My Coney Island Baby
BILLY O’CALLAGHAN
(Jonathan Cape, 256 pp, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

Billy O’Callaghan’s new book revolves around an adulterous affair between a married man and a married woman in New York. The protagonists have been conducting this relationship for 25 years, and they still find affection and excitement in one another, but they are now entering a kind of endgame. The male protagonist, Michael, has a wife who is dying of cancer. Meanwhile, his lover, Caitlin, discloses that her husband has to relocate, hundreds of miles away, to a Chicago suburb.

The narrative carefully excavates the personal histories which have led the characters to this point. Michael and his wife had a child that died during early infancy, and their ­marital relationship never recovered from that overwhelming grief. Meanwhile Caitlin’s husband works hard to provide for his wife, but is himself engaged in extramarital affairs of his own. Michael and Caitlin’s verbal and physical expressions of love for one another are therefore written as attempts to regain something that they have lost ­elsewhere.