The international list

From Britain’s music scene of the 90s to China’s Cultural Revolution to the publishing worlds of New York and London, a treat of drama and comedy

Screamingly funny critic and columnist CAITLIN MORAN follows her pithy 2011 feminist primer, How to Be a Woman, with her novel HOW TO BUILD A GIRL (Ebury, 352 pp). Her narrator Johanna, growing up fat and on benefits in a shambolic Wolverhampton council house mysteriously bereft of mirrors, has one ambition when we first meet, at 14: ‘Anyone could have sex when they’re sixteen. Try doing it when you’re fourteen, hang out only with your brothers and wear your mum’s bra.’

Reinventing herself as Dolly Wilde, by 16 she drops out of school and is smoking, drinking and sexcapading with rockstars in London. Halfway through, she finally gets her first kiss: ‘[I]t was the first time anyone had ever not kissed to the left or to the right of me—but gone right into the centre, as men and women do.’ It sparks an epidemic. Dolly drinks up life, building herself anew with eyeliner, top hat and a filthy mouth. For, she is now a much feared music critic at D&Me, writing only snarky reviews after one early rave about soulmate John Kite, fellow class warrior and renegade.

Many concerts, moshpits and one giant penis later—the latter inciting a hilarious after-party featuring a bout of cystitis and a Withnail and I codeine moment—Dolly has been schooled. She must find her own way, even as she worries about her impoverished family. Behind the background score of masturbation and ambition is a young woman with lovely lines like: ‘All my siblings were sliding out of the doors, like butter across a hot pan’—even as she describes watching herself come, reflected on a CD. The narrator never lets up, at her most vulnerable. And when she oversteps, she is surefooted, stretching breakfast table family comedy to a glimpse of your ex-rocker dad’s balls as he parades in your old dressing gown. Moran, with her half a million Twitter followers, is that kind of wicked genius.

But the shouty tweet-ese makes for a lingering slightness, heightened by the slightly irksome ‘build a girl’ conceit, which channels self-help spinoffs. As a novel, this Buddha of Suburbia for working-class women falters. But wonderfully, knowing it is more fun and honest than anything you may read this year.

Taxi driver Wang Jun is one of the many living an ordinary life in Beijing ahead of the 2008 Olympics, animated by the intimate conversations of his passengers and anchored by his wife Lida and daughter Echo in THE INCARNATIONS (Transworld, 384 pp). But an anonymous figure, the Watcher, is here to remind him they have known each other over a thousand years, in many other lives: ‘[T]o have lived six times, but to know only your latest incarnation, is to know only one-sixth of who you are. To be only one-sixth alive.’

In letters, this intimate grows closer, telling him of these other lives, taking him back to the Tang Dynasty, the Opium War and the Mongol invasion; to the age of the Red Guard and the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. For, this is a story about the relentlessness of memory—even in a nation keen to forget its past and focus on the future—and of history. Some men and women may live the same mistake over and over, and never leave the cycle. Nicely positioned against this recalling is contemporary China, as alive and vital as stereotypes about its anodyne culture. The story of a spirit-bride is mixed with contemporary young China; phrases like ‘da feiji’ (beating the aeroplane, or masturbating) are smoothly mixed in with the quaint tone of the Watcher.

This is an outsider’s tale with a native’s love of the old days. The author, SUSAN BARKER, who grew up in east London and now lives in Shenzhen, gives us contemporary China in its sombre reality; less colourless than the stereotype, but perhaps drawing too much colour from its past. Not since Jung Chang’s Wild Swans has there been such a visceral retelling of the old days. We need more stories like this from the People’s Republic.

It’s the tale you will want to read even if you didn’t work your first job in publishing, riding in and out of Brooklyn. In MY SALINGER YEAR (Bloomsbury, 272pp), one of the most enjoyable memoirs to come out of the Madison Avenue offices of the American literary world, JOANNA RAKOFF pays tribute to good old-fashioned publishing. In this peerlessly decadent world full of pedal-driven dictaphones, whisky minks and smokey, wood-panelled offices, the agents of the greats sustain a world where letters to JD Salinger arrive regularly and are answered, dutifully. The narrator, gauche young Joanna, is awed by her proximity to Fitzgerald and Thomas but recognises, after one troubled weekend wherein she reads all of his oeuvre, that Salinger is the outlier of a rarefied world. In it, ‘those names on the spine represented something else, something else that leads people to speak in hushed voices, something that I’d previously thought had absolutely nothing to do with books and literature: money’. The old ways may have to go, she sees.

A likeable heroine, Joanna is vulnerable in this ambitious world she has managed to succeed in. Yet, the reader is anxious on her behalf. Not least because of her love life, made up of a shadowy ex and mean aspiring writer Don, who pens cheesy-sounding male fantasy narratives but acts superior. Perhaps most direly, he finds them a house so awfully bohemian they have to keep the oven on to keep warm! This is perhaps the least compelling aspect— why can’t she just leave? —of what is otherwise a crisp, elegant memoir.

“If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.” Meet the residents of the roiling literary world of JK ROWLING’S latest murder mystery. Rowling’s turn as Robert Galbraith has been enjoyed and criticised, as the Harry Potter creator changed genre and continued to sell. Now, she dials up the drama in a publishing murder mystery that naughtily places the players of her champion industry in grave peril: detective Cormoran Strike returns in THE SILKWORM (Hachette India, 464 pp).

The chain-smoking agent with the hacking cough, the literary party laced with gossip and scandal, the groupies hovering around snotty writers; Galbraith/ Rowling has this milieu in ripe focus. It all centres around Bombyx Mori (literally ‘silkworm’), a creepy book foretelling the brutal disembowelment of its author, Owen Quine.

This Jacobean crime seems to originate in bad publishing etiquette: Crossfire is sent a manuscript Roper Chard was meant to see exclusively, setting off the mother of all industry upheavals. When a publisher bemoans the future, saying we need more readers, not writers, the humour turns black indeed. For the eccentric, cape-wearing author—of the “so-bad-he’s good category ”—is offed. A decaying outlier inciting old-fashioned chaos in a new-fangled world, Quine is surrounded by seven plates and cutlery as staged corpse: a revenge feast.

All terribly dire if it weren’t for our hero. Given to anguish over a mercurial ex, hogging biscuits and lots of creosote-coloured tea, Strike is a loveable, grumbling ogre. Openly annoyed with his friend’s bratty kids and admitting to using a young woman for work, he limps into our hearts (Strike is a disabled soldier). Rowling has grown into her own as Galbraith, if clunky at times; some of Strike’s interplay with winsome assistant Robin feels trite, some of the evil too evil, the hermaphrodite theme too overplayed. Ultimately, the plot loses its focus. But the excellent jibes at publishing and patient detailing fill out its sails. Full of pub crawls at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese and slick interrogations at the Groucho Club, here is a cosy London murder mystery.

(This is the first of a monthly roundup of the best of international publishing)

Caitlin MoranJK RowlingSusan Barker