Books in brief: A Life and a Half, Ruth and The Course of the Heart

A Life and a Half: The Unexpected Making of a Politician by Chris Bryant (Bloomsbury, £25)

This absorbing memoir is the kind of book those who bemoan career politicians will love – it stops when Chris Bryant becomes the MP for Rhondda in 2001. Instead, it focuses on his formative years growing up with an alcoholic mother and absent father, suffering sexual abuse, and being ordained into the priesthood. A Life and a Half is perceptive, revealing and full of suppressed trauma, but it can also take on the quality of a mischievous confessional, particularly when recounting wild times in Latin American Christian ministries. Unorthodox but beguilingly human.

Ruth by Kate Riley (Doubleday, £16.99)

There’s something arrestingly odd about Kate Riley’s debut, and not just because it’s set in America’s religious communes. Ruth has all the repressed horror one might expect, as its titular protagonist grows up in these isolated spaces (Riley herself lived in a similar commune). But at the same time, there’s acid wit and irony at play here too, which makes Riley’s central character simultaneously a passive observer and agonised, misunderstood critic. Riley’s first book, according to the jacket, is also her last. Strange.

The Course of the Heart by M John Harrison (Serpent’s Tail Classics, £10.99)

First published in 1992, this new edition paperback (with an introduction by Julia Armfield) is unashamedly capitalising on the novel’s status as a cult classic. A new generation will love discovering it for themselves: it has the giddy thrill of youth, as three Cambridge students perform a life-changing ritual act – one that, with the passing of time, they all try to psychologically escape. There’s plenty of terror and metaphysical transcendence, but it’s never silly; instead, M John Harrison unpicks the very notion of escapism.

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