"The Names" by Florence Knapp

 The prologue shows Cora going to register the birth of her newborn son. What should she call him? Her husband insists on Gordon, his name and, by tradition, the name of first-born boys in their family. But Cora favours Julian and her young daughter Maia suggests Bear. This is a high-stakes decision because Cora's husband is a man who controls his family by physically beating his wife. The rest of the novel follows Bear, Julian and Gordon in their separate lives.

At first I thought that this took the theory of nominative determinism to extremes (I myself am called a name that is not on my original birth certificate and I don't believe it has had a significant effect on my life). But actually this is more about the butterfly effect, the theory that a small change has repercussions that cascade through time. So that the husband's different reactions to his son's name is what drives the story.

I loved the Prologue because of the wonderful descriptions of a storm and its aftermath:

• “Outside, gusts lever at the fir trees behind the house and burst down the side passage to hurl themselves at the gate. Inside, too, worries skitter and eddy.” (Prologue)
• “Cora feels a draft of cold air, as though it's attached itself to his clothing and followed him up the stairs.” (Prologue)
• “The sounds of the storm meter out the minutes of night unravelling into day.” (Prologue)
• “A few doors up, a man's shirt is caught on a privet hedge, pegs still pinched at its shoulders.” (Prologue)

Wow! I thought. If it continues like this, I'm going to love it.

But I was swiftly disillusioned. My main problem was with the antagonist, the husband. He was a monster, he was an ogre, he was a dragon, he was Mr Hyde (although professionally he was Dr Jekyll), he was the embodiment of evil. He was said to be a wonderful GP although this was hard to believe because he was painted so black in his domestic life. For me, he felt two dimensional. There was little explanation for his wickedness, other than the fact that his neurosurgeon father was disappointed in him for becoming a GP. There was negligible exploration of his character; he was always a symbol of the very real problem of domestic abuse. I wondered whether the author realised his fundamental implausibility which was why he was swiftly sidelined in two of the three ensuing narratives, becoming a menacing bogeyman. In short, I felt that this was an issue-driven novel rather than about a character.

I also had problems with the structure of the novel, a sort of bildungsroman triptych. It is divided into seven year sections and further divided into subsections, each bearing the name of the boy (Bear, Julian or Gordon) whose story we are following. These sections are further divided so that the story is told from the limited third person perspective of the principal characters, mostly Cora, Maia and the boy. The present tense is used. This means that the reader is required to follow three storylines in which many of the characters (not just the major characters but also some of the minor ones) reappear but with different trajectories. I sometimes struggled to remember, for example, who Maia was involved with in this particular story, and whether a particular incident belonged to the storyline of Bear, Julian or Gordon.

This division of the narrative into three also meant that the three different plots become more prominent, and the fact that we were following at least five major characters left the author little time to develop them as characters.

Nevertheless, I developed a degree of empathy for at least two of the sons and there were a couple of lump-in-the-throat moments. So the novel was a success in those terms. I just felt it could have been more.

Selected quotes:

• “Sometimes big men feel small inside.” (Prologue)
• “He remembers his father's hands on the steering wheel, big and firm, a smattering of hair on the backs of them.” (1994; Julian)
• “Mr Radley chats to Maia, but his eyes are drawn back to his wife as though she is a slice of chocolate cake and he is politely waiting for the moment when Maia leaves, and he will be free to tuck in.” (1994; Gordon)
• “Julian can almost hear the sadness in her footsteps as she retreats down the hall.” (2001; Julian)

I suspect this will be popular with those who like their novels to be about important issues and are less worried about character development.

February 2026;343 pages

Published by Phoenix Books in 2025.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

I suspect that one of the inspirations behind this book is the novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

"The Burning Bride" by Manoj Kerai

This debut novel aims certainly succeeds in its aim to raise awareness about the way a marriage can be used by some people in India to extort money from the family of the bride; in 2013 over 8,000 women in India were murdered for a dowry despite the fact that dowries are illegal.

The first few pages set the scene. Avantika and her husband have all but bankrupted themselves to get daughter Uma married to Vijay, son of a wealthy and powerful family. But then Vijay's mother, Madhu, who has already pushed the cost of the wedding as high as it can go, asks for more money.

Uma, living with Vijay and his family, is trapped. She can't go back to her parents: she would be a shamed woman and never able to marry again. But she is entirely in Madhu's power. Angry words and humiliation slowly escalate into physical abuse. Even when she has a daughter, the bullying continues. And no one is talking about Vijay's first wife, or about his present girlfriend. It seems no one can help her.

Carefully plotted, the tension in this novel builds to an exciting climax.

The story is told from the perspectives of nine women. Of these, Alice, Vijay's English business partner and mistress, is a distinct voice, perpetually angry at the sexist behaviour of 'dickhead' men. But the Indian women, though they have different back stories and different issues, all seem to have the same interests (from the evidence of this novel virtually all Indian women are obsessed with food, TV soap operas, and what other people think of them) and the same voice.

This was the thing I found most challenging about this book. It is written in a very 'flat' writing style. Issues are explained and dissected very clearly, whether in descriptions or in dialogue or in the thoughts of the characters. But there is no emotional punch to the writing. For example, when Nilambari recalls drinking lassi spiked with cannabis which resulted in her being subjected to a mass rape "She realised she was naked and her body ached everywhere.  ... Nilambari let out a pained howl as the memories returned to her .... After lamenting for a while she realised she had to get away before anyone came back." An incredibly traumatic event is written up in a very matter of fact way as if by a disinterested observer in an academic journal rather than the character who suffered the events. Whilst not seeking the purple prose of a Gothic novel, I found this style rather cold. If I had woken up naked and realised I had been raped I doubt I would have been capable of thinking in sentences, let alone well-formed sentences like these.

Perhaps it is the way books are written in India.

But to an English reader the way the characters seemed to analyse their own predicaments in such a detached manner made them seem two-dimensional. Even though Madhu's back story was chronicled, including her humiliation when she was a new bride and the abortions forced on her and her terrible insecurity when she became a young widow, she still emerged as a pantomime villain. Uma had victim written all over her; the fact that she had been working as a nurse before her marriage seemed to have no impact whatsoever when she was entrapped by, among other things, her own traditional values. Avantika her mum thought only of her status in society. Amrita was the personification of vengeance. Although most of the characters changed in the way they behaved, the only character who showed signs of evolving attitudes was Vijay's sister Charu.

As a result, although I sympathised with Uma's plight, I didn't empathise with Uma.

One of the difficulties facing a book set in a foreign country is the language. There a lots of Gujerati (?) words in this book that I didn't know before, for example beti, lakh, baa, bapuji; foreign words appear on almost every page. Some authors might try to translate them, which could easily ruin the flow of the narrative, but this author allows the reader to understand them from the context and this is mostly very successful (although I did long for a translation when whole sentences appeared).

This is an intricately plotted book with plenty of tension which opens a window into the abuses which can occur when appearances matter more than being good.

September 2016; 434 pages