Books
Jessica Payn
South London-based publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions has once more been awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize, confirming its status as a vital home for ambitious, edge-defining fiction. Now in its fifth year, the prize seeks to promote and reward the best in literary fiction from small presses in the UK and Ireland, which it defines broadly as publishers with fewer than five full-time employees. This year’s winning title, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s Animalia, translated by Frank Wynne, follows four generations of a peasant farming family in rural 20th century France, investigating their Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Assassinate the President! Obliterate history by torching libraries and murdering historians! Crazy leaders and fake news are just a few of the subjects tackled by political journalist and thriller writer, Jonathan Freedland (aka Sam Bourne), in this, his fifth novel featuring the inventive, imaginative, intelligent trouble-shooter Maggie Costelloe. Maggie – see her name – is Irish turned American. Aside from an off-again on-again Israeli partner, her only relative is her sister, a school teacher computer nerd, who lives a fairly normal life in the American South with (gasp) a husband Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress brings personal and public tragedy together in a narrative as absorbingly melancholic as its subject is shocking. The story described by Léger’s narrator – a scarcely fictional version of herself – is of the performance artist Pippa Bacca who, in 2008, set out on a symbolic journey from Milan to Jerusalem clad in a white wedding dress, hitchhiking her way through cities and countryside. Bacca was never to reach her destination. The narrator’s research of this woman’s failed journey runs alongside and increasingly intertwines with her own story, that of her Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
That any writer “struggling to make ends meet” would apply themselves to the making of Dream of Fair to Middling Women is something of a complexity. Written in Paris in 1932, when Beckett was just twenty-six years’ old, this nebula – of autobiography, literary in-jokes, and musings on everything from philosophy, art and music, to the very novel that Beckett is in the process of piecing together – was shelved after multiple rejections for being too scandalous, too risky. There it would remain for another sixty years, until in 1992 it was finally published.His Read more ...
Nick Hasted
St. Patrick’s Day, and socialising itself, has been all but cancelled. But turn the rickety door-handle of a bohemian pub near Brighton station, and a poignant scene is unfolding. The Irish poet Brendan Cleary’s reading has been officially called off, and the boozy crowd whose raucousness he would have had to ride has evaporated. Instead, he continues unpaid for a scattered few. The sight of these last drinkers fondly listening under candlelight will warm me in the months to come. It’s not quite Weimar, because no human monster is approaching to destroy us. But the lights are going out.Cleary Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
“Groupthink”, according to Christopher Booker, is “one of the most valuable guides to collective human behaviour we have ever been given.” But what is it exactly? It begins Booker’s final, incomplete and posthumously published work as a descriptor for behaviour dictated by the “group mind”, the fixations of the “human herd”, or a “collective make-believe”. It is, in other words, a worldview with a superficial importance, whose relation to reality is fraught, and serves as an explanation for much of our world today: from identity politics, or the European Union, to the “belief”, passionately Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How do you prevent a sick baby in a high-care cubicle, his frail chest swamped in secretions, from drowning in his own “loose mucus”? Remove a suction catheter from its wrapping and insert it gently into the tiny mouth. “The whooshing sound of the vacuum sucks up his cracking cry. I flip the switch again and the sound stops. The cry subsides, his breath returns to soft chugs. The oxygen saturations on the monitor rise slightly. I tap his tummy and shush hush him back to sleep.”Suddenly, we have plunged into a period when hospitals become battle zones, with their personnel seen as shock troops Read more ...
India Lewis
Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is a true novel of two halves and is (excuse the pun) a bit of a curate’s egg. Kawakami’s bio at the beginning of the text explains that the novel was expanded from an earlier novella, made clear by a separation into books one and two. The first book centres on the visit of the narrator’s sister and niece to her house in Tokyo, and the second brings the narrator, Natsume, into the centre of a story about her desire to conceive a child at forty. The first book is excellent, a rough-edged drama that is both hilarious and tragic, and tinged with surreality. The Read more ...
Lauren Brown
The relationship between Joe, Robin and Ruth is far from your average love triangle. On the face of it, Robin loves Ruth, but after introducing her to his charismatic friend Joe – an artist and renegade – their affair reroutes all of their lives forever.We know Robin and Ruth end up married, and as a reader we must piece together how we got from A to B. But at the core of the novel is the belief that life isn’t linear and causality certainly isn’t that clean-cut. A story which initially seems anchored in a London pub slowly unfurls into a collection of memories that, when slowly puzzled Read more ...
India Lewis
Rebecca Solnit’s autobiography, Recollections of My Non-Existence, is just as you might expect it to be – tangential, changeable, deeply feminist, and imbued with a sense of hope that undercuts her wild anger at the world’s injustices. It says much for how quickly our thinking about women’s rights and those of minorities has evolved recently that her feminist rhetoric almost feels dated at points. However, Solnit’s energy is still fresh, urgent, and vital, reminding the reader that although the battle seems to be on the way to being won by powers of good, we are still far from victory, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In common with her literary forebear, Joanna Trollope’s light hand refrains from the introverted angst so common in contemporary novels. Her immensely readable, witty renderings of English middle-class life have entertained and enlightened over almost two dozen novels. She portrays characters on journeys for which they’re missing the map and exposes common dilemmas along the way. Her characters search for answers to situations obscured by habit and solutions to personal problems they hardly recognise. Her underlying optimism is alluring – from recognition may come change.In Mum & Dad Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
To Christos Tsiolkas fans expecting something in the vein of his riveting bestsellers The Slap and Barracuda, the sixth novel by this Australian writer may come as a shock. We're not in Melbourne any more. Damascus is a serious historical enterprise, a biblical and rather heavy-handed one, exploring the story of Saul of Tarsus, later St Paul.There’s a lot of raw, visceral squalor in this brutal Roman world 35 years after Christ’s death, and the testament according to Tsiolkas is full of stonings, castrations and other ghastly punishments. Damascus addresses questions of class, shame and doubt Read more ...