Fiction

Colin Thubron’s compact, elegant and beautifully written new novel opens with a woman undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour. Kathleen has had a successful career as an actor and is married to Robert, a pompous neurologist with whom she is planning to go on holiday to Egypt. The operation stalls and so is postponed until their return from the Valley of the Kings. This passage to Egypt, where Robert, in an ironic echo of E.M. Forster’s Adela Quested, hopes to see the ‘real’ country, is complicated by the inclusion of Robert’s younger brother, Alan.

Two girls in Basque south-west France in the 1980s have been best friends since early childhood. Rose is the good one, studious and kind, with a sweetheart she plans to marry. Solange is the wild child: rebellious, dishonest and pregnant at 15. How to Make a Woman might sound like a Gallic take on Elena Ferrante territory, but it’s much more than that. Visceral and cerebral, with echoes of Simone de Beauvoir, it describes what it means to live in a world apparently created by and for men. The novel unfolds as a triptych: Part One ‘According to Rose’; Part Two ‘As told by Solange’; and, finally, ‘Together’. Typically, while Rose goes on a school trip to Madrid, Solange survives a horrific birth, described in unflinching detail.

Billed as a literary thriller from one of the masters of the genre, Scarlett Thomas’s The Runner is a far denser philosophical novel than readers might expect – albeit one built around a propulsive chase. The author transforms ultramarathons into a metaphor for modern capitalism, using the story of a fugitive runner to question what gives life value in a world dominated by money, surveillance and relentless growth. Capitalism is presented as a race without a finishing line, with running symbolising an economic system that demands endless progression: ‘The whole world is just relentlessly upupup. Why is everything just another hill?

Valeria Luiselli’s previous novel Lost Children Archive (2019) was a formally inventive, highly erudite reworking of the American family road trip, a bravura performance that won both the Dublin Literature Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her follow up, Beginning Middle End, is a formally inventive, highly erudite reworking of a European family road trip. The framework might be the same – even down to the inclusion of Polaroid pictures – but this is far from a pale retread of earlier themes. It is a visionary portrait of three generations of women, as well as the times in which we find ourselves. Mother and Daughter have escaped New York and are housesitting for the Pianist in Sicily.

A spectre is haunting England in the surreal tales assembled in Ben Pester’s Sail Away Land, the follow-up to his debut collection Am I in the Right Place? (2020) and last year’s novel The Expansion Project: the spectre of tweeness. Confronted with scenarios involving nightmarish gatherings, paranormal entities and psychic electronic devices, his characters respond with a lobotomised, quaint strain of stoicism – the type that makes us say things like ‘It’ll come out in the wash’ when getting made redundant, and ‘Least said…’ when handed a terminal diagnosis. ‘You have left the grill on!’ repeatedly frets the title story’s nameless protagonist, like a Tony Hancock character, oblivious to the fact he is also apparently shrinking to the size of a rat.

When a girl turns up at an isolated cabin in Canada, unannounced and uninvited, the woman busy thinning the lettuce has no idea who the stranger is. But then the woman has trouble remembering even her own name. ‘“Are you Abra Phillips?” asks the girl. “Am I?” the woman ponders, conscious that the words “mean something” to the girl,’ writes Joan Barfoot in the opening pages of Gaining Ground, a Canadian feminist classic now republished nearly 50 years after it first appeared as a debut novel entitled Abra. ‘I think, finally, that I must be; there is no one else to connect with this name,’ continues the protagonist, who we soon learn has been alone in the cabin for the past nine years, all but living off the land after walking out on her family.

Cool Machine, the final novel in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy (following Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto), is another tour de force and a fitting conclusion to the Uptown peregrinations of his endearing protagonist Ray Carney, a successful Harlem furniture salesman and part-time fence. It’s an old-school crime caper, set in 1980s New York against the backdrop of Mayor Koch’s rapidly gentrifying city, told in three interconnected sections excoriating Reagan-era capitalism. The ubiquitous construction works, graffiti and corruption are fuelled by the twin deities of power and money.

In June 1948, the writer Osamu Dazai and his last love, Tomie Yamazaki, drowned themselves in the Tamagawa Aqueduct near Tokyo. It was a murky ending to a life which had begun in wealth and social status but which rapidly descended into alcoholism, depression, impoverishment – and literary genius. During his short life – he died at 38 – Dazai produced a substantial body of work: novels and stories which helped define Japanese literature of the 1930s and 1940s and which are enjoying a significant global reputation now. Often autobiographical in nature, playing games with the blurred borders between reality and illusion, they chart disordered, chaotic lives, exploring isolation, poverty and debauchery with a sly wit and brutal honesty.