John of John by Douglas Stuart
In John of John, Douglas Stuart returns to familiar, deeply affecting ground. With Shuggie Bain (2020) and Young Mungo (2022) he explored family pressure, masculinity, shame and desire. This time, though, he moves the story from Glasgow to the Hebridean Isle of Harris.
Closeted gay man John-Calum Macleod, broke and unsure what his art school education has really given him, returns to the croft where he grew up. There, he’s sucked once again into the old family structure he’s sought to escape. He’s caught between his father, John — a sheep farmer, weaver and respected figure in the local Presbyterian church — and his grandmother Ella, who has spent years keeping a difficult peace inside the house. They are surrounded by a small, tightly knit and deeply religious community in which the pressure to conform is stifling.
But Cal has changed, even if home has not. He returns with a sharper sense of himself and a growing awareness that the life expected of him may be one he cannot live. His father is unsettled by his son’s appearance, his independence and what he sees as a refusal to be spiritually “saved”.
Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker
Mónica Ojeda’s Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, translated by Sarah Booker, is described as “a blazing, psychedelic novel about girlhood, violence and the loss of innocence”. Set in the near future, it’s the story of two Ecuadorian girls — Noa and Nicole — who flee Guayaquil to attend a week-long, retro-futuristic festival at the foot of an active volcano. There, narcotics, technoshamanic rituals and collective hallucinations blur the lines between fun and real danger.
Ojeda has become one of the most talked-about Latin American writers of her generation, especially for fiction that blends horror, adolescence, violence and the body. Her earlier works include La desfiguración Silva (2014), Nefando (2016) and Jawbone (Mandíbula) (2022).
The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett
Set in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, during the Depression, Kathryn Stockett’s The Calamity Club is her long-awaited second novel after The Help (2009). Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has been learning to fend for herself ever since her mother disappeared and never came back.
Stuck in the town orphanage and already written off as one of the “unadoptable” girls, Meg has had to grow up fast. Her life begins to change when she meets Birdie, a young woman who arrives in Oxford intent on confronting her socially elevated sister who left her poor family behind in search of a better life. As Birdie starts to see cracks in that polished world, she crosses paths with Charlie, a woman worn down by grief and hardship, with little left to lose.
From there, Stockett builds a story about women thrown together by circumstance who find loyalty, courage and a measure of power in one another. The Mississippi setting will naturally bring The Help to mind, but at more than 650 pages, The Calamity Club is broader in scope and filled with humour. Lurking just under the surface is a frightening sense of the risks women take when they push back in a town ruled by appearances and hypocrisy.
Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel
Pepper Mills, 77, has recently been moved by her three adult children into Vista View, a retirement community in Austin, Texas. At first reluctant to move, she starts to make new friends and even falls in love. When she becomes ill, her family fear the worst. But what’s even more alarming than cancer or dementia is that Pepper is pregnant.
As news spreads, Pepper finds herself at the centre of public scrutiny, with the media, activists and medical researchers all trying to claim a stake in her story while she struggles to work out what happens next. Frankel uses that pressure to ask larger questions about bodily agency, family and dignity, and about what happens when control over your own life is taken away.
Frankel’s earlier novels include This Is How It Always Is (2017), One Two Three (2021) and Family Family (2024). Known for turning ethically charged subjects into emotionally rich fiction, Frankel demonstrates that same skill in Enormous Wings. What might have seemed designed purely to shock instead reads like a warm, politically alert novel about dignity and the way life can still change dramatically even when we’re old, but not dead yet.
Attention-Seeking Behavior by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo
British Greek writer Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s Attention-Seeking Behavior is one of the more interesting literary debuts of the month. Described as “a confession from a liar”, the story is told by an unreliable narrator whose version of events cannot be taken at face value. She tries to sort herself out in therapy while in a relationship with “Normal Ben”. As she tells stories about Ben, her boss and even a body found in the park, she keeps blurring the line between confession and invention.
That gives the novel its tension from the start. How do we know the difference between truth and lies? What does it mean to be called attention-seeking, especially in relation to women and self-presentation? And what happens when misrepresentation becomes a form of narrative power? At 200 pages, this compact, intellectually playful novel has a dark, deliciously comic bite.
This article was first published in Business Day.
