From Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo to Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Percival Everett’s James and a host of inventive debuts – this year’s highlights in fiction
Justine Jordan
Saturday 7 December 2024
In a year of surprises – a posthumous fable from Gabriel García Márquez, a superhero collaboration between China Miéville and Keanu Reeves – the biggest news, as ever, was a new Sally Rooney novel. Intermezzo (Faber) landed in September: the story of two brothers mourning their father and negotiating relationships with each other and the women in their lives, it is a heartfelt examination of love, sex and grief. With one strand exploring the neurodiverse younger brother’s perspective, and a conflicted stream-of-consciousness for the older, it opens up a more fertile direction after 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.
A new Irish literary boom: the post-crash stars of fiction
Dynamic, radical, often female … Irish fiction is flourishing. Gone is the conservative writing – all nostalgia and sexual repression – of the Celtic Tiger years. The writers of the new wave are original and bold
Justine Jordan
Saturday 17 October 2015
“Money kills the imagination,” says the narrator of Claire Kilroy’s 2012 novel The Devil I Know, a fiendishly good satire of the moment the Irish boom went bust. “It makes us want the same thing.” The book is set in 2016 and takes the form of one man’s testimony to a tribunal intended to uncover the sleaze and short-termism that enabled a giant property bubble to inflate in the years leading up to the global financial crash of 2008. In the autumn of 2015, we have not yet caught up with Kilroy’s future setting, but as the real-world aftershocks of the Celtic Tiger’s downfall continue, one Irish sector is booming: with the rise of a new wave of writers, from Paul Murray, Kevin Barry and Donal Ryan to first-time authors such as Eimear McBride, Sara Baume, Lisa McInerney and Colin Barrett, there is a palpable energy to Irish fiction.
Justine Jordan admires an ambitious debut novel with a razor-sharp vision of teenage life
Justine Jordan
Saturday 21 July 2009
T
his astonishing debut novel from young New Zealander Eleanor Catton is a cause for surprise and celebration: smart, playful and self-possessed, it has the glitter and mystery of the true literary original. Though its impulses and methods can only be called experimental, the prose is so arresting, the storytelling so seductive, that wherever the book falls open it's near-impossible to put down.
Through two different time schemes, in fragmentary scenes shuffled together like a pack of playing cards, Catton juxtaposes the aftershocks of an affair between a high-school student and her music teacher with the local drama school's appropriation of the scandal for a theatre project. As well as darting about chronologically, the narrative makes surprising leaps in register and tone, so that characters speak in a mixture of world-weary teenspeak, pitch-perfect realism, and mannered theatricality, sometimes within the same scene.
The list is out … The Booker longlist 2023. Photograph: The Booker prize
Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth
This article is more than 3 months old
The personal meets the political in a list that includes dystopia and SF as well as little-known debuts Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist
Justine Jordan Tuesday 1 August 2023
Those accustomed to complaining about the number of American writers nominated for the Booker prize since the widening of eligibility in 2014 will get a pleasant surprise this year: the sector that leads is Irish writers – and people called Paul. That’s not the only surprise; the judges have chosen to spotlight some little-known debuts in the place of major novels. While it feels reductive to read the longlist in terms of what’s not included, many will have expected to see Zadie Smith’s September novel The Fraud, and Tom Crewe’s acclaimed debut The New Life, among others.
The presence of four Irish writers, meanwhile, is far from surprising (and that’s without the inclusion of Anne Enright’s fine forthcoming novel The Wren, The Wren, or Claire Kilroy’s scorching tale of new motherhood, Soldier Sailor). Sebastian Barry is a veteran author who pushes himself with each new book, and Old God’s Time is a devastating, dreamlike study of the lifetime repercussions of historic childhood abuse in Catholic institutions. Paul Murray, loved for 2010’s tragicomic Skippy Dies, writes the novel of his career with The Bee Sting, which uncovers a family’s slow-burning secrets against a backdrop of climate anxiety – in terms of pure page-turning pleasure, this is probably the most enjoyable novel on the list. Elaine Feeney’s How to Build a Boat explores the meaning of community and outsiderdom through one boy’s story, while Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, scheduled for September, is a chilling study of Ireland becoming a fascist state.
ith Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, the judges have chosen perhaps the most timely and urgent book on the shortlist – a novel explicitly plugged into global strife and political tectonic forces. But it’s also the very intimate, elemental story of one woman’s love for her family, and her desperate attempts to hold on to the immediate world around her in the face of rising chaos.
Paul Murray’s second book, Skippy Dies, was one of the standout novels of the previous decade: a riotously entertaining tragicomedy, set in a posh Dublin boys’ school, in which bone-deep sorrow and pathos cut through the teenage hilarity and fart jokes. The Mark and the Void, 2015’s tricksy satire of both the banking crash and the difficult novel-writing business, strayed into metatextual noodling, but with The Bee Sting, Murray is triumphantly back on home turf – troubled adolescents, regretful adults, secrets signposted and exquisitely revealed, each line soaked in irony ranging from the gentle to the savage.
From the mysterious monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the impossible spaceship in Arrival, one of science fiction’s favourite tropes is the alien artefact that defies human comprehension. Danish author Olga Ravn’s brilliantly unusual novel The Employees, which has been shortlisted for the International Booker prize, is an SF epic in miniature, but it takes a prosaic approach to our dreams of extraterrestrial transcendence. “It’s not hard to clean them,” says a crew member of the strange objects found on the faraway planet New Discovery, now housed in the Six-Thousand Ship orbiting above. “I normally use a little brush.”
The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera; it’s also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human. The book takes the form of a series of statements – some missing, some with material redacted – made by the crew to a bureaucratic committee investigating the effects of the strange objects: not what they might be or reveal, but how they might “precipitate reduction or enhancement of performance, task-related understanding and the acquisition of new knowledge and skills”.
“I’m not sure, but isn’t it female?” asks that same cleaner about one of the objects. The novel is saturated from the outset in ontological uncertainty; the crew is made up of both humans and humanoids, the born and the grown, but it is not always possible to work out from their statements which is which. Where one humanoid cannot imagine any meaningful activity beyond the work they were created for, another insists on their burgeoning selfhood: “I may have been made, but now I’m making myself.” It might merely be a question of bureaucracy. “Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am?” asks one crew member. The statement that reads in its entirety “My body isn’t like yours” is a reminder that humanity may lie in the eye of the beholder.
In the midst of corporate jargon, the novel is haunted by longings, dreams, lyrical fragments of memory from a long-lost Earth. It is haunted too by its genesis as a companion piece to a 2018 art installation by Lea Guldditte Hestelund exploring “the relationship between different types of presence and body”, both human and not. The alien finds in the novel that draw, repel and provoke the different crew members are recognisably the objects in the exhibition, now archived online. Ravn maps the exhibition room on to the spaceship: the same white walls, sterile spaces, corridors between installations; even the “niches in the walls where you can hang your suit”. Art galleries and spaceships are both playgrounds for the cultural imagination; in another uncanny layer to an eerily rich text, by the end of the novel the ship itself becomes a macabre kind of museum piece.
Despite the sterile setting and often chilly prose, The Employees is a deeply sensory book, suffused with aroma and alert to tactility. The materiality of the objects makes crew members long to put them in their mouth; to discover where the limits of the self end, like babies learning about their new world. The image recurs of a marble or wooden sphere rolling around inside a mouth, person and possession in intimate proximity. The pages crawl, also, with disturbing up-close descriptions of egg clusters, open pores with tiny stones in, flesh specked with dots, pomegranates stuffed with seeds. It is as though Ravn is channeling trypophobia, disgust for clusters of holes or bumps, to evoke fear of the nonhuman. “Repetitive, organic structures are unbearable,” reads one statement. “They cannot be destroyed and will continue to regenerate.” There are affinities here with the unleashed vegetal energies in Jeff VanderMeer’s novels about mutation and nonhuman sentience. As relations break down between human and humanoid, one declares, “I’m a pomegranate ripe with moist seeds, each seed a killing I’m going to carry out.”
It is astonishing how much Ravn achieves in her small canvas of 130-odd pages: she muses on transhumanism, illuminates the dreamlike logic of inner lives, contrasts artistic and religious impulses with the anti-human reductionism of corporate jargon. And she does all this while retaining an elliptical, open-ended mystery and a delicately elegiac tone. Translator Martin Aitken perfectly balances all the different registers and voices (though DIY enthusiasts may be jolted by repeated references to taking the alien objects “back to Homebase”).
Like humans, the humanoids are always chasing their own metaphysical tail. “In the programme, beneath my interface, there’s another interface, which is also me…” This clever, endlessly thought-provoking novel catches something of our recursive search for the nature of consciousness; a question that answers itself, a voice in the darkness, an object moving through space.
Damon Galgut is a nuanced chronicler of the deep hurts of South Africa, past and present Photograph: Chris de Beer-Procter
Damon Galgut’s layered feat of fiction is a clear Booker winner
The Promise, about a toxic family in a toxic society, feels like the book this author was born to write
Justine Jordan Wednesday 3 November 2021
T
his year an idiosyncratic shortlist has produced a clear and unsurprising winner. With an impressive backlist and two former shortlistings, Damon Galgut is a major figure in world literature and a vital, nuanced chronicler of the deep hurts of South Africa, past and present.
Legends of the fall: the 50 biggest books of autumn 2021
From new novels by Sally Rooney and Colson Whitehead to Michel Barnier’s take on Brexit, Bernardine Evaristo’s manifesto and diaries from David Sedaris – all the releases to look out for
by Justine Jordan and Katy Guest
4 September 2021
FICTION
September
Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks Set in Vienna between the first and second world wars, this companion novel to 2005’s Human Traces uncovers individual stories of love and yearning at a time of historical upheaval.
The Dark Remainsby William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin With his books about DC Laidlaw, the scourge of 70s gangland Glasgow, McIlvanney was a huge influence on Scottish crime fiction. When he died in 2015, he left a handwritten manuscript setting out Laidlaw’s first case – and Scotland’s leading contemporary crime novelist has finished it.
Beautiful World, Where Are Youby Sally Rooney A successful young writer is repulsed by the literary world and the workings of fame in Rooney’s much-anticipated third novel. Alice and Eileen are best friends approaching 30, negotiating love, sex, status and purpose as the realities of the adult world bite.
Historical upheaval … Sebastian Faulks’s novel is set in Vienna between the wars. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Images
Harlem Shuffleby Colson Whitehead After tackling the horrors of slavery and racist reform schools in The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, the Pulitzer winner has fun with a heist novel set in a lovingly recreated 60s Harlem, against the backdrop of the civil rights movement.
Palmaresby Gayl Jones The first novel in more than two decades by the US author first published by Toni Morrison is a myth-tinged saga set in 17th-century Brazil, where a young girl hears rumours of “Palmares” – a haven for fugitive slaves.
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman The Pointless presenter’s crime debut broke publishing records, and this sequel sees his group of elderly friends look into a murder-heist connected to Elizabeth’s secret service career. Osman tempers the whimsy with hard-won warmth and real darkness.
The Making of Incarnationby Tom McCarthy A scientist’s secret archive, the birth of big data, military research and SF movies … a typically ambitious millefueille of modernity, symbolism and myth from the Booker-shortlisted author of C and Satin Island.
‘A heartfelt cry for climate awareness.’ Richard Powers. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images
Bewildermentby Richard Powers
Following his eco-epicThe Overstory, Powers focuses on the story of a father and his troubled son, in mourning for his dead mother and our dying world. It’s a heartfelt cry for climate awareness, with fantastical digressions to other planets and a rueful celebration of our own.
The Magician by Colm Tóibín
His 2004 novel The Master explored the mind of Henry James; now Tóibín turns to Thomas Mann, tracing the German Nobel laureate’s life and work against the rise of nazism and turbulence of two world wars.
The Book of Form and Emptinessby Ruth Ozeki Booker-shortlisted for A Tale for the Time Being in 2013, Ozeki brings a similar metafictional playfulness to this story of a 13-year-old who has lost his father but gains the ability to hear what objects are saying.
Matrixby Lauren Groff A departure for the author of contemporary marriage story Fates and Furies: this is a tale of 12th-century nuns, inspired by the poet Marie de France, who as an awkward teenager unwillingly becomes prioress in a rundown English abbey. It’s a gorgeously written celebration of female desire and creativity, with a formidable heroine.
Cloud Cuckoo Landby Anthony Doerr The follow-up to All the Light We Cannot See ingeniously connects the 15th-century fall of Constantinople, 21st-century environmental breakdown and a future spaceship, where humanity’s history and knowledge is accessed virtually. This is a dazzling epic of love, war and the joy of books – one for David Mitchell fans.
The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgård, translated by Martin Aitken Knausgård follows his epic autobiographical series My Struggle with a hefty new novel: a story of ordinary life and unknown forces, told through a group of Norwegians who are brought together by the appearance of a new and foreboding star.
‘A moorland walk goes horribly wrong’ in The Fell by Sarah Moss. Photograph: David Madison/Getty Images
October
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen The first volume in a planned trilogy about American life focuses on a midwestern family in the early 1970s, as the parents’ unhappy marriage and the kids’ adolescent transformations are set against the troubled national zeitgeist.
Burntcoat by Sarah Hall A stunning novel from the author best known for her short stories, which considers what it means to be a female artist. At the end of her life, a sculptor of monumental works remembers how at the moment of national lockdown she opened herself to a new relationship.
Life Without Childrenby Roddy Doyle A son is barred from his mother’s funeral, a nurse loses a beloved patient … Written over the past year, these are 10 short stories about the isolation and connections of life during pandemic from the Irish author.
State of Terrorby Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny Following husband Bill’s collaboration with James Patterson, Hillary promises to bring similar insider knowledge to her thriller debut. Written with a Canadian crime novelist friend, it explores her “worst nightmare” as secretary of state – a series of terrorist attacks undermining the global order.
Riccardino by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli The 28th instalment in the much-loved Sicilian detective series, first drafted in 2005 and delivered to Camilleri’s publishers to be held under lock and key until the author’s death, is the final outing for Inspector Montalbano.
Silverviewby John le Carré Le Carré left a complete manuscript when he died in 2020, now published as his 26th novel. The story of a man running a bookshop by the English seaside, a mysterious visitor, and an espionage leak, it dramatises the clash between public duty and private life at a time of moral crisis for Britain.
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout The Pulitzer winner returns to the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, as the widowed Lucy gets back in touch with her first husband, William. She muses on their long, complicated partnership in this wise and witty portrait of childrearing, ageing and the eternal surprise of other people.
The importance of saying no … Michaela Coel. Photograph: David Fisher/Rex/Shutterstock for BAFTA
The Nobel laureate weaves fiction and real events, as he explores the conspiracies and propaganda that drove the 1954 CIA-backed military coup in Guatemala.
The Fell by Sarah Moss In Ghost Wall and Summerwater, Moss excelled at mapping personal desires and responsibilities against the national mood. In this lockdown novel, it’s November 2020, and though Kate is in the middle of a two-week quarantine, she can’t stand the confinement, slipping out for a moorland walk that goes horribly wrong.
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft The long awaited appearance in English of the Nobel laureate’s masterwork. Set against the transformations of thought in enlightenment Europe, it is the epic story of the charismatic Jacob Frank, who arrives in a Polish village as a young Jew, and goes on to reinvent himself across countries and religions.
The Everyby Dave Eggers Following his 2013 tech satire The Circle, Eggers imagines a terrifying future: the world under one digital monopoly, controlling e-commerce, social media and search – and the woman hoping to bring the company down from within. Justine Jordan
NONFICTION
September
Greek Myths: A New Retellingby Charlotte Higgins A gritty and exhilarating new retelling of the ancient stories in which the female characters take centre stage.
Misfits: A Personal Manifestoby Michaela Coel The award-winning screenwriter and actor writes about the value of misfits, the power of theatre and storytelling and the importance of saying no.
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraintby Maggie Nelson With insight and intellectual rigour, Nelson wrestles the concept of “freedom” away from its contemporary political misuses and explores what it means in the context of art, sex, drugs and climate.
‘What really went on in the corridors of power’ … Gavin Barwell, right, with Theresa May in 2017. Photograph: Steve Parsons
Chief of Staff: Notes from Downing Streetby Gavin Barwell The former aide to Theresa May promises to reveal “what really went on in the corridors of power”, from Brexit to Trump and the ways that government operates “in a time of crisis”.
The End of Bias: How We Change Our Mindsby Jessica Nordell A groundbreaking analysis of bias and how to fix it, by a journalist who one day sent pitches from a male name and found that they started to land.
Harlots, Whores & Hackabouts: A History of Sex for Saleby Kate Lister A brand new account of the oldest profession, by the creator of research project Whores of Yore.
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Mattersby Steven Pinker The cognitive scientist rejects the popular view that the human brain is a “basket of delusions” and spells out the urgent need and potential for more rational behaviour and debate.
October
A 1,600 day Brexit diary … Michel Barnier, EC chief negotiator. Photograph: Getty Images
Secret Brexit Diary: A Glorious Illusionby Michel Barnier The diary Barnier kept during the 1,600 days of Brexit negotiations promises to lift the lid on that fraught period. A clue may be in its subtitle.
Manifestoby Bernardine Evaristo Described as a “no-holds-barred” story about being true to yourself, this memoir charts Evaristo’s journey from broke young poet to Booker prize-winning novelist.
A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003–2020: Volume Twoby David Sedaris The second book in a collection of diaries whose first, Theft by Finding, was described by this paper as “beautiful in its piquancy and minimalism”.
Life, love and music … Bruce Springsteen, left, and Barack Obama record their podcast. Photograph: Rob DeMartin/AP
Renegades: Born in the USA: Dreams by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen Obama and Springsteen discuss life, love and music, with full-colour photos and archive material.
Keisha the Sketby Jade LB The noughties online sensation about a young south London girl is back for the first time in official print, with additional essays from Candice Carty-Williams, Caleb Femi, Aniefiok Ekpoudom and Enny.
1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoirby Ai Weiwei Chinese history told through the lives of artist Ai Weiwei and his poet father, Ai Qing.
The Power of Women: A Doctor’s Journey of Hope and Healingby Dr Denis Mukwege story of courage and integrity, both of its doctor author and the female survivors of sexual violence whose strength he celebrates. A powerful call to arms.
Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time by Teju Cole In a collection of essays the celebrated author of Open City explores the ways we retain our humanity and different ways of thinking about the colour black.
‘If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it’: Rebecca Solnit. Photograph: Gary Mayes
Orwell’s Rosesby Rebecca Solnit An intellectually eclectic collection of essays “in dialogue” with Orwell takes in Stalin’s lemons, Colombia’s rose industry and the pleasing thought: “If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it.”
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanityby David Graeber and David Wengrow Written over a decade, a work that promises to overturn our view of human history and make us rethink the way we live.
The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for an Endangered Planet by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams A lifetime of experience and wisdom combines with much-needed optimism in this guide to the climate crisis and what we can do about it.
November
These Precious Daysby Ann Patchett A heartfelt and witty collection of essays on everything from marriage and knitting to the inevitability of death, by the Women’s prize-winning novelist.
Patient 1 by Charlotte Raven and Dr Edward Wild A powerful account of living with Huntington’s disease.
A new collection full of hope and healing … Amanda Gorman. Photograph: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images
Both/And: A Life in Many Worldsby Huma Abedin Hillary Clinton’s aide and adviser writes a personal and revealing account of her relationship with Clinton, her marriage to Anthony Weiner and her own action-packed life and history.
Diaries and Notebooks by Patricia Highsmith Distilled from the 8,000 pages discovered in her linen closet, this is the definitive edition of the diaries of “one of our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Katy Guest
POETRY
September
All the Names Given by Raymond Antrobus A eagerly awaited collection from the Folio prize-winner explores language, deafness, conflicting identities and the weight of history.
October
Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück Glück’s first collection since winning the Nobel prize last year is an intimate and haunting work full of “recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring / anyone can make a fine meal”.
December
Call Us What We Carryby Amanda Gorman A new collection full of hope and healing from the young American poet who electrified the world when she read “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration. JJ
