At the start of this pandemic I found it so difficult to concentrate on reading any fiction because I felt like I had to check the news every five minutes. Like many people I felt extremely anxious, but I've gradually learned how to remain vigilant while also occasionally switching off to lose myself in a good novel. Reading has connected me with the world in an essential way while I can't physically travel outside my home. The books I read are such an important source of comfort and inspiration I don't know what I'd do without them. So I'm excited to share some recent favourites and I'd love to know about the best books you've read this year.
Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward
You could call this inventive debut novel a book of short stories or interlinked short stories but it's primarily about a couple named Rachel and Eliza whose desire to have a child results in unforeseen circumstances. It's framed as a series of thought experiments exploring different conceptual ideas and philosophical concepts. I know that sounds way too cerebral for fiction but it's honestly so entertaining and engaging how she explores the emotional consequences of following different possible life choices to competing and dramatic conclusions. It's so creative and extraordinarily unique like nothing I've read before.
Weather by Jenny Offill
My favourite novel last year was “Ducks, Newburyport” and, in a way, “Weather” by Jenny Offill feels like a heavily condensed version of that book. They both explore our modern day anxieties concerning politics and the environment with humorous commentary. For instance, there will be a line such as “Today NASA found seven new Earth size planets. So there's that.” Weather has an incredible way of building out a much larger world view and a portrait of a life through snapshots of experience. It's a skilfully abbreviated view of one woman's reality. And I can't resist a novel that has a librarian as its heroine. This is currently shortlisted for the Women's Prize and I think it has a good chance of winning.
Huricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (translated by Sophie Hughes)
A notorious individual referred to as The Witch is found dead in a body of water in a Mexican village and through a series of accounts we get a portrait of both this victim and the larger masculine-dominated community. There's a dizzying pace and intensity to this narrative which is so hypnotic and gripping I found it hard to put down. Through the momentum of the characters' voices we see the complexity and contradictions of people who appear simply villainous on the surface. This novel feels heavily influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez with his journalistic or documentary style while telling a story from a variety of perspectives until the meaning of truth is completely obliterated. It's very powerful. Also this novel is currently shortlisted for the Booker International Prize and I think it has a good chance of winning.
The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams
This novel is set in the 1870s in New England at a newly-established private girls school founded by Samuel who has experimental views about the way community and education should function from a kind of Transcendentalist perspective. But the story focuses primarily on his adult daughter Caroline who works as a teacher at the school. Things go very wrong and it's extremely suspenseful. The girls become plagued by a mysterious illness and the the story goes to some very dark places saying something larger about complicity and sexual abuse. I think the author also uses such incredible imagery with strange red birds that periodically appear. It's very smart and movingly done.
The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili (translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin)
This great big family saga took me a long time to read but it was so worth it. It's enthralling, fascinating, beautifully-crafted storytelling about multiple generations of a Georgian family over the past century, their experiences throughout multiple wars across Europe and a cursed hot chocolate recipe. In my mind it's like “Gone with the Wind” crossed with “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. This novel has so much to say about family, shifting politics and the very direct impact that has on people's lives. I loved interviewing the author and her translators about this novel and you can listen to our conversation here.
Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez
This novel primarily focuses on a young man named Jesse who moves from where he was raised in the West Midlands to London after being forced out of the Jehovah's Witness community he was raised in. The way the author captures this character's strength as well as his vulnerability as he plunges into city life and discovers who he is as a black gay man is achingly beautiful. And it's also very moving the way circles back to connect with past generations and the heritage he's been cut off from. Since I moved to London at roughly the same time as the main character I was also able to personally connect to many aspects of the story including different events, music and even local buses that I also regularly ride.
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette)
I have some very big novels on my list here but this book is a masterclass in how much a writer can say in a short space. One half of the story is about a young Palestinian woman who is captured by Israeli soldiers in the desert in 1948 where she is raped and murdered. But we don't actually see this. It's filtered through the perspective of a commander suffering from a poisonous bite. The second half of the book is set many years later and follows a woman trying to find out more about this woman's death which only gets a brief mention in a larger article that she reads. The way their two stories connect through images and sensory experience is so moving and powerful and says so much about the way victims' stories get lost in the larger pages of history.
Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. by Joyce Carol Oates
This novel begins with an act of racist police brutality. It's a startlingly topical opening given recent Black Lives Matter Protests in the wake of the horrendous real life instance of George Floyd's death. This is the story of a family grieving for the patriarchal figure who is killed as a consequence of his confrontation with the police, the painful loss felt by the widow, how some of their children in their misdirected anger resort to bigotry and how others find the courage to redefine their lives under their own terms. It's an epic story of American life as only Joyce Carol Oates can tell it and I'm still buzzing from the joy of recently interviewing Oates about her literary life and this novel. She's very candid in speaking about what inspired her to write this novel and you can listen to our conversation here.
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
This is the story of two sisters who run away from their small town in Louisiana in the 1950s and how they go on to lead very different lives. As light-skinned African American women one sister pretends she's white and marries a white man while the other marries a very dark skinned black man before returning to their home town. It's about the assumptions we make about each other, the brutal legacy of racism and the many different ways people reinvent themselves. This is such a skilfully constructed story which says so much about the uneasy relationship we have to our constantly evolving sense of identity.
The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey
This novel has a mermaid at its centre but it's definitely not your typical fantasy story. A fisherman strikes up a relationship with a mermaid on a Caribbean island but one day she's captured by American tourists. It's a story filled with love, greed, betrayal, sex and violence but it also says something much larger about the history of Colonialism. It's fascinating how it considers this from the perspective of an indigenous woman who has been cursed to dwell in the sea. And the heartfelt way the author portrays this character's abiding sense of loneliness made me feel like I was right there at the bottom of the ocean with her.
