Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson
Fiction to look out for in 2024
The first great lockdown novel, new tales from David Nicholls, Sarah Perry and Percival Everett, and Rachel Kushner’s contender for the Booker… next year promises to be special
Alex Preston Monday 1 January 2024
There’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer’s debut fiction feature next month.
Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith and Tsitsi Dangarembga completed landmark series, Martin Amis turned to autofiction and Elena Ferrante returned to Naples – plus a host of brilliant debuts
Justine Jordan
Sat 28 Nov 2020 09.00 GMT
As the first lockdown descended in March, sales of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Camus’s La Pestesoared, but there were uncanny echoes of Covid-19 to be found in this year’s novels too.
Maggie O’Farrell’s tender, heartbreaking Hamnet (Tinder), which went on to win the Women’s prize, illuminates life and love in the shadow of death four centuries ago. Focused on Anne Hathaway rather than her playwright husband , it channels the family’s grief for son Hamnet, lost to the plague, with a timeless power. From public information slogans to individual fears, Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars (Picador), set in a Dublin maternity hospital during the 1918 flu pandemic, shows how little our responses have changed. Don DeLillo completed The Silence (Picador) just before the coronavirus hit; but this slim, austere vision of what it’s like to be in a room as screens go dark and disaster unfolds outside chimes with current fears.
Unfolding disaster was the theme of novels that spoke explicitly to the present moment, too: Jenny Offill’s Weather (Granta) assembles shards of anecdote and aphorism into a glittering mosaic that faces up to Trump’s America and climate collapse with wit, heart and moments of sheer terror. Naomi Booth’s Exit Management (Dead Ink) expertly dramatises the crisis in housing, jobs and community. Sarah Moss’s menacing Summerwater (Picador) is set over one rainy day in a Scottish holiday park: catastrophe lurks in the near future as we dip into the minds of various daydreaming, dissatisfied holidaymakers, in a sharp investigation into the meaning of community and otherness. Also deeply attuned to the anxieties of both Brexit and our long, slow post-industrial collapse is M John Harrison’s masterly The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (Gollancz). An unsettling and multilayered narrative foregrounding two lost souls in a haunted, unheimlich England who don’t know how lost they are, it took the Goldsmiths prize for innovative fiction.
Summer (Hamish Hamilton) completed Ali Smith’s rapid-response Seasonal quartet: four novels written over four years that have encompassed Brexit, climate change, corporate takeover and the refugee crisis along with the bracing consolations of art and nature. Reuniting characters from previous volumes and juxtaposing second world war internment with today’s migrant detention centres, Summer brought a much needed note of hope and resilience to the finale of a landmark series that explores how we live in and out of time.
This year saw the final volume, too, of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, which has conjured a vanished age to such extraordinarily vivid life and cast profound insights about power, ambition and fate on to the present one. The Mirror & the Light (4th Estate) had to end on the executioner’s scaffold, but the reader is suspended in the unfolding present moment until the axe falls.
Another trilogy was completed in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body (Faber); written three decades on from her classic Nervous Conditions, it is a brutal, intimate reckoning with the psychological trauma of colonialism. Also shortlisted for the Booker, Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (Canongate) is a beautifully crafted account of the female soldiers resisting Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and their own oppression in Ethiopian society. Lyrical, furious and meticulously researched, it is a necessary act of historical reclamation.
Marilynne Robinson turned her Gilead trilogy into a quartet with Jack (Virago), a romance across the race divide in segregated mid-century America which explores the redeeming, transcendent power of love and faith. Brit Bennett also anatomised racism in The Vanishing Half (Dialogue), a stunning family saga about passing for white and the hollowness of the American dream that won her comparisons to Toni Morrison.
There were historical escapes from David Mitchell, in 1960s muso epic Utopia Avenue(Sceptre), and Jonathan Coe, with a bittersweet visit to one of Billy Wilder’s last film sets in Mr Wilder and Me (Viking). Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham (Doubleday) spun wistful alternative history, imagining what the world might have looked like if Hillary hadn’t married Bill, while Martin Amis drew on his own history forInside Story(Cape), a baggy but fascinating autofiction combining cameos from Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens with tips on prose writing.
Andrew O’Hagan’s poignant Mayflies(Faber) explores the way all our lives recede too quickly into history, with a joyous nostalgiafest of young Scots chasing music and girls on a wild weekend in the 80s segueing into sober mid-life realisations and difficult decisions decades later. A brilliant portrayal of male friendship, it’s also the perfect gift for middle-aged alternative music fans.
The year began with an impressively assured debut from US author Kiley Reid; Such a Fun Age (Bloomsbury) is a razor-sharp take on white fragility and millennial uncertainty, beginning when a black nanny is accused of kidnapping her white charge. Also witty and fresh, Naoise Dolan’s deliciously dry Exciting Times(W&N) sees cynical Irish twentysomething Ava unsettled by genuine emotion while teaching in Hong Kong.
Two semi-autobiographical Scottish debuts from Picador showcased essential new voices: Douglas Stuart took the Booker prize for his moving, devastating Shuggie Bain, the tale of a boy’s desperate love for his alcoholic mother in the deprived, post-industrial 80s; while Graeme Armstrong’s The Young Team, set among teenage gangs in Lanarkshire, updated Trainspotting for a new generation.
Other notable first novels included Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez (Dialogue), a fearless coming-of-age story about racial and sexual identity and masculinity focused on a young, black gay man who flees his Jehovah’s Witness community to become a sex worker. Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton) coolly explores a toxic mother-daughter relationship in middle-class India, while Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (Daunt) weighs contradictory urges towards solitude and intimacy. The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams (William Heinemann), which continues the lexicographical playfulness of her short stories, is a singularly charming jeu d’esprit about two people a century apart doing the difficult, essential work of defining words and defining themselves.
In translated fiction, Elena Ferrante returned to her emotional heartland, the psyche of the teenage girl, in (Europa, translated byAnn Goldstein). As Giovanna tackles parental hypocrisy, self-disgust and the disconnect between upper- and lower-class Naples, the novel builds into what feels like a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Originally conceived as a true crime story, Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (Fitzcarraldo, translated by Sophie Hughes) is a savage, unstoppable chronicle of misogyny and murder in a small Mexican village. Another rawly compelling novel won the International Booker: young Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening (Faber, translated by Michele Hutchison) focuses on a girl in a deeply religious family that is falling apart in the wake of her brother’s death.
Daniel Kehlmann’s darkly funny Tyll (Riverrun, translated by Ross Benjamin), a picaresque journey through early 17th-century Europe, follows the progress of a folkloric jester figure from village to court against the bloody backdrop of the thirty years’ war. In Samanta Schweblin’s fiendishly readable Little Eyes(Oneworld, translated by Megan McDowell), the new must-have tech gadget allows users to leapfrog into the lives of strangers – a sharp idea that became even more pertinent with the isolation and atomisation of lockdown. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (Pushkin, translated by Adrian Nathan West), a “nonfiction novel” focused on the exceptional minds looking into the dark heart of maths and science in the 20th century, traces revelatory connections between discovery and destruction.
Some of the most exciting short stories of the year were to be found in Kathryn Scanlan’s The Dominant Animal (Daunt), with its fiercely sculpted sentences and unnervingly off-kilter scenarios. Cathy Sweeney’s Modern Times (W&N) has a comically surreal energy and verve, while in Reality and Other Stories (Faber) John Lanchester structures a collection of ghost stories around the most dangerous, intrusive, unknowable force in our lives – technology.
Two striking books unfolded in the fertile space between story collection and novel. In poet Frances Leviston’s The Voice in My Ear (Cape), 10 different protagonists, all called Claire, contend with the demands of the world and their difficult mothers; the stories glance off each other to build into a cubist portrait of contemporary womanhood. Maria Reva’s Good Citizens Need Not Fear (Virago), meanwhile, uses interlinked tales centred around a crumbling apartment block in Ukraine to convey the absurdity of post-Soviet life.
Finally, two novels that were a long time coming. From the 18th century to the 21st, Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock (Cape) explores violence against women in three subtly linked time periods: a blazingly angry, darkly witty tour de force, Wyld’s third novel is bleak but bracing, and as ever, beautifully written.
Sixteen years after her bestselling debut Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke returned with Piranesi (Bloomsbury), the story of a man trapped in a many-halled House with an Ocean surging within it, his only companion a mysterious Other. Written out of long illness, but published into a world in which every reader was struggling with confinement and thrown on their inner resources, Clarke’s fantastical parable of solitude, imagination, ambition and contentment is a spectacular piece of fiction, and the perfect reading accompaniment to a year like no other.
Evie Wyld: ‘Women are always told to ignore their sixth sense’
The prize-winning novelist on having her drink spiked, repressed female rage and fibbing about her writing routine
Ursula Kenny Saturday 7 March 2020
B
orn in London, Evie Wyld, 39, grew up in Australia and south London, where she lives now. Her debut novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (2009), won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize; her next, All the Birds, Singing, was published in 2013, the year she was named one of Granta’s best young British novelists. Her new book, The Bass Rock, published later this month, tells the story of three interlinked women across several centuries and explores the ways that men seek to subjugate women and how women fight back. In the 1700s, Sarah is accused of being a witch; after the second world war, Ruth marries a widower and becomes a mother to his sons; and in the present day Viv is lost and mourning her father.
The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld review – a fearless vision of toxic masculinity
Spirits haunt this gothic tale of male violence against women, set across three time frames on the coast of Scotland
Justine Jordan Sat 21 Mar 2020 07.30 GMT
I
n her award-winning first two novels, 2009’sAfter the Fire,A Still Small Voiceand 2013’sAll the Birds Singing, Anglo-Australian authorEvie Wyldwrote with intensity and precision about toxic masculinity and emotional damage. The past was always snapping at the heels of her characters, coming to hunt them down.
Angela Carter's exploration of life in a female body taught me to be comfortable in my own
I was 15 and in the bottom set for most subjects at school. The Magic Toyshop changed everything
Evie Wyld Monday 8 June 2020
T
he Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter was the first book I read at school that seemed to make some kind sense of my life. I was 15, and in the bottom set for every class other than art, where I painted very badly and was praised a disproportionate amount for my terrible, angsty self-portraits; in most of which I appeared bald for some reason.
As the weakest student of every bottom set – quite an accomplishment – I couldn’t spell and my handwriting bordered on illegible. From my point of view, there was a great worthiness about most of the books we studied, a dusty maleness, and it felt like there was nothing so important as a man of about 57 who was very wise and sure of himself.
Reading the first page of The Magic Toyshop was revelatory. My bad, bald self-portraits began to make sense. I was trying on other skins, attempting to fit comfortably into my own. The story’s protagonist, Melanie, discovers her own body at the age of 15 in a way that completely scandalised our English class – I remember one girl teasing another, asking if she’d ever looked at herself naked in the mirror – an impossible thing to answer without complete ridicule and mortification.
And there was Melanie, setting herself up, between masturbating, to look like Lautrec’s models, “legs apart with a basin of water on the floor”. I remember how outrageous it felt to read about a young woman looking at her own body in a mirror, admiring it. The next thing Melanie did was put into words the dreadful feeling of being assessed by a man – the first few times it happens and you have nothing to compare it to: how magnetic it feels, and how dangerous.
“It was as if he had put on the quality of maleness, like a flamboyant cloak. He was a tawny lion poised for the kill – and was she the prey? She remembered the lover made up out of books and poems she had dreamed of all summer; he crumpled like the paper he was made of before this insolent offhand terrifying maleness, filling the room with its reek. She hated it but could not take her eyes off him.”
What a relief when her younger siblings are taken away from Melanie and she is freed of the responsibilities of being “a little mother”.
Alongside the bad portraits, I’d been writing short stories by then for a couple of years, about hideously fantastical things – people who lived inside their own minds under bridges because that was more beautiful than reality, or the setting of one’s self on fire, because of a general sense of ennui and the batteries in one’s Walkman running out. I still have the little booklet of stories I made back then. The writing is desperate to seem serious, to seem huge and wise like the old men we read at school.
It is often the magical, fabular aspects of Carter’s stories that people focus on, but in The Magic Toyshop I responded to the way she blended this with a clear-eyed realism about what it was to live in a female body. Carter seemed to be saying something about female experience, that it had a different kind of relationship to reality than those breezy male characters I had previously met, confident in their role as subject and point of view. Melanie becomes aware of her body and sexuality as part of a process of literal discovery in which she compares it to America. Rereading this book, I am struck by this metaphor, the female body as colonised land, site of projected meaning, violence and plunder.
In a novel so brilliantly conjured from splayed toothbrush heads, mustard-and-cress sandwiches and prawn shells, bread loaves and cutlery, brickwork and yellow household soap, the female body is both one more familiar object and at the same time something strange and troubling. Melanie is only able to understand her body by turning it into another kind of object, but in doing so she understands this is a power. As a young girl experiencing that moment when your body is both the vessel for your self but suddenly, as if overnight, also a thing, a collection of objects for men to look at, assess, interpret and desire, Carter’s story seemed to speak directly to my life. That this was an experience from which art could be made felt like someone had opened a door somewhere.
My English teacher, sensing a student pricking up her ears for the first time, took me one Saturday to hear Carmen Callil, Carter’s best friend and editor, talk. She told us that “Angie” couldn’t spell. That was perhaps the most encouraging thing I’d heard from anybody, that the gridlines of schoolwork didn’t mark the limits of ability. In her introduction to the 1981 edition, Callil writes that “all over the world are literary incendiary bombs planted by Angela, and in Britain, young writers whom she encouraged”.
Encouraged is an interesting word that has become gentler in the way it is commonly used. But Callil was no doubt using it in the literal sense, of Carter giving writers the courage to write. I know that had I not read The Magic Toyshop at that point in my life, I would never have felt that my sort of experiences deserved to be written about at all.
Evie Wyld is a writer and the author of After the Fire, A Still Small Voice; All the Birds, Singing; and Everything is Teeth. Her most recent book is The Bass Rock
