fiction
theartsdesk
"My pen is the wing of a bird; it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think, those dreams we are not allowed to dream." Batool Haidari’s words give this bold collection of stories its title and epigraph. She is one of 18 writers from the Write Afghanistan project, run by the organisation UNTOLD which works to promote the work of writers in communities marginalised by conflict. This book is the culmination of that two-year project: the first anthology of short stories by Afghan women, written in the languages Dari and Pashton, and translated by Afghan translators.The following Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Free Love opens in 1967 and remains within that heady era throughout; no flashbacks, no spanning of generations as in Hadley's wonderful novels The Past or Late in the Day. Phyllis, aged 40, is a suburban housewife, C of E, deeply apolitical and a contented mother of two.She likes L’Air du Temps perfume (one of Hadley’s Sixties tropes: Jill, a character in The Past, also uses it), loves the panelled oak doors in her hallway, and has a special bond with her nine-year-old son, Hugh.Hadley’s eighth novel is as absorbing as any of her other fiction, with complex family secrets, brilliant insights Read more ...
theartsdesk
“Duck! Here comes another year.” We can, I think, all empathise with the motions and emotions of Ogden Nash’s new year poem, “Good Riddance, But Now What?” Before, however, we bid a troublesome year farewell, we look back at the year in fiction and share our favourites. 2021 was the year that Sally Rooney, to high anticipation, published her third novel, that Damon Galgut (third time lucky) won the Booker, and that Hillary Clinton, continuing the family legacy, wrote a thriller. Read on for more. The best novel I read this year was without doubt Jon McGregor’s Read more ...
Izzy Smith
For most of us, fluttering our eyelids to convince a loved one to cook dinner is harmless meddling. Complimenting our boss on their new coat before asking for a promotion is necessary cunning. For the characters in Lucie Elven’s debut novel The Weak Spot, however, small moments of manipulation amount to something rather more sinister.Insecurities, penchants and fears become means of exploitation in a novel that uncovers what it is to have our "weak spot" used against us. Delightfully equivocal and quietly unnerving, the book offers a striking allegory of the power of information in the modern Read more ...
Jessica Payn
How do you imagine the wind at dawn? Biting, brisk, peremptory – a kind of summons as another day begins? For Les Tamplin, wife-beater, sheriff, father to three sons, it is a detective, deathly wind, "the wind that cannot be stopped" which stirs with the ghosts of all he’s killed, "come to steal [his] last breath". Since the Civil War, he has murdered compulsively, following "the urgent need to choke" for the relief it brings. The wind stalks him with the threat of retribution. It is lithe and fleshly, and "comes crawling at me on its belly like an infant’s slow slithering". He is Read more ...
CP Hunter
“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel takes its name from a Buddhist heart sutra that meditates on reality and questions of human existence. It’s a big question for a big book. A Zen priest as well as a teacher, writer, and filmmaker, Ozeki tackles her subject on a series of meta-levels, which make this 500-pager fascinatingly complex, if also at times a bit overwhelming.The story begins with the death of Kenji Oh, a tragicomic accident that leaves his widow, Annabelle, and their son, Benny, stunned. Kenji leaves behind him a trail of trauma, which manifests in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
It’s Christmas 1971 in New Prospect, a suburb of Chicago, and pastor Russ Hildebrandt has plans for time alone with Frances, an attractive young widow who’s just moved back into town.Important facts become quickly apparent: Russ resents his long-suffering wife, Marion, and he has suffered a humiliation at the hands of Rick Ambrose, the groovier pastor (“a little black-moustached satyr with stack-heeled hooves”) who leads Crossroads, the church’s youth group. Ambrose’s way is less God, more sensitivity session, and it goes down a storm with the kids. Even worse, Russ’s teenage children, Becky Read more ...
India Lewis
Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat is one of those new books with the unsettling quality of describing or approximating a great moment in history and its aftermath, as the reader is still living through it. This could be trite, but Hall manages to make it compelling, tragic, and still sensitive in its handling of a love story during a time of terrible social upheaval.The pandemic of Burntcoat is not our Corona or Covid, but Nova, a disease that more closely resembles the bubonic plague, with its pustules and arguably more horrific end. We join Burntcoat’s narrator, the artist, Edith, when the disease, in Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
More than once, reading Colson Whitehead’s latest novel Harlem Shuffle, the brilliant Josh and Benny Safdie movie Uncut Gems from 2019 came to mind, which was unexpected. For one, Whitehead’s book takes place on the other side of Central Park, far uptown from the film’s downtown Diamond District setting. It also unfolds in a meticulously recreated 1960s era Harlem rather than the early 2010s. But like the film, Harlem Shuffle has more than its fair share of precious stones and dollar-stuffed envelopes passing hands and, as its name promises, more than a touch of that film’s hectic energy; a Read more ...
Lizzie Hibbert
Historical fiction – perhaps all fiction – presents its authors with the problem of how to convey contextual information that is external to the plot but necessary to the reader’s understanding of it.Some authors supply an omniscient third-person narrator to plug possible gaps in historical knowledge, as in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), where Orlando sends a letter to “Mr Nicholas Greene of Clifford’s Inn” and helpful parentheses explain that “(Nick Greene was a very famous writer at that time).” Others have first-person narrators do the same job as they reflect retrospectively upon their Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Like any good writer, Claire-Louise Bennett loves lists. Lists are, after all, those moments when words, freed from grammar’s grip, can simply be themselves – do their own thing, show off, let loose. It doesn’t take much for Bennett to let one unfurl. At one point, she scans with obvious, epicurean delight an array of “little bottles and jars and ramekins” on a set of imaginary kitchen shelves, “each holding their own delectable though not always readily detectable specimen, capers, for example, capers, cornichons, cockles, truffles, tamarind, nutmeg, goose fat, juniper berries Read more ...
India Lewis
Thora Hjörleifsdóttir’s Magma is certainly not an easy read. It describes, in short chapters, the obsessive and ultimately destructive power of an abusive relationship. It is, at times, patchily written (perhaps because we have been programmed to recognise the clichés in doomed love affairs), but is ultimately compelling, at least in part because some of the aspects of her experience will not be unfamiliar to some readers.This is Hjörleifsdóttir’s first novel – previously, she has only published poetry. Her poetic history is clear in Magma, each chapter acting as a vignette, Read more ...