21. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Two middle-class black Americans, Roy and Celestial, have been married for just over a year when Roy is arrested and wrongly imprisoned for rape. The novel covers the 5 years that Roy is in prison, its effect on their marriage, Celestial's efforts to make a life without her husband, and the fallout after Roy is released.
This was definitely a novel of two halves for me! I found the first half engaging - the romance between Roy and Celestial is genuinely touching, and Jones has quite a turn of phrase. The second half sagged badly, however: the narrative drive had largely disappeared and I just didn't care much about the characters, or about who ended up with whom. I felt that the form didn't work, either: the first-person narratives at the start were fresh and interesting, but the later, epistolary sections were too long and bogged down in exposition (it's really hard to push the narrative through letters in a way that doesn't sound false). The novel also ended up falling between two stools subject-wise: despite being billed (by Barack Obama, no less!) as "A moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple", it didn't have enough detail or punch to be a novel about mass incarceration ... but it was also too unfocused to work as a novel about relationships. If it's about anything, it's about what it is to grow up as a black man in America, and about the relationships between these black men and their fathers. I do think that Tayari Jones is an interesting and eloquent writer, and would read more by her - I was just disappointed by this novel, which seemed to be somehow less than the sum of its parts.
22. Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert
Urbane legal crime thriller written in 1950. This was entertaining in a terribly British, detached and lightly ironic way. I didn't guess the killer until the last few chapters, thanks to the tangled plot(s) - but I also remain slightly baffled by their motivation 
. What really struck me was the period detail: the action takes place in a firm of solicitors and, although they are portrayed as rather stuffy, it's still notable that the men are all clerks and partners, and the women (some of whom are very silly indeed) are all secretaries. I enjoyed the references to post-war rationing - and the way that a city-wide "electricity cut" played a key part at one point.