Second Place

"Rachel Cusk’s new book, Second Place, has also been hotly anticipated. Cusk is best known for her Outline trilogy, those cool and exacting works of autofiction . Second Place, too, draws from life, in as much as the main character ‘M’ is a writer who lives in an isolated marsh—not unlike Cusk herself—and the narrator gestures towards some “global pandemonium” making travel difficult. But the main thrust of the plot is derived from, or adapted from, a 1933 memoir by the American salonnière Mabel Dodge Luhan, who invited the writer D.H. Lawrence to live at her arts colony in New Mexico. Like Luhan, Cusk’s M writes to a painter she admires, inviting him to live in a guest house on her property. Like Luhan, M hopes that this this celebrated artist will reflect her life and landscape in some way through his art, something she does not feel qualified to do. And—like Luhan’s relationship with Lawrence—this relationship cannot be anything other than fraught and parasitic. But who, exactly, is the parasite? I loved Rosa Rankin Gee’s Dreamland , a bleakly beautiful queer love story set in a dystopian England of the near future. In it, Chance, a scrappy young woman, fights to keep her family’s heads above the water (sometimes literally) in Margate, a seaside resort that is slowly being reclaimed by rising seas. It’s intense and Atwood-esque, cranking up the tension as it goes, until its spectacular final sequence. I also enjoyed Sue Rainsford’s Redder Days , and indeed am quoted on the cover describing it as “a masterpiece of literary horror”—so it is. Set in a paranoid, possibly post-apocalyptic world, Redder Days features a failed commune in a Centralia -like landscape, where smoke billows from the ground and members patrol the perimeters alert for incomers carrying a virus known as ‘the redness’. Information is drip fed in this occasionally cryptic, always atmospheric novel."