Patty Yumi Cottrell’s blackly comic and sophisticated debut Sorry to Disturb the Peace (And Other Stories, £10) opens with Helen Moran learning that her brother —adopted, as she was — has committed suicide. Helen lives in New York, working with troubled teenagers who have dubbed her ‘Sister Reliability’. Against familial expectations she returns to Milwaukee to her adoptive parents’ home for the funeral. But Helen has not arrived simply to grieve:
Perhaps to investigate his death would revitalise my own life, and if I could communicate my eventual findings to them, it would strengthen and support the lives of my adoptive parents as well.
Despite her nickname and these somewhat inflated intentions, Helen proves to be anything but reliable, particularly in her perception of her place in the world. The charm of Cottrell’s book lies in the delightful, prickly dissonance between Helen’s voice, stuffed with outlandish utterances (such as boasting of her ‘very observational acumen combined with a genius for ethical practices’), and her actions. She is clearly deeply unhappy to return to Milwaukee but determined to suppress all negative feelings.
What follows is three days of Helen struggling to carry out her investigation. A repeated refrain, ‘I said to no one’, serves to highlight her isolation. Cottrell writes entertainingly — Helen notices her father’s eyes are ‘small and sad and brave, like those of an endangered bird flying through a forest at dusk’ — but the memorable impact of Sorry to Disturb the Peace, concealed beneath Helen’s self-delusion, comes from what lurks unsaid.
Eli Goldstone’s Strange Heart Beating (Granta Books, £12.99) also opens with a death: Seb’s wife, Leda, has been killed by a swan in a boating accident, though Seb finds it ‘almost too embarrassing to mention the absurd nature of her death’ — or perhaps Goldstone does.
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