First novels

A sari state of affairs

On the one hand, you have well-meaning Westerners in the East; on the other, you have a book Richard Desmond and his lawyers will devour - Hephzibah Anderson rounds up the latest debut fiction

A young woman moves to Delhi to pursue an affair with her friend's married uncle; a teenager bides her time in Bombay while she swots for Berkeley; a graduate seeks to atone for privilege by working with Aids babies in Bangkok, only to become entangled with the spoilt son of a local businessman. Lucky or not, these are some of the girls whose lives fill Lucky Girls (Picador £10.99, pp240), Nell Freudenberger's brilliant collection of short stories.

They may not always start out as the protagonists - they are a voice down a long-distance telephone line, a late appointment - but even when the narrative appears to belong to another, it is drawn slowly, surely, into their orbit. These girls are lucky inasmuch as they are Americans living, mostly, in India or southeast Asia. It's all relative and the stories' dynamism derives from the friction between worlds, not just East and West but also the pretend-adult and the adult, the romanticised and the actual.

Freudenberger inhabits all these tales with empathy, peering in on what one character terms 'the incredible privacy of people's experience', cutting between viewpoints male and female, old and young, and allowing each to illuminate the other.

In the title story, the protagonist allows herself to be dressed in a sari and bracelets by her friend, Gita, and her sisters. They braid her hair and paint her palms, but they forget to teach her how to walk in the sari. It later occurs to her that it was an elaborate practical joke, 'like dressing up a cat or a dog'. More gravely, the do-gooding girl in 'The Orphan' flourishes her Thai whenever possible and translates her rape as a misunderstanding, 'a cultural thing, actually'.

There are no weak stories in Lucky Girls, yet a couple dazzle more than others. 'Letter From the Last Bastion' is the longest and, within its lines, story after story is enfolded with the exquisite economy of origami. Together, they form a whole of heartaching eloquence, yet each different strand has the resonance of a far longer work. A novel will surely follow. Already these surprising, generous stories signal the arrival of a born writer.

Poor-but-merry Irish childhoods are such stock literary fodder that they have assumed a fabled quality, and stockbroker-turned-screenwriter Hugh O'Donnell does not fight this in a debut whose title, 11 Emerald Street (Jonathan Cape £10, pp198), is also the home of its child hero.

'It always seemed like a magical address, "11 Emerald Street",' Robbie declares. 'Even our street sign was magic. Deep green with "Emerald Street" in white letters - a bit rusty, but perfectly placed high up on the side wall of the corner house for practising your hurling with a worn tennis ball.'

So begins a series of bright, good-natured vignettes in which Robbie tells us about his pet dog, his drunk but gentle Da and his asthmatic Ma, painting a Dublin childhood of street soccer, Hail Marys, and 'crisp and banana and tomato sandwiches'.

O'Donnell's narrative comes into its own when Robbie discovers a talent for working miracles, each of which leaves him with a throbbing headache. Admitted into hospital, he finds it peopled by bosomy nurses and boys far sicker than him; their illnesses, along with his Da's drinking, are the true test of his healing powers. A characterful tale, its happy ending errs just on the right side of feyness.

In The Ghost Writer (Jonathan Cape £10.99, pp374), John Harwood's protagonist, Gerard, is raised in a depressing suburban sprawl strung along the shore of Australia's Great Southern Ocean. His father is a pale presence, and soon it's just Gerard and his mum, who has 'nerves' and haunts the telephone ready to ring round the hospitals if he's even half-an-hour late home. As a small boy, she tells him all about England, where once she lived with her grandmother, a ghost-story writer, in a big house with maids and an attic. These tales stop when Gerard is caught unlocking a drawer in his mother's room, but the secrets that spill from within entwine themselves around his future.

As a mystery story, The Ghost Writer is irresistible, pushing all the genre's gothic buttons and casting a convincingly Dickensian pall. The novel is structured like a haunted mansion, its core narrative giving way to a series of stories by Gerard's great-grandmother, whose plots insinuate themselves into his life with chilling effect.

Art has an equally disastrous impact on life in Toby Moore's Sleeping With the Fishes (Viking £12.99, pp256). Ollie Gibbon is the New York correspondent for the Herald, a British tabloid recently taken over by a porn magnate (Moore was once New York correspondent for the Daily Express ). Desperate for a scoop, Ollie has dashed off a sizzling, three-part exposé on the Mafia, pieced together from The Godfather and Goodfellas and supplemented by the menu at his local trattoria.

Summoned back to London, Ollie fears the worst, but not even in one of his own wildest stories did he dream that his boss might ask him to organise a hit. Slick, shrewd and smacking of the truth, this is the canny urban skit that many other comic novels promise but fail to deliver.

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