Heroines of Their Day
Flitting between Lahore and London, in times of war and peace, a host of high-spirited females stride through Elizabeth Buchan’s fiction roundup.
Laura Harrington’s Alice Bliss (Picador L12.99/ebook L15.99) is also about fracture, this time of a family. American reservist Matt Bliss has been sent to Iraq, leaving his wife and daughters to cope on the home front with varying degrees of success. Seen mainly through the eyes of 15-year-old Alice — whose relationship with her father is tenderly and movingly realized — she struggles to come to terms with this unlooked-for coming of age. “I had the luxury of not needing to believe in anything … but wish I believed in all of it,” she confesses to her mother. The setting and writing style is American through and through, but the relationships at its heart are recognizable anywhere.