2018, as picked by writers / Part two

 Illustration: Jennifer Tapias Derch

2018, as picked by writers – part two

Surrealist artists, dogged detectives, modern lovers and spies behaving badly ... leading authors pick their best books to enjoy these holidays

Saturday 7 July 2018

Lara Feigel

This is a brilliant summer for books by women: novels, memoirs and poems that address the difficult questions in women’s lives from an intimate perspective, but also with an unsentimental, distancing acuity and a preparedness to invent new forms for writing and for living. Three that seem to speak to each other in this respect are Deborah Levy’s game-changing The Cost of Living (Hamish Hamilton), Rachel Cusk’s Kudos (Faber) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (Harvill Secker). I also love Kathyrn Maris’s new poetry collection The House With Only an Attic and a Basement (Penguin), which tackles motherhood and family life with a comic thoughtfulness that’s unusually open to cruelty and that can rise and fall easily between the heroic and the bathetic. And right now, the book that’s really gripping me, and making me start again in thinking about many things, is Silver Press’s reprint of Nell Dunn’s 1965 Talking to Women, a series of artfully transcribed conversations with 10 of her friends. What’s striking, reading this, is how much has changed but also how little. And, unusually, the lack of change doesn’t feel depressing, reading these interviews, because there’s a pleasure in feeling so connected to these women across the decades. Also, there’s a kind of satisfaction in feeling that it’s just as important to keep asking the questions she asked about how we live, and why, and it makes me grateful that we have Cusk and Heti and Levy and Maris still asking them.

Aminatta Forna

In Calypso (Little, Brown), David Sedaris’s essays marry meditations on family, suicide, grief and mortality with the hazards of bodily functions and frequent travel for his massively popular public readings. Sedaris is as much standup comic as writer, making this a great audio and one for the car journey. I’m currently reading The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer, highly relevant in this fourth wave feminism moment and quietly gripping. I shall also be packing What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (Tinder) by Lesley Nneka Arimah, whose New Yorker short stories I have enjoyed. Tsitsi Dangaremba’s This Mournable Body (Graywolf) isn’t out until August, but I shall read it before summer’s end.

Mohsin Hamid

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile (Penguin) really made me think about how I think. I am also rereading Homer’s Iliad (the Robert Fitzgerald translation) and making my way through Susan Wise Bauer’s History of the Ancient World (Norton).

Yuval Noah Harari

The Road to Unfreedom (Bodley Head) by Timothy Snyder is a brilliant and disturbing analysis of the rise of authoritarianism in Russia, Europe and the US in the second decade of the 21st century. Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the political crisis currently engulfing the world.

In Enlightenment Now (Allen Lane), Steven Pinker extols the amazing achievements of modernity, and demonstrates that humankind has never been so peaceful, healthy and prosperous. There is of course much to argue about, but that’s what makes this book so interesting.

Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, will be published on 30 August by Jonathan Cape.

David Hare

I’m sure Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room is going to be great – at least if The Flamethrowers is anything to go by. In Ma’am Darling, 99 Excerpts from the Life of Princess Margaret (4th Estate), Craig Brown achieves the impossible by finding a tone in which to write about monarchy. Not bitchy, not snide, not angry, but not fawning nor deferential either. Just funny.

Jess Kidd

I am rollicking through Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin, which is one of the funniest, most twisted and freshest things I’ve read in a long time. It follows the fortunes of Mona, who cleans houses and falls for a man she calls Mr Disgusting. Beagin combines deep compassion and irreverent humour to create characters with nasty, wonderful, human flaws. Helen Barrell’s Fatal Evidence, Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor and the Dawn of Forensic Science is an engrossing read. It follows the career of Taylor, a remarkable scientist who gave evidence at the trial of William Palmer, “The Rugeley Poisoner”, pioneered the study of forensic medicine and let Charles Dickens nose around his laboratory. Barrell explores Taylor’s (occassionally bizarre) cases, his public and private persona and his wide-ranging interests, which included geology and photography. Her description of the ways in which forensic experiments evolved is as fascinating as the courtroom dramas they accompanied.

Deborah Levy

Your Silence Will Not Protect You (Silver) collects Audre Lorde’s essays and poems together for the first time in the UK. I look forward to getting stuck in to Talking to Women, Nell Dunn’s 1964 conversation about sex, money, work and art with a group of friends – including the writer Ann Quin and pop artist Pauline Boty.

My love affair with the explosive, erotic, modernist poetry of Apollinaire is the one enduring passion in my life. Many of his best poems were written when he was a soldier fighting on the front lines in WW1. It was Apollinaire who invented the word, Surrealist. In Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (NYRB), Ron Padgett’s translation from the French (Padgett wrote the poems for the bus driver poet in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson) is pitch perfect and dazzling.

I will also reread four books I initially read very fast, mostly because the skill of the writing itself is the main event in all of them: The Years by Annie Ernaux, Kudos by Rachel Cusk, The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg (Daunt, translated by Dick Davis) and Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan (Faber).

Hilary Mantel

If you have not already met The Secret Barrister (Macmillan), he or she makes an entertaining and acerbic holiday companion for those who don’t switch off their brains in summer; it seems our resource-starved legal system is poised on the brink of not working at all. Tessa Hadley’s short stories, Bad Dreams (Cape), are simple and artful and leave you wanting more. Didier Eribon’s memoir Returning to Reims (Allen Lane, translated by Michael Lucey) is a haunting book, fiercely political and deeply personal; I shall be thinking about it this summer and for many seasons to come.

Paul Mason

Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism (Verso) is influencing left parties as they enter government, from Greece to Portugal to Mexico. It is a beach-sized introduction to a major left thinker of the 21st century. Mike Davis’s Old Gods, New Enigmas (Verso) is a challenging re-exploration of Marx in the light of the atomisation of class struggle, the climate crisis and the centrality of cities to social justice struggles. Patrick Langley’s debut novel Arkady comes beautifully presented by Fitzcarraldo. What’s not to like about a book where revolutionaries take over a city in the north of England?

THE GUARDIAN

The Top 10 Novels of 2017

The Top 10 Novels of 2017

By SARAH BEGLEY

November 21, 2017

Fiction publishers complained that 2017 was a difficult year to get attention in a fast-moving media climate that was intensely political. But some of the year’s best novels spoke to current events, whether directly (as in Mohsin Hamid’s refugee story Exit West) or indirectly (George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardois about the Civil War, but its comments on race feel relevant to the present). Other common themes emerge: new parenthood, a search for identity, an obsession with the past. Several of them feature ghosts. But two elements unite every title on the list: compelling writing and fresh storytelling.

10. New People, Danzy Senna

Senna’s latest racial satire focuses on a multiracial couple, Khalil and Maria, in which each half is grappling with complicated feelings about identity. With humor, understanding and a touch of sympathy, Senna’s novel is both knowing and biting.

9. Days Without End, Sebastian Barry

In this riff on the American frontier genre, narrator Thomas McNulty and his sweetheart John Cole live through a series of trials: performing as women in a saloon, fighting in the Indian and Civil Wars, escaping random attacks in Postbellum South and avoiding being caught as gay lovers. Their story is both simple and strikingly choreographed.

8. The Ninth Hour, Alice McDermott

The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor meet Annie at her lowest point: she’s pregnant, and her husband has just committed suicide. With help from the nuns, Annie and her daughter are spared from destitution—but the intervention has ramifications that echo through generations. McDermott offers up a version of sisterhood that’s both historical and relevant.

7. The Changeling, Victor LaValle

The myth of the bad mom gets the horror-story treatment in this novel, which takes place deep in the boroughs of New York City. Apollo Kagwa and his wife Emma Valentine are thrilled to welcome their first child, but soon after his birth, Emma feels a strange distance from her son—is this the boy she birthed, or some sinister imposter? The story cleverly interrogates parenting norms, racial prejudice and technological quandaries.

Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

Hamid tells the story of a couple whose love story begins just as war breaks out in their city, which is unnamed but resembles Lahore. The only path to safety is through a series of enchanted doors that lead them, and a surge of other refugees from around the world, to western cities where they face new threats from the residents who’d prefer these migrants went back to where they came from.

5. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

In his first full novel, Saunders has gained an even wider audience, winning the 2017 Man Booker Prize for this historical ghost story about Abraham Lincoln. The night after his young son is buried, as the Civil War rages, the President visits the cemetery for a final farewell, only to be observed by a ragtag cast of souls who can’t bring themselves to leave their earthly remains behind.

4. Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan

The Pulitzer Prize winner’s new novel, seven years after A Visit From the Good Squad, marks a move away from the experimental—this is a straight historical novel, set mainly during World War II. The book’s heroine, Anna Kerrigan, is a character perfectly calibrated for Hollywood, with verve, vulnerability, and a tough-as-nails glamour that transitions from her job as the first female diver to work on war ships to her nights in gangster-filled night clubs.

3. Transit, Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk

Cusk’s second novel in a planned trilogy goes minimal on plot, maximal on observation. The plot structure in the book is the renovation of the narrator’s London flat, and the spirit of transformation is mirrored in her conversations: With her contractors, her friends, her old flame. Through elegant meditations on contemporary life, Cusk’s depiction of her narrator is not so much portrait as a photo negative—mysterious, poetic and in contrast to her world.

2. White Tears, Hari Kunzru

The British novelist skewers American culture in this treatise on whiteness and cultural appropriation. Two young white men breaking into the music industry find success when they record random noises in a New York City park and discover the voice of a man who wasn’t there. They pass the recording off as a rediscovered blues song—only to learn their lie may be accidentally based in reality. The hunt for the truth takes them on an unnerving journey through the past.

1. Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward

Ward’s third book set in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, based on her hometown of DeLisle, Miss., conjures the same raw emotion of her previous works, like the Hurricane Katrina novel Salvage the Bones. But this time, a sense of magical realism deepens the ghostly sense of the past reaching out to touch—or even strangle—the present. Ward’s novel is a true triple threat, expert in prose, human observation and social commentary.

TIME

2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist: the best and worst lines

17 OCTOBER 2017 • 12:59PM

Ahead of the final verdict, we bring you the dazzling highs (and cringe-making lows) of this year's candidates.

Paul Auster on 4321

Emily Fridlund on History of Wolves

Mohsin Hamid on Exit West

Fiona Mozley on Elmet

George Saunders on Lincoln in the Bardo

Ali Smith on Autumn

What makes a Man Booker novel? / Mohsin Hamid on Exit West

What makes a Man Booker novel? 
Mohsin Hamid on Exit West

Ahead of the announcement of the 2017 prize next week, the stories behind the stories

Paul Auster on 4321

Emily Fridlund on History of Wolves

Mohsin Hamid on Exit West

Fiona Mozley on Elmet

George Saunders on Lincoln in the Bardo

Ali Smith on Autumn

Saturday 14 October 2017 08.00 BST

Mohsin Hamid on Exit West

Mohsin Hamid. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

I was born in Lahore, and I live in Lahore, but I’m a mongrel through and through. Some of us look like mongrels. We’ll have eyes that people think belong to one continent, and hair they think belongs to another. Some of us are mongrels inside. We’re mongrels in ways that might not be obvious from a photograph. We’re mongrels in how we muse, how we speak, what we believe, who we are. I’m that second type of mongrel. I’ve lived on both coasts of the Pacific and the Atlantic and far up the Asian land mass alongside an empty river that once flowed down to the Indian Ocean via the Arabian Sea.

It’s a frightening time for mongrels. Purity seems to be all the rage. In a rage. We see, once again, the rise of openly expressed white supremacy in America. We see growing anti-migrant sentiment in Europe, growing anti-Muslim sentiment in India, growing chauvinism in China, Turkey, Myanmar. And in Pakistan, quite literally the “land of the pure”, where I live, we see a murderous attachment to purity so pronounced that no human being is pure enough to be safe.

Sometimes I feel a sense of impending apocalypse. Driving home with my children or lying in bed with my wife, I imagine that our ancient city might go the way of those other ancient cities that straddle the hinge between Asia, Europe and Africa – the cities we read about in our newspapers and watch on our screens. I imagine a bloodbath. I imagine fleeing. I imagine leaving loved ones behind. I don’t think this will happen. I think it is unlikely. But the fear is often with me, like swimming in the ocean, as a child, after having watched Jaws.

Exit West grew out of that fear. I needed to explore the worst, and I needed also to find hope. I am a father, and so hope is no longer a luxury for me, it is the most fundamental requirement of my job.

The novel is not autobiographical, in the sense that it is not the story of the events of my life. And yet, as I wrote it, I saw autobiographical elements creeping in. It is geographically autobiographical, in that I have lived in a city like the nameless city of Nadia and Saeed, and also in London, where they flee, and also in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they flee later, and I have spent time in Tijuana and Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo and all the other places in which characters in the novel suddenly appear. These locations are not present by chance. They have mattered to me. They are locations that have mattered to my life.

And feelings in the novel seem close to my feelings, to my recollections of love, and especially first love, to my thoughts about getting older, of watching my children grow, of recognising the differences in the arcs of our lives, and to understanding my parents, who live next door, differently as a result.

As a mongrel, I once thought I was unlike other people. But I have come to realise that everyone is a mongrel. Hybridity is at the core of humanity. It is our nature. We do not divide, like some single-celled organism, into further identical human beings. We commingle the genetic material of two different people to create a child. When we wage wars against mongrels, wars for purity, we attack what makes us human. We attack ourselves.

As I wrote Exit West, I found the language changing as the chapters progressed. The sentences grew longer, became more incantatory, like a magic spell. Like a prayer. Which seemed fitting to me. We write what we most need.

Exit West is published by Hamish Hamilton.

THE GUARDIAN

The judges for the 2017 Man Booker prize (from left): Sarah Hall, Lila Azam Zanganeh, Baroness Lola Young, Tom Phillips and Colin Thubron. Photograph: A Davidson/SHM/Rex/Shutterstock

Surprised by the Booker shortlist? Don't judge the books, study the judges

As a former judge, I sometimes joke that the only year I correctly picked the Man Booker winner was when I was on the panel – it’s too unpredictable

Stuart Kelly
Thursday 14 September 2017 15.32 BST

T

his week the email from the Man Booker’s publicity team arrived, with its announcement of the shortlist: three Americans; two debuts; two formerly shortlisted authors; one winner of a major prize set up in opposition to the Man Booker; and one grand old man. Curious indeed, I thought, and then, as my more reptilian brain kicked in, I started playing the odds. Horse-trading? Who pushed for what? Why were names such as Zadie Smith, Sebastian Barry and Arundhati Roy whittled off the longlist?

As a literary editor for many years, and a former judge, I have sometimes joked with friends that the year that I correctly predicted the Man Booker result was the year I judged it. It is, delightfully, unpredictable. The longlist did seem like a mix-tape of greatest hits (thankfully nobody put on the Rushdie) – and yet the only two surprise tracks are on the shortlist.

With a different set of judges each year, it is a fool’s errand to try to guess the eventual winner. So I have always had a simple formula: never judge the books – study the judges.

In the infamous year of having a former spook looking at literature, the prize nearly collapsed under the banalities, until a tried-and-tested victor was put in place (Julian Barnes, with The Sense of an Ending). This year’s judges are a curious mixture. Having been in this game for so long, I can say without hesitation that I respect the opinions of Sarah Hall and Lila Azam Zanganeh, both of whom I have chaired at literary festivals, and have long admired Colin Thubron and Tom Philips, whose work I used to push on creative writing students. I have not had the pleasure of meeting the chair, Baronness Lola Young. But these are people I take seriously, and their decisions should be taken seriously.

But seriously: Paul Auster? The new book strikes me as bloated Borges. What he managed in “The Garden of Forking Paths” it takes Auster a book longer than Ulysses to play around in. It’s a very macho book, not in content, but in form. After years of slender novels and slim pickings we get the huge work, and it is huge work to finish it.

Another Booker koan: the front-runner never wins. I quite liked George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, but it had a musty air of nostalgic experimentation. Ali Smith (Autumn) appears to be always the bridesmaid, and seems content with that – as she observed, Angela Carter never won the Booker. The debuts, History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund and Elmet by Fiona Mozley, which I read yesterday, are good; at points very good indeed. Mohsin Hamid (Exit West), like Auster, attempts alternative realities but has the upper hand in politics.

If you want to win at the Man Booker – as a punter – then here’s the strategy: find five friends and each of you place a bet on one of the books. One of you will win and you can divide the dividends sixfold. That’s the only way to win.

THE GUARDIAN