fiction
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
“There is another world… a way of perceiving that is chaotic and awesome and terrifying,” announces Seraphina Madsen’s cigarillo-smoking, telepathic cat.Lecturing a teenage coven on the art of sorcery and how to tap into the powers of the “Unseen world”, Tu Tu (also known as "The Master", in just one of Madsen’s many playful nods to Mikhail Bulgakov) swings from chandeliers, drinks champagne, plays the bongos and an electro-acoustic harp, and waltzes around a Gothic Revival mansion in a diamanté collar.Yet you’d be mistaken for thinking he’s a beneficent magical moggy akin to those found in a Read more ...
theartsdesk
From Kafka’s spry sketches to Derek Owusu’s novel-poem, and Jaan Kross’s Estonian Wolf Hall to Katherine Rundell’s spirited biography of John Donne, our reviewers take the time to share their favourite books of 2022. Before his death, Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of his papers. This included his short stories, novels (both finished and fragmentary), diaries, and his little-known foray into the visual arts. But now, collected extensively for the first time, we can find The Drawings (Yale University Press, £50) staring defiantly back at us. The fact that, if Kafka’s Read more ...
Harriet Mercer
Derek Owusu’s debut That Reminds Me won the Desmond Elliot Prize in 2020. When asked what it was that she loved most about Owusu’s semi-autobiographical 117-page book, Preti Taneja, chair of the judges (and winner of the prize herself in 2018) answered, without hesitation, “the form” and Owusu’s “compression of poetic language”. Owusu’s latest work, Losing the Plot, imagines what life was like for his 18-year-old mother when she arrived in London from Ghana in 1989. His fictional narrator’s mother swaps the “dusty trails of Jamasi” for the grey pavement of Tottenham, “a village of disguised Read more ...
India Lewis
Cormac McCarthy’s first books in over a decade are coming out this year, a month apart from one another. The Passenger tells the story of deep-sea diver Bobby Western, desperately in love with his perfect, beautiful, wildly intelligent dead sister, Alicia. Then, Stella Maris is her story, named after the asylum to which she commits herself.The Passenger is classic McCarthy fare: totally abstruse, excellently descriptive, and frustratingly digressive. It has elements of many of his previous novels, the strongest being the narrative of the perpetually wandering anti-hero. Western is a very Read more ...
India Lewis
Tense with horror and the sticky darkness of the Argentinian night, Mariana Enriquez’s writing is rich and occult. Her epic novel, Our Share of Night, vividly translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, follows on from her short story collections Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. In this, her first novel to be translated into English, she delves further into a lushly violent and erotic world.Our Share of Night is set in the aftermath of the Argentine military junta’s worst excesses. The book begins in 1981 (the dictatorship ended in 1983) and the Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1814, Francis Jeffrey began his review of Wordsworth’s The Excursion with a provocative denunciation of romanticism: “This will never do,” he complained. “It bears no doubt the stamp of the author’s heart and fancy; but unfortunately not half so visibly as that of his peculiar system.”William Boyd’s latest excursion into fictional biography, aptly entitled The Romantic, is the fourth of the “whole-life” novels he has made his speciality, following The New Confessions (1987), Any Human Heart (2002) and Sweet Caress (2015). It will almost certainly do, as far Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hilary Mantel, who has died at the age of 70, was a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, an action-packed 650-page brick of a book about the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Three years later its successor, Bring Up the Bodies, became the first sequel ever to win the prize in its 44-year history. Then came the RSC's stage adaptation of both novels, while the BBC adapted Wolf Hall, with Mark Rylance (pictured below) in the title role. Finally, after a long wait for her fans, came The Mirror & the Light, which followed its predecessors into the Read more ...
India Lewis
Bringing Olivier Guez’s novel The Disappearance of Josef Mengele on a beach holiday may seem like an odd choice (such is the lot of a reviewer). This incongruity transformed into something stranger, however, when I learned that the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele fled to South America and the book’s subject is the permanent holiday of the so-called “Angel of Death” – a poisoned chalice of a life in unending, hidden exile.Recently translated into English by Georgia de Chamberet, Guez’s book won the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt. It is, ostensibly, a Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Sitting in the park on a hot summer’s day, life began to imitate art. I had been soaking up the sun’s now overpowering rays for over an hour and was beginning to feel its radiating effects.Golden green filaments of grass moved back, the trees swayed in heady sympathetic succession; buzzing from the outside in, my body started to metabolise light at a speed my brain couldn’t fathom. My skin bubbled green, my tongue unfurled petals and my eyes sprouted luminous buds. I had become a plant – or so I felt – and the sun-soaked synthesis of my transformation was near complete.Hyperbole, you wonder? Read more ...
India Lewis
The title of Katya Adaui’s debut collection in English is taken from one of the 12 short stories it contains: an allusion to the depths hidden below the surface, which is also one of the book’s central motifs.Adaui is the Peruvian author of three books of short stories and a novel, who now lives in Buenos Aires. Here Be Icebergs, translated by Rosalind Harvey, is an elegant, slim volume, which, despite its size, manages to capture the enormity and complexity of familial and personal ties.The opener, “The Hunger Angel”, is an excellent depiction of how we can merge into our family whilst Read more ...
Izzy Smith
Mieko Kawakami is the champion of the loner. Since achieving immense success in the UK with her translated works, she has become an indie fiction icon for her modern, visceral depictions of characters who exist on the fringes of Japanese society. Kawakami’s latest novel to be translated into English by Sam Bett and David Boyd not only cements her reputation for giving voice to the quieter souls of this world, but also sees the intimacy of her writing reach new heights.All the Lovers in the Night is one of those novels that hangs together so delicately that it’s difficult to discern its Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
“Is she at a pivotal point in her life but unable to pivot…?” Eve, the young heroine of Chloë Ashby’s dazzling debut novel, Wet Paint, asks this question standing in front of Édouard Manet’s painting "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882). Yet she could easily be asking herself the same question.Unable to “pivot” in life, but at a pivotal stage, Eve goes from job to job, is thrown out of her flat, becomes increasingly reckless and then spirals downwards in an effort to stave off the memories of the past. Initially, art – the viewing and co-creation of it – keeps her afloat, but past traumas Read more ...