The Literary Fiction to take into the Easter weekend: Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn, Small Boat by Vincent Delacroix, Back in the Day by Oliver Lovrenski

A SPRAWLING, convoluted and underwhelming new novel from the author of the Patrick Melrose novels, which are one of the great literary portraits of outrageous family dysfunction.

Sebastian is maintaining only the faintest handle on reality following a breakdown, while Olivia is struggling to maintain even a semblance of a relationship with her emotionally wayward birth mother.

Linking the pair, in ways both are unaware, is Martin, who is Sebastian’s therapist and Olivia’s adopted father.

Yet St Aubyn has never regained his form since Melrose and this novel circles round and round itself in desultory search of a plot.

There are hints of St Aubyn’s scabrous wit in Sebastian’s psychotic episodes (the author is not one to pussyfoot around the subject of insanity) but precious little evidence of his lacerating intelligence and stylistic brio. Disappointing.

In his sensationalist, 2023 Booker-winning dystopia, Prophet Song, Paul Lynch asked readers to imagine the terrifying reality of migrants trying to cross treacherous seas.

It was a crude and unworthy novel; far better is this taut, tense novella from the French philosopher Vincent Delacroix, which looks at the same question from more ethically ambiguous perspectives.

The first and third sections are narrated by a French coast guard operator on whose negligent watch 27 migrants died when their boat capsized (a real-life event, which took place in 2021); the middle section is from the point of view of a nameless migrant aboard the boat.

Much of the novel grapples with the question of blame and where it lies – a question, the operator argues in a police interrogation, that has its roots in the geopolitical circumstances that prompted the migrants to leave their homes in the first place. A work of sickening power, it’s won a deserved place on the International Booker shortlist.

We don’t know much biographical detail about Ivor, the teenage narrator of this jagged novel by the Croatian Norwegian writer, on whom we are led to believe the character is loosely based.

We do know he is bright, loyal to his friends, self-destructive and, after the death of his beloved grandmother, is sinking rapidly into a drug-addled life of kicks, stabbings and violent crime.

Through jumpy, bite-sized chapters peppered with slang, we get a queasily voyeuristic impression of the dark side of Norway’s immigrant communities, and the ease with which one’s life can slide.

To some extent this is an exercise in literary adrenaline (you can gulp it down in one sitting) but its immersive brio is also hard to shake off.