Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant review when Bowie ruled the world

Captures the absurdity of the times … Linda Grant. Photograph: Geraint Lewis/Rexv

This is the story of friendships that cohere at a northern university in the 70s. The narrator, Adele, was born and brought up in a Jewish family in Liverpool: "I grew up to be the leader of a circle of schoolgirls, bolshy, sophisticated, ambitious, supercilious, a little bit cynical already, who smoked and wore plum-coloured lipstick and very short skirts."

She has a terrible secret: her father, Harry, a petty criminal, killed himself when he was exposed as the organiser of a small Ponzi scheme. The family and their world are changed for ever. But, like her mother, Adele is a strong woman. She takes a job at the perfume counter of Lewis's in Liverpool. She quickly finds it stultifying, but is determined to do better and talks herself into one of the new universities in Yorkshire by pretending to be Allen Ginsberg's cousin.

At university she is soon involved with a new group of friends, and the novel revolves around their fates. It is an era when students believed that they could change the world; that false consciousness was a blight to be overcome; that people could elect to be gay or straight; that socialism, along the lines of Marcuse, would triumph; and that mental illness should be understood, as RD Laing prescribed, as an aspect of normality. On the campus there is a vogue, no doubt influenced by David and Angie Bowie, of dressing up to suggest that there are no absolutes of sexual orientation. Adele takes none of these notions seriously.

The centre of the story is Evie, who arrived at the university as Lorraine, but changed her name when she took up with Stevie, also known as Stephen Platt. They swap clothes, and in some ways became one androgynous person, but their relationship breaks down. Stevie leaves after a few terms – and dies on the night of Adele's 20th birthday.

"If you go back and look at your life there are certain scenes, acts, or maybe just incidents on which everything that follows seems to depend," muses Adele, many years later. "If only you could narrate them, then you might be understood. I mean the part of yourself that you don't know how to explain."

Linda Grant gives the impression of looking for an organising principle for the novel: the mystery of Evie's demise. For many years after they have all left university, Adele is obsessed by what happened on the fatal night. Who saw her last? Who could have helped? Who is to blame? But the problem with this otherwise fine novel is that there is not much of a mystery to be solved. Her family secrets, revealed in some handy notebooks, are not really very significant. Evie was a troubled child, ethereally beautiful, and caught up in something she didn't fully understand.

But Grant excels in capturing the absurdity of the times, and the phenomenon of a university consciously trying to introduce societal change through exposure to brutal architecture and experimental teaching. She is also brilliant on the naivety and vulnerability of the young students, from flamboyantly gay Bobby to Gillian, the viola player turned revolutionary. Rose, who becomes a successful barrister, acknowledges at the friends' final meeting that she was exactly the graduate the university was trying to produce: "My life has never departed from the plan. It all worked, didn't it? It worked terribly, terribly well."

You could read into this Grant's feeling that the higher banalities have come to roost and have not left us. "There was a revolution," says Adele, "just not the one they had in mind."

It is a great talent to be able to keep afloat so vividly and so plausibly this many characters. While not exactly a feelgood book, Upstairs at the Party has the great virtue of being a wonderfully and perceptively written story, which rings utterly true, and as a consequence lifts the spirits.

• Justin Cartwright's latest novel is Lion Heart (Bloomsbury). To order Upstairs at the Party for £11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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The Joshua Files: Apocalypse Moon by M.G. Harris - review

This book is about the apocalyptic surge that Joshua goes forward in time to see and then has to prevent, using clues from the four books.

Joshua is by far the best character and I like him as he is very mysterious, talented and brave because of his Dad dying, his long-lost sister being killed, and the long, hard journey to get the IX Codex.

This series is awesome and I have really enjoyed it. I would definitely recommend this to anybody. 5/5 stars!!!

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My hero: David Foster Wallace by Colin Barrett

David Foster Wallace. Photograph: Gary Hannabarger/Corbis

I was in the long, sullen afternoon of my early 20s, contentedly directionless, occupying an office cubicle from Monday to Friday and writing gruesomely mannered and mercifully short poems, hungover, on Sundays. I wanted to be a writer, but was worried I only wanted to be a writer because I wanted to be a writer.

I read Infinite Jest on my weekday tram commute over a summer. Just over 1,000 pages long, heavily influenced by the dense, formally daunting works of Pynchon, Gaddis and McElroy, Infinite Jest is a crypto-apocalyptic, science-fiction-tainted satire and tragedy. It's about a great many things, from tennis and addiction to roving packs of giant feral hamsters and militant Quebecois wheelchair assassins, but beneath its almost defensively elaborate postmodern conceits is a novel brimming with extraordinary compassion and empathy.

The two main characters, teen tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza and recovering addict and ex-con Donald Gately, have stayed with me as few fictional entities do. Like Ulysses, Infinite Jest is a book that seems to echo and anticipate many other books. And it's no accident that its two central characters are a gifted, vulnerable but insufferably snide little prick, and an older, wiser, fundamentally decent man; or that the narrative hinges tantalisingly on the prospect of their exasperatingly deferred, but surely inevitable, connection.

The book left me euphoric and burdened. Here it is, it seemed to say: here is the torrential spate of the mind talking incessantly back to itself, the bottomless aporias and fleeting ecstasies that you, as a human, must suffer alone, like everyone else. Here is the head that pounds like a heart.

Infinite Jest gave me back to myself, and left me with nowhere to hide. I stopped writing my brittle, evasive poems. I began to wonder how on earth you do something like this.

• Colin Barrett's debut collection Young Skins won this year's Frank O'Connor international short story award, announced this week.

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Scroobius Pip and Kate Pullinger on self-publishing books podcast

As the squeeze on author earnings continues, writers are looking for ever-more-inventive ways of getting their work to their readers.

The award-winning novelist Kate Pullinger tells us why she decided to sign a conventional publishing deal in Canada for her latest novel, Landing Gear, and then publish an electronic version herself. She describes how it developed online, out of a collaborative storytelling project. Many more writers are going to have to take control of their publishing careers, she argues, in order to tackle what she calls a "crisis in the mid-list".

Two months after the launch of the Guardian/Legend Press self-published novel of the month, we look back at the first two winners, and talk to Legend's Tom Chalmers about the challenges of seeking them out from the 500 entries that pour in each month.

Finally, we turn to a poet who has never had any truck with conventional publishing. Fresh from Glastonbury, and en route for the Latitude festival, Scroobius Pip demonstrates his unique form of performance poetry.

Landing Gear by Kate Pullinger (Katepullinger.com)
Scroobius Pip Live at the Edinburgh Fringe will be available from Scroobiuspip.co.uk from August 4

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Whos the poet: Pamela Anderson or Sylvia Plath? Take our quiz

Actor, model and former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson has published a 1,209-word epic poem, expressing her feelings after she filed for a second divorce from her two-time husband Rick Salomon. Its themes include love, technology, economic inequality and genetic determinism.

You can read it in full on her Facebook page.

But first, why not see if you can tell her apart from Sylvia Plath?

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The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - review

This is a gripping and captivating novel that I enjoyed reading very much. The characters were believable and interesting, and I found there was a lot of symbolism and depth in the book too, which accounted for the sadness of it. The poems that Hazel recited were amusing as well.

However, despite how much I liked the book, there was one thing that bugged me as I read: the subject matter of it. To me, glamorizing illness and sensationalizing cancer is even more heartbreaking than the sadness that hangs over the book. At my school, you can hear people all day every day yelling things like, 'Have you seen The Fault in Our Stars yet? Did you cry? I cried!' and, 'I'm trying to draw a cannula but it just won't work.' And also, 'I have to find a cannula for sale so I can dress up as Hazel for Halloween.'

Why is this so distressing? you ask. What about the poor people who actually have cancer? If they saw somebody dressed up with a cannula, they would think, 'Well, they can take that off at any point – but I can't.' Also, I despise the way The Fault in Our Stars has been made into an acronym. There is even a #TFIOS. It's like saying, #cancer. It is just like news corporations sensationalizing news stories.

One day, this book will go out of fashion and so will cancer. How depressing for people with cancer. The book has been made trendy by hashtags and Twitter accounts.

Even though I disliked the subject of the book, I would recommend it to anybody who is sensible enough to realize that cancer and illness is not a fashion.

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Get the Scoop: Justin Bieber by Ronny Bloom - review

The Scoop tells the story of a boy named Justin Bieber. He was sixteen years old and he wanted to be famous.

He started off in a magazine by putting pictures of himself playing the guitar and singing, and then he began putting videos on YouTube. He put videos of himself playing the guitar and singing, and he got a lot of followers so he made a new album called My World.

If you want to know more about Justin Bieber and who he met, read this book! I think that it is cool to read a biography about a famous person and get to know Justin Bieber more deeply.

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