fiction
Tim Cumming
Recent politics surround the EU and nationhood, fantasies of Irish Sea bridges and trading borders more porous than limestone have revived the granular rub between Eire and Britain, and the Celtic Tiger cool of the Nineties is a history module these days. Nevertheless the creative exchange between the two nations has a long and fruitful history – our folk traditions are conjoined twins, after all, and our contemporary musical cultures part of a continual flow back and forth.Imagining Ireland, first mounted to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising back in 2016, the year of the Brexit Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
With the publication of her first work, Waiariki (1975), Patricia Grace became the author of the first ever collection of short stories by a Māori woman. In the four-and-a-half decades since, she has established herself as a canonical figure in postcolonial and Māori literature. Grace’s second novel, Potiki (1986), winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and now re-released after thirty-four years, is an anguished account of a small family living on a remote stretch of New Zealand’s coastline. Set “at the curve that binds land and sea”, it is a searching examination of human nature, Read more ...
James Dowsett
In Clemens Meyer’s new collection of short stories Dark Satellites (translated from German by Kate Derbyshire), the lonely frequently enter into each other’s orbit. Their loneliness is intensified by every rotation they make of one another. These are people at the very margins of society. It is here where the author plies his trade. In this worthy follow-up to the Booker International Prize-nominated Bricks and Mortar, which was set in Leipzig’s red-light district in the days of the former GDR, Meyer returns to Germany’s fringes. His stripped-back prose is suffused with meaning.The short Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Like many writers, Jeet Thayil is a bit of an outsider. And, if his track record is anything to go by, he has been happy to keep it that way. The poet, novelist, editor, performer and former addict spent a couple of decades rubbing shoulders with the writers, artists and eccentrics of bohemian Mumbai before putting pen to paper in the late 90s and, eventually, offering a glimpse of that underworld in his kaleidoscopic first novel, Narcopolis.After courting one literary prize (the 2012 Man Booker) and picking up another (the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature), his sophomore effort, The Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
In March 1937, the government of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk instigated what it called a “disciplinary campaign” against the Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds in the Dersim region of eastern Turkey. What followed was a bloody, coordinated assault that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and forcible deportations. The episode has “weighed on Turkey’s official history ever since” and supplies the context to Sema Kaygusuz’s Every Fire You Tend, translated into English by Nicholas Glastonbury. The novel, which grapples with memories that are both an obligation and a burden, is a brave rejoinder to an Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Elizabeth Strout is fond of plain titles. Much as her stories are interested in subtlety – the quiet complications and contradictions of ordinary life – her books advertise themselves by means of telling understatements. Olive, Again follows ten years on the heels of her Pulitzer Prize-winning “novel in stories” Olive Kitteridge, which painted a resonant, emotionally complex portrait of a community in fictional Crosby, a small coastal town in Strout’s native Maine. Via 13 interlinking short stories, Strout refracts glimpses of her eponymous character Olive, a retired maths Read more ...
Sarah Collins
“Truth was further from safety than two islands at opposite ends of the earth,” proclaims the narrator of ‘Lake Like A Mirror’, the titular short story in Ho Sok Fong’s intoxicating new collection. When a young Chinese Malaysian literature tutor inadvertently falls foul of the university committee after a recital of an ee cummings poem is uploaded online, she begins to feel bored with herself, and bored of “drawing the line” that determines appropriate and inappropriate, fatigued with self-censorship in the pursuit of safety. Ho’s startling prose viscerally conveys the quiet, stifling fear Read more ...
theartsdesk
She had clutched the envelope given by the shy messenger, but she had never opened it. The Intended.True. The message from the director was for her.A joke between them—a bond.Though in her view he was no Kurtz: all he wanted was to finish his film.Caz is surprised at the attendance.There is no body, just this blasphemy, his inexplicable remains in a jar, a bowl of ashes that mocks his actual mortal substance, this foreign form of dying—as if some obscene power had turned him into what repulsed him, an indifferently presented dish.She thinks—but how everyone is at his wake. Now they come. A Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Jeanne – employment, age and appearance unknown, motives unknowable – is building a collection of penises. In street after street, she feigns dizziness; on the inevitable approach of a man eager to lend his help, she leads him to a hotel room. After the encounter, she does not retain any recollection of this man’s face, body or name; in the intricate interior of her memory palace, only the textured details of the penis, the "shape, the form, the particular warmth, the density, the smell", are carefully preserved. She is the protagonist of Nina Leger’s provocative novel which imagines the Read more ...
Stephanie Sy-Quia
Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is written as a letter to his mother, who cannot read. She cannot read because, when she was five, her schoolhouse was burnt to the ground in an American napalm raid. “Our mother tongue, then,” writes Vuong, is the “mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”Vuong, whose debut poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, won the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1988 and emigrated with his mother and grandmother to Hartford, Connecticut via a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Stalingrad is the companion piece to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which on its (re)publication in English a decade ago was acclaimed as one of the greatest Russian (and not only Russian) novels of the 20th century. For its sense of the sheer sweep of history, of a society passing through a period of momentous conflict, comparison was often made with Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Stalingrad is the prequel to Life and Fate, and its appearance now allows readers to assess Grossman’s magnum opus – he considered the two novels to be effectively a single work – in its entirety. Tolstoy Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If there’s one thing to learn from Ben Okri in this evening of conversation at Brighton Festival between the Famished Road writer and author Colin Grant it’s how to “upwake”.The phrase, coined in his new (11th) novel The Freedom Artist – a post-truth fable set in an imagined future – describes a retaliation state after people find themselves unable or unwilling to think for themselves. He describes it as being the opposite of waking up, which is a slow uprising – being upwake is swift, vertical and immediate. It’s the need to question, and the challenging of blind acceptance.He speaks of how Read more ...