Reviews: The Most, The Ghost Lake, Anansi’s Gold

Jessica Anthony
Doubleday, £12.99, pp144

US author Anthony satirized Republican politics in her debut, Enter the Aardvark. In The Most, she takes a similar – if slightly sadder – tone with the 1950s American marriage, popping its upright, perma-smiling bubble with a portrait of two people who don’t really know each other at all. Billed as Mad Men meets On Chesil Beach, the brevity of The Most means it never really delivers on that promise. But by alternating chapters about insurance salesman Virgil and tennis champion turned homemaker Kathleen, it certainly delivers on page-turning interior secrets.

Wendy Pratt
The Borough Press, £16.99, pp272

An early draft of The Ghost Lake was longlisted for the Nan Shepherd prize, which celebrates emerging nature writers from underrepresented backgrounds. Three years on, the importance of this prize is evident with this remarkable memoir from working-class North Yorkshire poet Pratt, interrogating the place she is from and the person she has become through ancestry, grief, and landscape. The ghost lake is figurative, literal and a centring point, an extinct mass of water that holds life and death itself. “Time lapping against my feet,” as she puts it.

Yepoka Yeebo
Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp400 (paperback)

It has been called one of the most lucrative scams in modern history, and while Yeebo isn’t the first to explore the bizarre world of Ghana-born conman John Ackah Blay-Miezah, her debut finds intricate postcolonial contexts that skewer the greed at the heart of western elites. For nearly 20 years, Blay-Miezah convinced people that he was the custodian of a massive trust fund from the Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. All you had to do was invest to release the hidden billions. Everyone has seen this swindle before, but Yeebo makes this particular one completely compelling.