Best fiction of 2021

 

Best fiction of 2021 
Illustration: Maïté Franchi

Best fiction of 2021

Dazzling debuts, a word-of-mouth hit, plus this year’s bestsellers from Sally Rooney, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro and more

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he most anticipated, discussed and accessorised novel of the year was Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber), launched on a tide of tote bags and bucket hats. It’s a book about the accommodations of adulthood, which plays with interiority and narrative distance as Rooney’s characters consider the purpose of friendship, sex and politics – plus the difficulties of fame and novel-writing – in a world on fire.

Rooney’s wasn’t the only eagerly awaited new chapter. Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s magnum opus The Books of Jacob (Fitzcarraldo) reached English-language readers at last, in a mighty feat of translation by Jennifer Croft: a dazzling historical panorama about enlightenment both spiritual and scientific. In 2021 we also saw the returns of Jonathan Franzen, beginning a fine and involving 70s family trilogy with Crossroads (4th Estate); Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Klara and the Sun (Faber) probes the limits of emotion in the story of a sickly girl and her “artificial friend”; and acclaimed US author Gayl Jones, whose epic of liberated slaves in 17th-century Brazil, Palmares (Virago), has been decades in the making.

Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy (Hamish Hamilton) continued her series reclaiming women’s voices in ancient conflict, while Elizabeth Strout revisited her heroine Lucy Barton in the gently comedic, emotionally acute Oh William! (Viking). Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate), her first novel since the 2013 Booker-shortlisted A Tale for the Time Being, is a wry, metafictional take on grief, attachment and growing up. Having journeyed into the mind of Henry James in 2004’s The Master, Colm Tóibín created a sweeping overview of Thomas Mann’s life and times in The Magician (Viking). There was a change of tone for Colson Whitehead, with a fizzy heist novel set amid the civil rights movement, Harlem Shuffle (Fleet), while French author Maylis de Kerangal considered art and trompe l’oeil with characteristic style in Painting Time (MacLehose, translated by Jessica Moore).

Treacle Walker (4th Estate), a flinty late-career fable from national treasure Alan Garner, is a marvellous distillation of his visionary work. At the other end of the literary spectrum, Anthony Doerr, best known for his Pulitzer-winning bestseller All the Light We Cannot See, returned with a sweeping page-turner about individual lives caught up in war and conflict, from 15th-century Constantinople to a future spaceship in flight from the dying earth. Cloud Cuckoo Land (4th Estate) is a love letter to books and reading, as well as a chronicle of what has been lost down the centuries, and what is at stake in the climate crisis today: sorrowful, hopeful and utterly transporting. And it was a pleasure to see the return to fiction of Irish author Keith Ridgway, nearly a decade after Hawthorn & Child, with A Shock (Picador), his subtly odd stories of interconnected London lives.

Damon Galgut’s first novel in seven years won him the Booker. A fertile mix of family saga and satire, The Promise (Chatto) explores broken vows and poisonous inheritances in a changing South Africa. Some excellent British novels were also listed: Nadifa Mohamed’s expert illumination of real-life racial injustice in the cultural melting pot of 1950s Cardiff, The Fortune Men (Viking); Francis Spufford’s profound tracing of lives in flux in postwar London, Light Perpetual (Faber); Sunjeev Sahota’s delicate story of family consequences, China Room (Harvill Secker); and Rachel Cusk’s fearlessly discomfiting investigation into gender politics and creativity, Second Place (Faber).

Also on the Booker shortlist was a blazing tragicomic debut from US author Patricia Lockwood, whose No One Is Talking About This (Bloomsbury) brings her quizzical sensibility and unique style to bear on wildly disparate subjects: the black hole of social media, and the painful wonder of a beloved disabled child. Raven Leilani’s Luster (Picador) introduced a similarly gifted stylist: her story of precarious New York living is full of sentences to savour. Other standout debuts included Natasha Brown’s Assembly (Hamish Hamilton), a brilliantly compressed, existentially daring study of a high-flying Black woman negotiating the British establishment; AK Blakemore’s earthy and exuberant account of 17th-century puritanism, The Manningtree Witches (Granta); and Tice Cin’s fresh, buzzy saga of drug smuggling and female resilience in London’s Turkish Cypriot community, Keeping the House (And Other Stories).

Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water (Viking) is a lyrical love story celebrating Black artistry, while the first novel from poet Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death (Canongate), is a very contemporary allegory about creativity, injustice, and keeping afloat in modern Britain. Further afield, two state-of-the-nation Indian debuts anatomised class, corruption and power: Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (Scribner) in a propulsive thriller, and Rahul Raina’s How to Kidnap the Rich (Little, Brown) in a blackly comic caper. Meanwhile, Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast (And Other Stories), a revenge western with a freewheeling spirit, is a gothic treat.

When is love not enough? The summer’s word-of-mouth hit was Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss (W&N), a wisecracking black comedy of mental anguish and eccentric family life focused on a woman who should have everything to live for. Another deeply pleasurable read, The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi (W&N, translated by Elena Pala), charts one man’s life through his family relationships. An expansive novel that finds the entire world in an individual, its playful structure makes the telling a constantly unfolding surprise.

There was a colder take on family life in Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms (Granta): this honed, painfully witty account of a toxic mother-daughter relationship is her best novel yet.

Two debut story collections pushed formal and linguistic boundaries. Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi (Fitzcarraldo) announced a surreal and inventive new voice, while in English Magic (Galley Beggar) Uschi Gatward proved a master of leaving things unsaid. Also breaking boundaries was Isabel Waidner, whose Sterling Karat Gold (Peninsula), a carnivalesque shout against repression, won the Goldsmiths prize for innovative fiction.

It will take time for Covid-19 to bleed through into fiction, but the first responses are already beginning to appear. Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat (Faber) is a bravura exploration of art, love, sex and ego pressed up against the threat of contagion. In Hall’s version of the pandemic, a loner sculptor who usually expresses herself through monumental works is forced into high-stakes intimacy with a new lover, while pitting her sense of her own creativity against the power of the virus.

A fascinating historical rediscovery shed light on the closing borders and rising prejudices of current times. In The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (Pushkin, translated by Philip Boehm), written in 1938, a Jewish businessman tries to flee the Nazi regime. The J stamped on his passport ensures that he is met with impassive bureaucratic refusal and chilly indifference from fellow passengers in a tense, rising nightmare that’s timelessly relevant.

Finally, a novel to transport the reader out of the present. Inspired by the life of Marie de France, Matrix by Lauren Groff (Hutchinson Heinemann) is set in a 12th-century English abbey and tells the story of an awkward, passionate teenager, the gifted leader she grows into, and the community of women she builds around herself. Full of sharp sensory detail, with an emotional reach that leaps across the centuries, it’s balm and nourishment for brain, heart and soul.

THE GUARDIAN

 

The best fiction of 2017

We look back on a year that saw Arundhati Roy’s return and George Saunders’ Man Booker victory, along with dark short stories and a haunting last novel

Justine Jordan
Thursday 30 November 2017

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ne of the joys of the novel is its endless capacity for reinvention, and 2017 saw fiction writers trying out fresh approaches and new forms. The Man Booker winner was a debut novel from an author with 20 years of short stories under his belt: George Saunders’s magisterial Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury), in which the death and afterlife of Abraham Lincoln’s young son is told through snippets of civil war memoir and a cacophony of squabbling ghosts, was a fantastically inventive exploration of loss, mourning and the power of empathy. There was an injection of the fantastic, too, in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (Hamish Hamilton), which added the device of magical portals opening up across the globe to its spare, devastating portrait of victims of war, creating a singular parable about modernity, migration and the individual’s place in the world.

Jon McGregor has always written about communities; in the acclaimed Reservoir 13 (4th Estate), he deepened his pursuit of a collective voice, encompassing the natural world as well as the human in a cyclical tale of the years going by in an ordinary English village wounded by a girl’s disappearance. Each of Nicola Barker’s books is a world unto itself; with H(a)ppy (William Heinemann), winner of the Goldsmiths prize, she pushed the novel towards objet d’art, using colour and madcap typography to conjure a visionary dystopia of surveillance and control in which creativity and individuality refuse to be constrained.

There were notable returns and some new directions from fiction’s biggest names: Colm Tóibín replayed Greek myth in House of Names (Viking); John Banville channelled Henry James in the Portrait of a Lady sequel Mrs Osmond (Viking); Salman Rushdie went back to realism in The Golden House (Jonathan Cape); and Alan Hollinghurst layered historical snapshots of gay life in The Sparsholt Affair (Picador), a beautifully written chronicle of art and love in a changing Britain.

Jennifer Egan followed up her zippy Pulitzer winner A Visit from the Goon Squad with a more conventional novel of American dreams, Manhattan Beach (Corsair); while Arundhati Roy’s second novel appeared a mere two decades after her first: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Hamish Hamilton) was a sprawling, kaleidoscopic fable about love and resistance in modern India. Roddy Doyle excelled himself with Smile (Jonathan Cape), a typically bittersweet novella about a middle-aged man’s memories of his schooldays which pulls the rug shockingly from under the reader’s feet. And in June we said goodbye to the prodigiously talented Helen Dunmore, who died shortly after the publication of her haunting last novel, Birdcage Walk (Windmill), set in an 18th-century Bristol where revolution is in the air.

George Saunders … magisterial. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Of the many classical reboots, the most interesting was Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Bloomsbury Circus), which contrasts the role of the modern state with timeless bonds of love and loyalty by replaying the Antigone myth through the story of two sisters and their jihadi brother. Hogarth Press’s project to novelise Shakespeare continued, with master stylist Edward St Aubyn recasting King Lear as the downfall of a media mogul in Dunbar. Debut novelist Preti Taneja set her fierce, freewheeling version, We That Are Young (Galley Beggar), in contemporary India, with fascinating results.

The trend for autofiction continued, with two scorching novels powered by personal history: Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (Atlantic) brutally exposed the violence of an abusive marriage within the constraints of Indian society; and The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis, translated by Michael Lucey (Harvill Secker), is a savage account of growing up poor, gay and victimised in rural France. Meanwhile, the intimate horrors of a toxic marriage – and toxic parents – were skewered in Gwendoline Riley’s pin-sharp First Love (Granta).

Two slim, terrifying volumes lingered in the mind: Fever Dream by Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell (Oneworld), was a gloriously creepy fable taking in bodyswapping, maternal dread and the dangers of GM crops. In Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (Portobello), a traumatised young girl’s arrival in an orphanage is the trigger for an explosion of love, hate and repressed desire. Both are quickly read, never forgotten. Another gem in translation was Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft (Fitzcarraldo), which in the vein of WG Sebald knits together snippets of fiction, narrative and reflection to meditate on human anatomy and the meaning of travel: this is a delicate, ingenious book that is constantly making new connections.

The Lie of the Land.

If you’re after the juicier pleasures of a realist pageturner, pick up Amanda Craig’s canny portrait of the bitter divisions in a marriage and the UK: The Lie of the Land (Little, Brown) sees a privileged couple who feel too poor for London move to rural Dorset. There they discover how the other 90% live in an elegantly written expose of all the things the elite would rather not consider about poverty, inequality, food production and class, with a nailbiting mystery thrown in.

Debuts to celebrate included Yaa Gyasi’s ambitious, multi-generational saga of the effects of the slave trade, Homegoing (Penguin); Gabriel Tallent’s intense tale of abuse and self-determination in backwoods California, My Absolute Darling (4th Estate); and Sally Rooney’s witty anatomisation of modern attitudes in post-crash Dublin, Conversations With Friends (Faber). Former US soldier Brian Van Reet’s Spoils (Jonathan Cape) was a brilliantly written account of kidnap and conquest in the early stages of the Iraq war; for the Iraqi perspective, turn to Muhsin al-Ramli’s The President’s Gardens, translated by Luke Leafgren (Maclehose), which follows a group of friends growing up under Saddam Hussein.

The year’s short stories tended to the dark and the disturbing: standout collections included Sarah Hall’s Madame Zero (Faber), elegant tales of sex, motherhood and transformation, and June Caldwell’s Room Little Darker (New Island), a supercharged gothic debut from an Irish writer to watch. Another debut, Eley Williams’s Attrib. And Other Stories (Influx), cornered the market in cerebral playfulness.

Madame Zero.

Finally, two novels that make fitting reading for the season. Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break (Jonathan Cape), about an elderly married couple on a mini-break in Amsterdam, may put you off the festive sherry: its portrayal of the tightening vice of alcohol addiction is unparalleled. But its profound exploration of love, companionship, faith, work and our search for meaning in life made it a tender masterpiece, and one of the year’s essential reads.

Ali Smith’s Winter (Hamish Hamilton) is the second in her seasonal quartet, following the Booker-shortlisted Autumn, and once again tackles the biggest subjects with the lightest touch. A capacious, generous shapeshifter of a novel taking in Greenham Common and Barbara Hepworth, Shakespeare and global migration, it juxtaposes art with nature and protest with apathy, finding surprising alliances in a family riven by feuds. It’s a book with Christmas at its heart, in all its familiarity and estrangement: about time, and out of time, like the festival itself.

THE GUARDIAN