Dodgers by Bill Beverly; Sunset City by Melissa Ginsburg; The Turning Tide by Brooke Magnanti; The Other Mrs Walker by Mary Paulson-Ellis; The House of Fame by Oliver Harris
Told in precise, economical prose, Bill Beverly’s debut novel Dodgers (No Exit, £14.99) is the story of 15-year-old East, a foot soldier in LA’s street-level army of drug peddlers, who is tasked with killing a witness before a case comes to trial. Together with his feral, trigger-happy 13-year-old half-brother Ty, and two other young men, East, who has never been outside his home city before, travels across Wisconsin to commit the murder, but – as might be expected – things do not go entirely to plan. The book is a mashup of rite of passage and road trip, with the four main characters at odds not only with each other, but also with a country that is entirely alien to them. The quiet, watchful East, at once world-weary and naive, is a heartbreakingly believable character, and, although it could be argued that the drama peaks too early, giving a sense of anticlimax, Dodgers is well worth the read.
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