The literary fiction you should read: Waiting For A Party by Vesna Salt, The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe, The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

WAITING FOR A PARTY by Vesna Main (Salt £10.99, 208pp)

There’s a slight Mrs. Dalloway-esque atmosphere to this slim novel, which covers the hours pianist Claire spends waiting for her novelist boyfriend Martin’s birthday party.

He is about to turn 102, which makes the immature Claire a mere spring chicken, not least (she reflects) because her life really began in her sixties, when she first found sexual fulfillment.

As her thoughts circle around her numerous lovers – and her “found family” – she meditates on what makes for a good life and reevaluates her marriage: Was it as happy as she is determined to believe? And was her husband’s death a stroke, or perhaps an accident in which she had a hand?

A welcome look at old age that isn’t about its misery.

THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE by Jonathan Coe (Viking £20, 352pp)

Proof of My Innocence is now available from the Mail Bookshop

Since his time at Cambridge University, Chris Swann has been on a personal crusade to chart the course of conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. But when he comes across the plan of a secret think tank in the early days of the Truss government

If he pushes for the privatization of the NHS, his days are numbered.

Here, however, things take a turn for the meta, as Phyl, the disillusioned Gen-Z college graduate daughter of Chris’ old friend Jo, seeks both catharsis and money by turning his downfall into a potentially lucrative, cozy crime yarn.

The result takes us – somewhat unfortunately – in a different direction: a superficially related literary mystery surrounding a neglected novelist whose right-wing sympathies caused him to be denied the notoriety of his left-wing colleagues.

In addition to all the ingeniously twisted satirical entertainment, we get a defense of the art of fiction – which, based on this showing, seems safe enough in Coe’s hands.

THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker £25, 464pp)

The City and Its Precarious Walls is now available from the Mail Bookshop

In an afterword, the beloved Japanese author explains that this novel grew out of a 1980 novella that he came to regard as unfinished. By the time he addressed the issue, it was 2020 and the pandemic — which, he believes, may or may not be significant — was raging.

Readers will strongly suspect the former. The wintry atmospheric titular city appears to have been destroyed by a catastrophe of which its few residents have no memory. Time has no meaning while abandoned unicorns suffer as obscure scapegoats.

Moreover, the city itself is a shared hallucination, a joint construction of the nameless main character and his girlfriend, who insists that her “real” self lives there. Murakami’s favorite motifs multiply as the boundaries between the real and the unreal, the conscious and the unconscious, blur.

While the narrator’s amorous malaise hangs heavy throughout, this opaque allegorical doorstop ultimately feels like a November fog—both dense and insubstantial.