I’ve walked past this premise in Bangor many times over the past twenty years or so, and always wondered about it. The combination of ‘self-service marketing’—which seems an odd thing in itself—and ‘hosiery factors’—whatever they are—fries my brain.

Some dedicated sleuthing hasn’t revealed an awful lot, though in an advert in the Mid-Ulster Mail from 1 March 1990, they declare themselves to be:

But this just provides more bafflement: surely the suppliers of the finest hosiery in all the land would be able to spell the name of the thing they sell?

This summer has been full of angry, broad-brush commentary about asylum and immigration in the UK media, and it feels like this will only ramp up as autumn comes round. It felt refreshing to read a novel that set those debates aside and instead turned its gaze to the lived experiences of individuals whose lives take them between different countries.

Naudé’s book follows Jaco, a middle-aged gay man, as he oscillates between Europe and South Africa, reckoning with his father’s approaching death and his own unsettled existence. Around him, he encounters a range of other ‘fugitives’: migrants, artists, lovers, all navigating the dislocation of living between cultures. Of course, Naudé presents these people as textured, complicated individuals rather than as the faceless homogenous ‘migrant masses’ so often conjured by political rhetoric.

I sometimes warmed to Jaco and sometimes felt distanced from him. At moments he felt like a character to root for, while at others he’s more of a lens than a companion. Perhaps that’s intentional: Naudé isn’t writing a simple psychological portrait, but a book about movement and fracture, including within families. I hadn’t previously given much thought to how ties can splinter when relatives live under different societal cultures and expectations; this book made me think harder about that.

The strand that will linger with me is the subplot of a sick child taken from South Africa to New York for experimental treatment. The hope, the weight of expectations, and the inevitability of disappointment echoed other parts of the book, and left me reflecting on how we load our own dreams onto others, sometimes unfairly. It was a moving and troubling seam in a novel already rich with them.

The prose style didn’t particularly draw attention to itself. In many ways that felt right: it’s the characters and their displacement, rather than the language itself, that stay with me.

Overall, I found Fathers and Fugitives absorbing, timely, and quietly thought-provoking. In a season when immigration is a political football, it was refreshing to spend time with a book that insists on the messiness and individuality of people’s lives.

Andrew Sean Greer is perhaps best known for Less, his Pulitzer-winning comedy about an ageing writer blundering around the globe. I enjoyed Less when I read it back in 2018, but for my money, The Story of a Marriage is the better novel. It’s quieter, more restrained, far more emotionally resonant, and I felt like I gained more insight from it.

Set in 1950s San Francisco, it tells the story of Pearlie Cook, her husband Holland, and the stranger who arrives at their door to unravel the carefully ordered lives they have built together. What begins as a portrait of an unassuming family becomes, revelation by revelation, a study of the secrets, compromises, and half-truths that hold relationships together.

I was swept along by both Greer’s elegant prose and the steady drip of revelations. Each turn added new emotional weight, not just to the plot but to my sense of the characters and the bargains they struck with themselves in order to survive. Pearlie’s voice drew me in: warm and candid at first, but increasingly distant as the novel unfolded. It felt as though the more we understood about the context of her life, the less she resembled a contemporary confidante, and the more she stood as a figure shaped and limited by the societal expectations with which she lived.

Reading this shortly after Nella Larsen’s Passing, I found myself struck by the parallels. Just as Larsen illuminated the personal costs of racial and social conformity in 1920s America, Greer here makes vivid the stifling pressures of the 1950s. In our era of self-expression, we often dwell on the anxieties of exposure; this novel is a reminder of the equally corrosive anxieties of enforced silence.

The Story of a Marriage may not have the wit and sparkle of Less, but its restraint feels exactly right. It’s a novel of quiet devastations, one that lingers not for its cleverness but for its insight into how private lives are warped by public expectations. I finished it with a sense of melancholy admiration — and a conviction that it deserves more recognition than it gets.