond’s book, which uses extensive interviews to explore what it was like to stage a show in New York amid Covid, has a similarly quixotic, rebellious spirit at its heart.
How to Sleep at Night
Elizabeth Harris
Borough Press, £16.99, pp304
Journalist Elizabeth Harris’s debut novel is a sharp and often funny study of modern America mores, based round a simple question: if your loving partner did something that horrified you, what would your reaction be? Bleeding-heart liberal teacher Gabe is stunned when his husband Ethan announces his intention of running for Congress as a Republican candidate, and the knock-on effect hits Ethan’s sister Kate, a newspaper reporter thrown into her own tailspin when her ex-girlfriend re-enters her life. Readers of all political hues will enjoy Harris’s witty and well-paced narrative.
A Sign of Her Own
Sarah Marsh
Tinder Press, £10.99, pp432 (paperback)
Fiction often struggles to convey the challenges of sensory deprivation, so it is to Sarah Marsh’s immense credit that her first novel manages it so effectively. Marsh, who is herself deaf, explores the condition through the prism of a relationship between its hearing-impaired narrator Ellen Lark and Alexander Graham Bell, who would later invent the telephone but here appears as an ambitious young man who is attempting to help deaf people to speak. Ellen is no hapless victim, Bell no conventional saviour, and Marsh’s fine book conveys their unorthodox dynamic superbly.
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