The book I've recommended most this year and had the most enthusiastic feedback about, a whopping 656 pages later is without doubt Paul Murray's Booker-shortlisted tragicomedy, The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton). This story of an Irish family's tribulations told from four points of view combines freewheeling hilarity with savage irony, surprise reveals and generations-deep sadness; it offers the immersive pleasures that perhaps only a fat family saga can bring.
It lost out on the night to Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, a harrowing portrait of a totalitarian Ireland with an urgent message for a world of rising political violence. There was another long-awaited return to fiction from 2013's Booker winner Eleanor Catton. In Birnam Wood (Granta), idealistic guerrilla gardeners in New Zealand run up against a ruthless billionaire. This is a propulsive thriller responding to the climate crisis, apocalyptic thinking and political ideology, and as stylishly written as you'd expect. Zadie Smith also took on a new genre with her first historical novel, The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton), which sets a gently comic portrait of 19th-century literary London, and a real-life trial which stirred up passionate emotions around class and identity, against harrowing testimony from a slave plantation. It expertly links Jamaican and British history, and offers a timely, quizzical reflection of our current age of globalisation and hypocrisy. Nigerian-American author Teju Cole's Tremor (Faber) is deeply engaged with the horrors of colonialism, using autofiction for a subtle and up-to-the-minute study of how ideas around art, value and trauma are inflected by historical knowledge. Sebastian Barry's beautiful, nightmarish Old God's Time (Faber) also digs back into the past, to show how trauma remains an open wound. A retired Irish policeman's apparently calm life is torpedoed by historical experiences of abuse within the Catholic church: this raw and hugely moving novel is shot through with the force of
[
add
]
[
|
|
...
]