Fiction

This One Sky Day by Leone Ross

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This One Sky Day

A lush and intoxicating read

Longlisted for The Women’s Prize 2022, This One Sky Day by Leone Ross is a wondrous affair, brimful of light and life. Set on the imaginary Caribbean archipelago of Popisho, a place where magic is perpetually afoot, it follows a momentous day in the life of its inhabitants. Unrest lurks in many forms, including meteorological, as the stories of a silver-fingered healer and ex-addict chef entwine in a magical realist novel of love and grief, dosed with a spike of political satire.

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Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali

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Beer in the Snooker Club

A lighthearted look into a confused young mind

With the most English sounding of titles, Egyptian 1964 classic Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali portrays Ram, a penniless and charming Egyptian Copt who lives well off his wealthy aunts, his own father having lost a fortune on the ‘bourse’. Seduced by the sophistication of Europe, Ram and his friend Font travel to London to immerse themselves in the political and cultural ideas of the time. Meanwhile, Egypt is going through its own political upheaval with the end of British imperialism, Nasser’s revolution and a burgeoning Communist movement. Which side, if any, will Ram come down on?

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Mercia's Take by Daniel Wiles

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Mercia’s Take

A dark and impressive debut novel

Michael Cash believes that coal mining has stolen his boyhood, blighted his adulthood and may well send him to an early grave. In the brooding Mercia’s Take by Daniel Wiles, we join him in the dark heart of the English industrial revolution as he battles to save his young son from the same fate. Desperation, vengeance, and the unholy lure of gold, drives a tale where the blackness seeping into Michael’s lungs threatens to invade his very soul.

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The Passion According to G.H by Clarice Lispector

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The Passion According to G.H.

Mesmerising avant-garde Brazilian classic

If your experience of transformative insect fiction is limited to the Kafkaesque, then it’s high time you met the ‘heralding quiver’ of cockroach antennae in The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector. A novel that demands the utmost concentration, this Brazilian modern classic tells the story of a somewhat intense sculptress, who discovers a large cockroach in her home. Her initial attempt at extermination leaves the creature slowly dying in front of her eyes, a protracted process that sparks a full-blown existential crisis. Enlightenment, madness, or possibly both, await.

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Free Love by Tessa Hadley

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Free Love

One woman’s search for self in 1960’s London

It’s 1967, and while London is swinging, the home counties are abstaining. There’s certainly no Bohemian aura around suburban housewife, Phyllis Fischer. Forty and fragrant, Phyllis enjoys an elegant life of propriety, her days revolving around her family and social circle. Her complacency is set to be shattered when an intoxicating secret kiss ignites a desire for sexual and intellectual freedom. But at what price? Free Love by Tessa Hadley is a magnificently astute portrayal of family upheaval and compromise, set in an English decade itself in flux.

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The Antarctica of Love by Sara Stridsberg

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The Antarctica of Love

Giving the victim a face

There are voices we don’t hear from often enough in literature. Shuggie, the young son of an alcoholic in Shuggie Bain, is one example; Kristina, or Inni, in The Antarctica of Love by Sara Stridsberg, another. A drug addict and prostitute about to be murdered in the most gruesome way imaginable, invisible to society until, for a fleeting moment, she grabs the public’s attention as a victim of a horrific crime. Inni, talks to us from the afterlife, taking us through the day of the crime and how she got there. It’s a tough read this book, mainly because of the graphic violence but perhaps even more because it holds up a mirror to ourselves and our society’s failure to see people like Inni. Shell shockingly good.

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The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

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The Friend

Lyrical on mourning and dogs

A female English professor and writer loses her best friend and sometimes lover to suicide. A few days later she’s asked to take over the care of his dog, an enormous Great Dane. No small ask as the writer lives in a tiny flat in a Manhattan building where dogs are prohibited. This is the plot of the otherwise plotless but strangely mesmerising The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, a story about love, loss and being an artist, which, had my flight not been over, I would have read in one sitting.

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Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

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Crossroads

Reassuringly familiar

In Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen we’re back in familiar Franzen-territory: the dissection of an all American family. After his more expansive (geographically and thematically) and, in my opinion, less successful Purity, Crossroads feels reassuringly familiar. This is both a blessing, he does it extremely well, but also begs the question: is Franzen a one-trick pony?

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Consent by Annabel Lyon

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Consent

Elegant psychological page-turner

Long-listed for The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021, Consent by Annabel Lyon is a dark and twisty tale. At a time when public debate around the principle of consent has often centred on the sexual, the novel’s slightly lurid cover misleads. Lyon is actually intent on exploring the broader meaning of the word, in a cleverly interwoven story of two sets of sisters. In each case, one sister is incapacitated and the remaining sibling compelled to care for her. What appears to be an affecting domestic drama accelerates into a shocking and suspenseful reckoning with guilt and grief.

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The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura

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The Woman in the Purple Skirt

Enigmatic Japanese tale of lonely obsession

Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize, The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura is currently cresting the wave of novels by en vogue female Japanese writers. Set in an unnamed city in Japan, it tells the story of a narrator who refers to herself as the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. Leading an isolated life, her only diversion appears to be a fascination with a neighbourhood local, the aforementioned Woman in the Purple Skirt. What initially appears to the reader as no more than an odd girl crush, becomes much darker, as our becardiganed storyteller decides to play puppet master with Purple Skirt’s life.

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