fiction
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 ...
Marina Vaizey
A one-night stand between a female college student, Margot, whose part-time job is selling snacks at the cinema, and thirtyish Robert, a customer, goes pathetically awry. It was disappointing, uneasy, perhaps more, and memorialised in all its edgy discomfort in Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”, published in the New Yorker in December 2017. The tale hit the #MeToo zeitgeist, charting a deeply unsatisfactory sexual encounter, where the girl just thinks it’s more trouble to stop than continue. The tale went ballistic, with something like four million hits on the net. And now it is the centre Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is 1914 – a fateful year for assassinations, war and revolution. The fictional Erast Petrovich Fandorin, the protagonist of Boris Akunin’s series of historical thrillers, is an elegant, eccentric sometime government servant, spy and diplomat, as well as engineer, independent detective and free spirit. He is a completely assured personality, who nevertheless stammers in ordinary conversation. And he is very fond of risk.This well-travelled Muscovite is visiting Yalta to pay homage to the memory of his hero, Chekhov, thus already utilising the mix of real history and fiction that is Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
If you believe the bulk of the “books of the year” features that drift like stray tinsel across the media at this time of year, Britain’s literary taste-makers only enjoy the flavours of the Anglosphere. With a handful of exceptions, the sort of cultural and political notables invited to select their favourite reading overwhelmingly endorse titles from the UK or US. For our book-tipping elite, it seems, a hard literary Brexit happened decades ago. Yet publishing history tells a different story. The sales volume for translations of literary fiction released in the UK has doubled since the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
You had to keep your eyes skinned. Was that Iris Murdoch or AS Byatt, Kingsley Amis or John Banville, Margaret Atwood or Val McDermid – maybe, even, Joanna Lumley? Tables as far as the eye can see, dressed with white tablecloths and crowded with wine glasses. A glittering banquet with oceans of booze, it seems, mostly champagne, lots of hugging, kissing, shouting and clouds of gossip, all accompanied by television cameras.Barneys, Books and Bust Ups was a vastly entertaining documentary of the (Man) Booker Prize’s first 50 years, narrated in the soothing tones of Kirsty Wark. We witnessed Read more ...