Catherine Menon: Fragile Monsters, 9780241439296, C format paperback, Penguin Random House UK, January 2021

I started Catherine Menon’s debut novel “Fragile Monsters” in the old year and finished it on New Year’s Day 2021. I am still astonished that this is a debut, the writing is so exquisite, the story so full of imagination, the characters so complex and colorful.  I was completely captured by the narration that alternates between Mary’s voice, her recollections of her family starting with her British father and Indian mother and their troubled lives, and that of her granddaughter Druga’s.  The book comes with a deserved quote from none lesser than Hilary Mantel who says “Takes an immediate grip on the reader’s imagination and doesn’t let go”. I underwrite this 100 %, it gripped me from the first page.

Set in Malaysia between the 1920 to the present, this could have been a historical novel except it isn’t at all.  The fragile monsters being unspoken  ghosts of the past that give this book an Asian magical realism touch, drifting  between  past reality, what might have been and  the current situation.  Druga is visiting her testy, sharp tongued, difficult grandmother Mary in her small home town in rural Malaysia after having lived in Canada for some time, now working as a mathematician at the university in Kuala Lumpur.  An accidental fire and Mary’s admission to the hospital is the beginning of the reappearance of the “fragile monsters”, unspoken dark secrets every generation of this family seems to have suffered and is haunted by anew .  Druga’s own troubled life and her probing questions are answered by her grandmothers ever shifting recollections which often made me think of fairy tales. A great literary debut that I am positive will find many enchanted readers.