Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.There is always some debate about how focus-grouped Barack Obama’s summer reading selections are, but Blue Hour by Tiffany Clarke Harrison (Verve Books, £9.99) was a thoughtful pick (the book appeared on Obama’s 2023 list and has just been published in the UK). The unnamed narrator, a photographer and teacher, is trying for a baby but is prone to miscarriage, which makes her question her fitness for motherhood. When police brutality fells Noah, a gifted student in her class, she wonders about the ethics of bringing a new Black life into a country so inimical to its thriving. Guilt assails her over the death in a car crash of her parents and younger sister, while tensions simmer with another sibling. Biracial herself, the narrator seems to teeter on America’s faultline. Yet Blue Hour is also a portrait of determined creativity and the attempt to live authentically in a changing world. It’s full of zest and keen observation, with a likeable, intimate tone that cuts through its potentially dark subject matter. The narrator initially bonded with her future husband over a copy of Metamorphoses. Ovid’s myth-telling also finds its way into Tyler Wetherall’s Amphibian (Virago, £20), a gripping study of adolescent self-discovery. Half-Greek teenager Sissy navigates puberty and girlhood with the tales she’s absorbed of Daphne, eternally running from rape, and the tragic Little Mermaid. As the new girl at school, Sissy is thrilled to attract the friendship of confident Tegan, but Tegan’s murky home set-up threatens to catapult Sissy into sexual scenarios no fairy tale can equip her for. Adding to the air of menace is the unsolved case of abduction of girls in their town. With a mixture of fear, glee and bravado, the pair chat online to unknown “boys” — who are probably, worldly Tegan proclaims, men pretending to be so. Wetherall evokes the psychological pressures of teenage friendships but also their fleeting highs, in a coolly observed portrait of the intense period when influence by peers easily trumps parental control. Fictional narratives also guide the central character of The Muslim Cowboy (Dead Ink, £10.99), a man known simply as “The American”, who wends his way through war-ravaged Iraq, fantasising about the stars of his favourite Wild West movies. Author Bruce Omar Yates structures his novel around pivotal examples of the genre, including Shane, True Grit and The Wild Bunch. The American (who isn’t) has the hat, the Colt, the jacket and the mount — only his is a camel, the delightfully doleful Hosti. Think Clint Eastwood with a vape. Like any cinematic drifter, he ambles into a town devastated by baddies and left in ruins. Foraging for his beloved Coca-Cola in a house cracked open, he encounters Nadia, a young girl who has lost her entire family. When the “bad men” — fundamentalist militia — return in their Humvee, the American vows to save her from kidnap and probably worse, in a clear echo of The Searchers, another of his favourite films. Yates plays with various Western tropes in thrilling episodes — an attack on a compound, a ride hitched on the railroad — while the variously coloured berets of the militant groups stand in for feathered headdresses and Stetsons. Morality is fuzzy here, just as in the best cowboy movies. The deracinated Scot at the centre of Americanitis by Miles Beard (Renard Press, £10) has a different but no less intense affinity with the US, where he pursues erotic adventures while ostensibly researching his doctoral thesis on jazz musician Charles Mingus. The novel purports to be the text written by “Miles Beard” at the behest of his therapist as he wrestles with guilt over the death of his wife, Sarah.Both versions — the author and narrator — are lecturers in English, and many of the conversations on Easton Ellis, Foster Wallace, Updike and Coetzee sound as though they’ve been taken directly from a module on modern fiction. The larky approach to autofiction (what’s true? what’s real?) gives the impression of an author smirking behind his hand, but if you don’t mind that, Americanitis is an involving literary jest. Over in LA, a wildfire is raging but in Jacquelyn Stolos’s Edendale (Dead Ink, £10.99) four inhabitants of a ratty bungalow to the north of the city are too obsessed with their own concerns to notice its creeping approach. Earnest Lyle is foolishly obsessed with his lazy, pretty girlfriend Egypt. Ropey is chill, guru-like and also attracted to Egypt, while diligent primary school teacher Megan wonders why men go for airheads — this particular airhead being her best friend. Their oblivious emotional tussles are related in a style that’s funny, sad, and highly astute. Stolos achieves a fine balance between sympathy and satire in her depiction of the quartet’s emotional ineptitude, revealing in a final twist, the inevitable conclusion of romantic passion with almost Austenian irony and bathos.Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
