HUNGRY the STARS and EVERYTHING

There’s a tagline on the back jacket of Emma Jane Unsworth’s first novel that is out of place: ‘Can Mr Wrong ever be Mr Right?’. This makes it sound like chick-lit, and it’s at odds with the rather sophisticated under-designed cover, and at odds with the content. Hungry the Stars and Everything is a feast of a book – thoughtful, funny, maddening and very, very readable.

I don’t think I’m spoiling too much by saying that the devil pops up from time to time. I like to file my books thematically rather than artistically: Virginia Woolf nestles up against Katherine Mansfield as I imagine Woolf jealously hand-setting the type for Mansfield’s stories as therapy at the Hogarth Press. So Hungry the Stars… can go next to these two diabolical (that is to say, pertaining to the devil) books on my bookshelf.

The devil is just a bystander in this story, however. The real theme, clumsily rendered in the tagline, is the contrast between an unsuitable, dangerous former love and a present boyfriend who seems perfect – thoughtful, attentive, fantastic cook… and yet, and yet… something’s missing. As the book unfolds we find out more about how the central character, Helen, got to where she is now: sitting on her own, reviewing a swanky new restaurant in the centre of Manchester. The device Emma Jane Unsworth uses to reveal more and more about Helen’s past is so clever and brilliant I won’t say any more. You’ll just have to read it.

This is one of those books I enjoyed so much, when I got two chapters from the end I slowed right down; I couldn’t bear to finish it, and I couldn’t bear not to finish it, like the last thin square of some exquisitely bittersweet dark chocolate:

Children aren’t supposed to like dark chocolate. It’s one of those bitter things that you are meant to acquire a taste for later in life, like olives and self-pity. But I was different. I enjoyed the taste of wrongness in my mouth, the sheer devilment of what I was doing.

There was one, tiny thing that bugged me though. Now I’m a font nerd, and I love nothing more than a good ligature. Good ligatures these days are hard to find. But the ‘Th’ ligature in the font this book is set in is a bit oddly-shaped and quite ugly. I shuddered a bit every time one cropped up.

There. I said it was a tiny thing. This is a wonderful book.