Struggle for freedom

Catherine Taylor and David Jays on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | The Lives of Strangers | The Bones in the Womb | Jim Giraffe | Bad Influence | Home from the Vinyl Cafe

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey (Penguin Classics, £7.99)

The incontinent poetry of the Beats, the Kinsey report on sexual behaviour and the dark spectre of the cold war provided the shadowy back-drop to one of the most provocative works of fiction of the 1960s. McMurphy, an amoral trickster, is the cuckoo in the nest of a closed ward in an Oregon mental hospital, presided over by the termagant Nurse Ratched. With his fellow patients heavily medicated and electro-shocked into submission, McMurphy's anarchic attempts to subvert the system that has incarcerated them soon engages him in an increasingly desperate struggle. Inspired by Kesey's own student experiences as an aide in a mental institution and reissued with his apposite illustrations, the novel endures; more than a curio of the counterculture, it remains a blistering indictment of government control over individual freedom.

The Lives of Strangers, by Chitra Divakaruni (Abacus, £7.99)

"Drink bottled water at all times, and don't get involved in the lives of strangers," Leela's mother warns her as she sets off for India, the land of her ancestors. But involved is just what the "American-soft", laconic Leela becomes, swapping her pristine apartment and ordered existence for the "murky, primal lake" of an unfamiliar culture. And during a spiritual retreat to Kashmir, pity for an older woman shunned as an outsider awakens a dormant empathy, with catastrophic results. In California, a widowed grandmother, exiled from Calcutta, finds her traditional ways an embarrassment to her son and his family. In Vermont, an initially reluctant college student reinvents himself as American - deliberately breaking contact with his dying mother back in India. Chitra Divakaruni's stories cross continents and generations to ask: "is there ever a way back across the immigrant years, across the frozen warp of the heart?"

The Bones in the Womb, by Patricia Tyrrell (Phoenix, £6.99)

As a three-year-old, Cate was abducted from a campsite by Les, a homeless drifter, while her parents lay sleeping. Every year since then Les has telephoned her mother to inform her that her daughter is still alive. Now Cate is 15 and harbours a horrific secret, and Les urgently wants - and needs - to return her. Journeying from the arid scrubland of Arizona to the deep forests of Virginia, Cate squares up to rejection, loss and guarded acceptance. The potent bond between her and Les is soon gnawed away at by the fierce, mutually protective love growing between sophisticated mother and tearaway teenager, both "dry and tough as the dried cornfields". Despite its excruciating title (Tyrrell originally published the book as The Reckoning), this short, powerful novel of shifting loyalties and unlikely complicity is a timeless tale of backwoods America, beautifully offset by Cate's diffident, oblique narration.

Jim Giraffe, by Daren King (Vintage, £6.99)

"I have of late been visited by a ghost giraffe," confides our narrator, science-fiction writer Scott Spectrum. Scott has graph-paper trousers, alien-shaped slippers and a sexless marriage to Continence, a placid suburban life in need of enlivening. Enter (through the wardrobe) Jim the ghost giraffe, smelling of nature and shaking up his host with tough love ("If I weren't a ghost, I would wallop you on the kisser"). Through acrimonious banter and relentless mockery, Jim exhorts Scott to defy sexual repression as an unorthodox cure for brain cancer. He claims to be Scott's saviour and shares gems of jungle sex etiquette: "take her from behind, then run away." Would you take advice from a phantom wearing pants on his head and Velcro on his hooves (so that he can lift pints)? Thought not. Although King opens with exuberant invention, like Donnie Darko revised by Viz, his mucky fantasy increasingly stretches out like a giraffe's neck.

Bad Influence, by William Sutcliffe (Penguin, £6.99)

Ben and Ollie are best friends - they muck about, they chuckle, they're 10 years old. The first time Carl appeared in Ben's life, he briefly went psycho with a chainsaw, but suddenly he has become their friend, and Ben isn't sure how it happened. Carl is crazy, but not in a good way. He lives in a scary, flaky house, he's excessive and unpredictable: but he does make things happen. Not always good things. Sutcliffe evokes days of boredom cut with terror, where the dynamics of friendship shift with devastating finality. Increasingly, Carl's influence skewers the friends into unrecognisable behaviour. Sutcliffe's plot slowly grabs your attention; his style can scamper around like an over-eager puppy, and his tone of naive precocity flickers, but every so often it hits the bull's eye - as with the teacher who "says we're going to do the whole history of everything, starting with the Egyptians. This happens every year, and I've never got past the Romans."

Home from the Vinyl Cafe, by Stuart McLean (Granta, £9.99)

Some consider McLean to be Canada's Garrison Keillor: small town, small scale, big heart. In these homespun stories based on his broadcasts, Dave runs the Hornbyesque record store of the title (motto: "We may not be big, but we're small"). McLean's shtick is minor domestic crisis - hubby forgets to buy the Christmas turkey, daughter asks a boy out for Valentine's Day - wryly resolved. Pretentious neighbours may hold intimidating Christmas drinks ("Polly Anderson's crackers were better dressed than half the people at the party"), a misconceived car trip may end up stuck between marching bands in a street parade, but the fundamental things apply. After an unhappy brush with the stars in LA, Morley reflects, "those people, they don't know a thing about laundry or kids or running a house". Yeah, take that, Angelina. These tales may be cute in broadcast form, but coming at you on the printed page, this is way too much heartwarm.

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