Lean Fall Stand

"I was eagerly anticipating Jon McGregor’s new novel Lean Fall Stand— his fifth—and it didn’t disappoint. Like his Costa Prize-winning anti-mystery Reservoir 13 , it begins with a scene of high drama before allowing the consequences to spool out over the subsequent years. In Reservoir 13 , it was the search for a missing girl; in Lean Fall Stand it is a freak accident during an Antarctic expedition. The pitch and intensity of that opening scene is never revisited, but serves instead as fuel to fire the reader’s interest in the slower unravelling. What marks the novel apart is the strange, moving and often funny evocation of the speech and thought patterns of a stroke patient—which takes an almost experimental form on the page—and the ambivalence of the patient’s wife, who finds herself unexpectedly swapping a career in academia for a new life as a live-in carer. Striking and unusual. Lisa Taddeo—author of Three Women , the blockbuster 2019 study of desire and abjection — has made her first foray into fiction with the confrontational novel Animal . In some ways it’s a continuation of her work in Three Women, touching on similar themes—notably, the domination of women by men—but also a corrective. Joan, the protagonist, does not simply lie down and take it. She hurts, but also hurts in return. It’s a book of female rage and sometimes graphic violence. Buckle up: this book goes dark and deep."