Fire and fury

Everyone behaves badly in The Polyglot Lovers — no saving graces. It’s a complex, shifting structure of sex, self-hatred and misogyny, examining what the author calls ‘the violence in the male gaze’. Its blithe disregard for social norms and finer feelings is exhilarating; it’s pitiless and scathingly funny. The women invariably make wincingly bad decisions. Feminism for the Fleabag generation?

Nothing is simple here, in a world as disorientating as a hall of mirrors. The novel has three parts, each with a narrator and the story is told backwards as it teasingly reveals its leading character — not a person, but a manuscript that will change all three narrators’ lives. Ellinor — ‘I’m 36 years old and seeking a tender, but not too tender, man’ — is online dating. She meets up with an alcoholic literary critic who shows her a manuscript he thinks is a work of genius. Typewritten, it’s the only copy in existence (never a good idea).