The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction longlist 2020

One of my favourite writers that I read during my time at university was George Orwell. I have a special fondness for his fiction such as “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” and “A Clergyman’s Daughter” (in addition, of course, to the famous “1984”) and nonfiction such as “Down and Out in Paris and London”. So it’s wonderful that The Orwell Foundation runs a series of prizes for new books which seek “to make political writing into an art” including an award for political fiction. Last year’s winner was Anna Burns for “Milkman” which is a sharp-eyed look at the personal impact of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Other novels I was especially glad to see on last year’s shortlist include “Ironopolis” by Glen James Brown, “Sabrina” by Nick Drnaso and “Red Clocks” by Leni Zumas.

The longlist for this year’s prize has just been announced and includes an intriguing mixture of fiction I’ve read, a few I’ve been meaning to get to and some books I’ve not come across before. Some of these novels such as “The Topeka School” by Ben Lerner, “Spring” by Ali Smith and “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead have been critically lauded but received little or no prize attention before this award. So it’s great to see a book prize shine a spotlight on them and noting the political message of these books in particular. Four of these novels also appeared on last year’s Booker Prize longlist including “Ducks, Newburyport” by Lucy Ellman (which was the best book I read last year), “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernardine Evaristo, “The Wall” by John Lanchester and “The Man Who Saw Everything” by Deborah Levy. Iconic writer Edna O’Brien’s novel “Girl” is also listed for this year’s Women’s Prize.

Other books on the list I’m keen to read include “This Paradise” by Ruby Cowling which is a collection of short stories about people fleeing towards places or times or situations they hope might be better. “Broken Jaw” by Minoli Salgado, the other book of short stories on the list, includes tales mostly set in Sri Lanka that concern the traumas of war. Regina Porter is an award-winning playwright and her debut novel “The Travelers” concerns the histories of two interconnected American families (one white, one black). Attica Locke is an acclaimed author of literary crime novels and “Heaven, My Home” is the second instalment in her Highway 59 series. James Meek’s “To Calais, In Ordinary Time” is a historical novel set in the 14th century amidst the shadow of the Black Death.  

So it’s a wonderfully varied list and I look forward to discovering some good new fiction from it. The shortlist will be announced mid-May and the winner will be announced on June 25th, George Orwell’s birthday. Let me know if you’re rooting for any of these books or if you’re keen to read any of them now.

My Top 10 Books of 2019

It’s been an eventful year for books. Some of the biggest literary releases of the year took the form of sequels such as “Find Me”, “Olive, Again” and “The Testaments”. Atwood’s novel was also controversially awarded this year’s Booker Prize alongside Bernardine Evaristo magnificent “Girl, Woman, Other”. Thankfully other book prizes stuck to awarding one winner. Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport” didn’t make it past the shortlist of the Booker but it did win this year’s Goldsmith’s Prize. The Women’s Prize for Fiction was awarded to Tayari Jones’ “An American Marriage”. Jokha Alharthi, an author from Oman, won this year’s Booker International Prize for her brilliant novel “Celestial Bodies”. The Wellcome Book Prize was awarded to “Murmur” by Will Eaves. The Wainwright Book Prize for Nature Writing was awarded to Robert Macfarlane’s “Underland”. The Desmond Elliott Prize was awarded to Claire Adam’s “Golden Child”. Excellent writers Danielle McLaughlin and David Chariandy were amongst the recipients of this year’s Windham Campbell Prizes. It’s also been a significant year for poetry as Raymond Antrobus’ “The Perseverance” won both the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Winners of The BAMB Readers Awards included Madeline Miller’s “Circe” for Fiction, Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” for Non-Fiction and the late great Leonard Cohen’s “The Flame” for Poetry. We also lost a number of great authors this year with the deaths of Toni Morrison, Jade Sharma, Kevin Killian, Andrea Camilleri, Deborah Orr, Clive James, Andrea Levy and Rachel Ingalls.

Personally, I’ve read many great books this year. There have been a number of powerful memoirs including “Kill the Black One First” and “My Past is a Foreign Country” and some excellent new poetry including “Surge” and “Deaf Republic”. But here are ten highlights which I think are truly exceptional. If you’ve read any of these books I’d love to know your thoughts as well as some of the best books you’ve read this year. You can also watch a video of me discussing my ten favourites here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9SVanX5kO0

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

This novel may be more famous for its page count than the contents of its story, but I think it’s utterly immersive. The story is almost catered for me as it discusses a lot about baking and old movies (two passionate interests of mine) but it’s also a brilliant take on our current times, our current state of mind, our current uncertainties and fears, our current tendency to rely on rumour and assumptions over facts and all of this is filtered through the unrelenting perspective of one Ohio housewife. I found it hypnotic, hilarious and unlike anything I’ve ever read before while also having the feel of great classics like Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses. I think it’s ingenious and like I said in a video I made recently about my favourite books of the decade I think it will be a future classic.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

One of the difficulties about having political discussions concerning racial minorities and minority communities in Britain is it lumps huge groups of distinct individuals into one category (and that’s something which occurs in a lot of rhetoric from political pundits). So it’s really meaningful and effective how Evaristo creates stories of many different black women to present the complexities of many different points of view and ways of living. But this novel isn’t just about making this larger statement. More importantly, it’s great enthralling storytelling that had be gripped and flipping through the novel to fully understand all the connections and ways these women’s lives touch upon each other. It’s a very creative way of telling the story of a community of people who both support each other and sometimes tear each other down.

My Life as a Rat by Joyce Carol Oates

I think one of the most terrifyingly tragic things that anyone can face is to be rejected from their own family. In this story an adolescent girl witnesses her brothers committing a racist attack and testifies to that fact. This is seen as a betrayal and so she’s thrown out of the only life she knows. One of Oates’ greatest themes is the instinct for survival. And it’s heartrending how the girl at the centre of this story persists and continues while still hoping to be welcomed back into her home. But it’s really a novel about the tough choices all of us have to face when negotiating whether to remain loyal to those we depend upon or stay true to what we know is right. And the way Oates presents the psychological complexities of this is so impactful.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

This novel looks at another side of racial injustice where a young man is falsely accused of a crime and taken to a juvenile reformatory in Florida. There he experiences the horrendous way young men (most of whom are black) are being abused and killed and where the larger community either ignores this is happening or takes a complicit role in their exploitation. It’s so impactful how Whitehead composes this story and presents the way whole histories and communities of people can be made to disappear. And I’m one of this novel’s many fans who feel like it’s an injustice this book hasn’t won any awards yet.

You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr

This is another novel which unearths hidden histories. Before reading this novel I didn’t realise that during the Second Boer Wars in the early 1900s, the British military set up and ran concentration camps in South Africa. These camps were purportedly for their inhabitants’ safety but really they were a slow form of torture and a political tactic to steer the war. The story follows a mother who is taken to such a camp, but it’s a dual narrative as the second half of the book goes over a century into the future where a teenage boy is taken to another kind of camp which is meant to make a “real man” out of him through torturous practices. So this novel is about how certain institutions can appear to be for people’s benefit, but really physically and psychologically destroy them. I know this all sounds very weighty and difficult, but you’re just made aware of these things in the background and it’s what I’ve thought about since finishing the book. But the immediate story is about the warmth and endearing characteristics of its central protagonists and that’s what makes this novel an enjoyable read as well as a moving one.

Constellations by Sinead Gleeson

This is a book of autobiographical essays which follow the trajectory of Sinead’s life through illness, marriage, motherhood and work as a journalist. And while she goes into some very personal subject matter it also gives a perspective on social and political transformations in Ireland over the course of a generation. I love this book because the writing is so beautiful and smart while not being self-important. And she does this by referencing many different artists and writers but only in instances where they have deep personal meaning for her and the subject matter of her life. It’s an evocation of an entire culture as well as a hard-fought life.

The Years by Annie Ernaux

This book does something quite similar to the above but concerns a very different place (as it’s set in France instead of Ireland.) This is my first time reading Ernaux’s writing and I was utterly blown away how she can write such specific details about a life that simultaneously evoke an entire culture and time period. She does this by using the collective “we” when describing events and transformations over a half-century of French life. But you’re also aware of events in the life of the individual protagonist that this narrative is filtered through who goes through significant events like having children and getting a divorce. Reading this was a revelation to me as it’s so unique and extraordinary.

This Brutal House by Niven Govinden

Another very unique way of telling a story and presenting a culture is what Govinden does in this novel. It shows drag culture in NYC by representing the voices of different queens who sometimes speak in a collective voice, the police force they sometimes clash against and the individual story of Teddy, a child of one of these houses. It’s a beautiful evocation of how drag is both funny and playful as well as being a political act and a way of creating non-traditional families. And he really meaningfully shows the complications and in-fighting within this community as well as its strong bonds.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor

This novel takes the concept of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando where a character changes back and forth between a man and a woman – but in the form of a 23 year old college student in 1993. However, in some crucial ways Paul really differs from Orlando and even self-consciously states at one point that’s not who he is. Even though he can physical change back and forth between being a man and woman, there’s a central core to his character which is constant. I found him to be really endearing and fun, but the story also shows how he’s a very flawed individual that makes assumptions about other people based on their appearance just as assumptions are made about him based on how he fashions his own physical appearance. It’s really brilliant and it’s such a sexy sexy novel.

Underland by Robert Macfarlane

This is a nonfiction personal account of Macfarlane’s journey through many different subterranean landscapes from natural caves to mining operations to underground scientific research centres to the bottoms of glaciers. It’s a way of looking at a different part of the planet which we’re usually unaware of but which shapes our environment and is a repository of both geological and human history. I found it a really liberating way of breaking out of my own circumscribed view of the world which normally consists of walking between work and home. And the writing is so beautifully poetic, touching upon many reference points and making a larger statement about where our humanity is headed.

My Ten Favourite Books of the Past Decade

As we near the year 2020 there have been a lot of ‘best of the decade’ lists coming out and here’s another one! Many such lists seem top heavy with more recent titles. So I wanted to challenge myself to pick only one book from each year of the past decade and it has to have been published in that year. This naturally forced me to consider what books have meant the most to me in the long term and which continue to resonate for me personally long after reading them. You can also watch me discussing these books in this video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kPlIpLHj7Q

It made me reflect on how we’ve lost a great talent this year with author Andrea Levy who died at a relatively young age. I felt a bit melancholy opening my copy of “The Long Song” and seeing her signature which she inscribed when I went to see the Booker shortlisted authors read in 2010. If she’d have won that year (rather than Howard Jacobson) she’d have been the first black woman to win the prize. So it’s a shame she didn’t live to see Bernardine Evaristo win this year’s Booker.

Julian Barnes’ “The Sense of an Ending” didn’t make much of an impression on me when I first read it but (now that I’m a bit older) rereading it made me realise just how its story is so poignant. Other favourite authors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Ali Smith have produced a number of books in the past decade, but the stories in “Lovely, Dark, Deep” and the novel “Artful” feel especially meaningful to me and show these brilliant writers at their most formally daring and innovative while still retaining emotional resonance. Maybe there’s something to be said for the length of a book deepening its impact because the novels “The Luminaries” and “Ducks, Newburyport” are both massive. They still vividly reside in my imagination and I’d gladly go back to reread their hundreds of pages.

Probably the most obscure book on my list is “The Parcel” which also stands as one of the most heart-breaking novels I’ve ever read. It challenges the reader to consider many difficult moral questions, but it also made me fall dearly in love with its characters. Choosing this list made me consider how it’s not always book prize winners who should be most noted, but the books which receive multiple prize nominations. “Mrs Engels” was listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Walter Scott Prize, the HWA Goldsboro Debut Crown, the Guardian First Book Award and the Green Carnation Prize (which I actually helped judge that year.) It sadly didn’t win any of these awards, but its inclusion by a wide range of judges certainly testifies to its quality. Finally, I was also reminded how there are accomplished and much-respected writers such as Colson Whitehead and Sarah Moss whose back catalogue of books I still need to explore.

Obviously I had to make some tough choices when limiting myself to a list of only ten books. Some years included many extraordinary new publications which I also loved such as “A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing”, “H is for Hawk”, “Lila”, “A Brief History of Seven Killings”, “Almost Famous Women”, “Under the Udala Trees”, “Dinosaurs on Other Planets”, “A Book of American Martyrs”, “Lincoln in the Bardo”, “Sight”, “The Years” and many many more. But the whole point of lists like this is to provoke discussion and get readers to chide me for making some obvious omissions while championing their favourites. So I’d love to hear in the comments below about some books from the past decade that you consider to be the greatest!

The Booker Prize 2019 Winners

Well this was a result I never expected! What a shock when chair of the judges Peter Florence announced there would be two winners of The Booker Prize this year because they are “two novels we cannot compromise on.” And it was a further surprise when those winners were announced to be “The Testaments” and “Girl, Woman, Other”. Maybe it’s the year of doubles with the recent Nobel Prize in Literature being awarded to both Olga Tokarczuk (for 2018) and Peter Handke (for 2019) – a decision which was controversial in a different way. Certainly there’s a strong love and respect that many readers have for Margaret Atwood, but it seems a curiously unnecessary thing for her to share the award with Bernadine Evaristo. Atwood herself said when receiving the prize “I kind of don’t need the attention.” Her stature and popularity will be little affected by this win, whereas it will be a huge boost to Evaristo who has produced several well-regarded novels but doesn’t have the same kind of national or international reputation. In the press conference after the award was announced Evaristo said “I’m not thinking about sharing it. I’m thinking about the fact that I’ve got here with it.”

I’m thrilled that “Girl, Woman, Other” has won the award since I loved this novel so much. Given the enormous anticipation for “The Testaments” I assume most people who were desperate to read it have now done so. Hopefully, those readers and readers who follow The Booker Prize winners to guide them in what to read next will now read “Girl, Woman, Other” as well. I’m eager to continue discussing it and plan to reread it at some point. I don’t think the prize being awarded to two authors detracts from the significant fact that Evaristo is the first black woman to win the Booker, but it would have been nice if she’d been able to stand in the spotlight on her own.

Personally I feel that if the award had to go to two novels I would much preferred to see it given to Lucy Ellmann and Bernadine Evaristo because I thought “Ducks, Newburyport” is a more accomplished novel than “The Testaments” and she’s an author whose reputation equally deserves to be enhanced. However, there is hope in the fact that “Ducks, Newburyport” is also shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize – an award that rewards fiction which breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. While “The Testaments” is an engaging and moving read it certainly doesn’t do anything wildly inventive in its structure or style. Maybe recognition from The Goldsmiths Prize will highlight how “Ducks, Newburyport” is such an edgy and exciting novel while also being a deeply pleasurable read.

It was also thrilling to attend The Booker Prize ceremony for the first time this year and witness all the excitement in action. I had a wonderful time speaking with journalists, publishers and authors including Lucy Ellmann and Elif Shafak. It was a thrill to see such a grand event being held in the name of literature and regardless of the controversy I’m glad that the prize has sparked so much discussion and engagement with all the excellent novels listed this year. Whoever wins a book award doesn’t matter to me as a reader because what the prize has already done is encourage me to read both “Girl, Woman, Other” and “Ducks, Newburyport” – I’m not sure I’d have got around to reading either novel without the prize’s encouragement. And now I can continue encouraging other readers to pick up these great books as well. You can watch my video about attending the Booker Prize ceremony here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqNe4R4K7bg

The 2019 Booker Prize Shortlist

The Booker Prize shortlist has been announced and here are the six novels!

I’m ecstatic to see “Ducks, Newburyport” included! It’s a hilarious and immersive story and the narrator is really an everyman/everywoman of our time. Also thrilled to see “Girl, Woman, Other” as its filled with such rich tales and characters who make me want to reread the novel to better understand this wonderful latticework of storytelling.

Also very happy to see “10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World” as its such a moving tale about marginalized people’s lives. I have to admit, I wasn’t as struck with the story in “An Orchestra of Minorities” as some other people have been. It’s creative storytelling and a poignant tale, but the distinct narrative voice grew irritating and felt too grandiose to me.

I’m geekily proud to have guessed 4 of the 6 novels correctly as I discussed in my video about recent Booker Prize reading. As with all book prize lists, there will be some novels I’m sad didn’t make the cut. Particularly “Lost Children Archive” since this novel was also only longlisted for the Women’s Prize. It’s a shame that this tremendous novel probably won’t end up winning any major prize. It’s also a shame “Lanny” or “Frankissstein” didn’t make the list because these novels are so audacious and innovative in their storytelling making them such fun and so clever. Then there is the meditative brilliance of “Night Boat to Tangier” and I’m sad that Kevin Barry won’t be getting wider recognition.

I still have to read “Quichotte” & “The Testaments”, but having just reread “The Handmaid’s Tale” I’m so excited to read Atwood’s new novel!

What do you think about this list? Have you read any? Will you read them now? What novel do you want to win?!

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

I will sometimes enthusiastically purchase long novels with the best intentions of reading them soon but nonetheless they’ll typically remain on my shelf for many years before I get to them. But I was strongly tempted by the description of Lucy Ellmann’s monumental “Ducks, Newburyport” and its Booker Prize longlisting buzz got to me so I put it on my immediate reading list. While it's intimidating to read a 1000 page novel that’s mostly narrated in one unbroken sentence, “Ducks, Newburyport” is also hypnotic for the rhythm it develops, the frequent Laugh-Out-Loud humour and the moving way it builds a portrait of the life of an Ohio housewife and her many anxieties living in America today. Her story radiates a warm familiarity as we come to intimately know her sweeping stream of thoughts while baking a mountain of pies to sell and food for her family. It also inspired me to bake cinnamon rolls for the first time!

She ruminates on a whole range of subjects from her personal past to her immediate family life caring for four children to local news to political divisions in America to global environmental concerns. Usually these thoughts become mixed together and happen concurrently so she needs to periodically pause and clarify what she’s referring to. She’s also affected by what’s happening around her, the films she watches while baking and odd song lyrics which surface randomly in her mind. The trivial rubs up alongside what feels dearly important. This profusion of things running through her mind has a consistent rhythm so it becomes easy to follow and accumulates more meaning as certain subjects, memories or ideas resurface frequently. Thus they steadily acquire more resonance and also take on a humorous edge as the barrage of thoughts will sometimes become jumbled and absurd. There’s something mesmerising and hypnotic about this constant flow of words. It’s addictive and so tempting to emulate!

The chain of thoughts are frequently linked through the assertive words “the fact that…” This may just be a mental tic but it gives a feeling of plain-speaking sincerity as if she’s laying out exactly what she’s thinking and feeling. It also highlights the dubious relationship we have with “facts” in our current age as we often accept what we discover on internet searches as solid fact or opinions spouted on social media as sincere truth. Even if we are consciously aware that the information we find online is conjecture or rumour it still gets lodged in our consciousness as a point of reference when trying to interpret and interact with the world. So I think the narrator’s constant reference to “facts” which are more often ideas received from speculation or half-remembered news reports shows how we often only have a tenuous understanding about what’s really happening. This is something the narrator freely admits as she acknowledges she forgets a lot, misremembers things and “the fact that I remember all the wrong stuff”.

There’s also the surprising tale running parallel to her story which is narrated from the perspective of a mountain lion. The housewife's thoughts are periodically broken by short sections following the journey of this lion as she hunts and seeks to protect her cubs. The simplicity of the lion's life contrasts sharply with her own where she feels utterly overwhelmed, but their stories also intersect in a fascinating way. There’s also a symbolic importance to lions which occasionally appear in her narrative in the form of an old Christmas ornament or a recalled visit to the zoo. Notably the sections about the mountain lion are narrated in short declarative sentences as opposed to the unending sentence of the housewife. It made me think how burdened the housewife is by this inner monologue that she’s helpless to stop even though she knows it’s pointless: “the fact that what is with this constant monologue in my head, the fact that why am I telling myself all this stuff, since I know it already, the fact that I knew it all before I said it to myself, because I’M ME, Kraft Miracle Whip”.

Part of the beauty of this novel is that even if the narrator believes her thoughts unimportant the novel bestows importance to her life and her point of view. She’s aware that “a lot of people think all I think about is pie, when really it’s my spinal brain doing most of the peeling and caramelizing and baking and flipping, while I just stand there spiralling into a panic about my mom and animal extinctions and the Second Amendment just like everybody else”. So the narrative reveals how she feels the burden of both local and global concerns, but she doesn’t believe she has the power to participate in or change any of these problems. Part of what is so endearing and sympathetic about her is how she frequently puts herself down and diminishes herself. Her story also points out how this is just one of many such inner monologues occurring in the human population: “the fact that there are seven and a half billion people in the world, so there must be seven and a half billion of these internal monologues going on”. Through becoming so closely aligned with her subjective point of view we become aware of the singular integrity of everyone’s own perspective.

The cinnamon rolls I baked while reading the novel

The novel’s title refers to an occasion when the narrator’s mother almost drowned when she was a child running towards some ducks in a pond. This incident seems to haunt the narrator as obviously if her mother had died she’d have never come into existence. But ducks take on a bigger meaning throughout the novel because she’ll refer to how people are made to feel like “sitting ducks”. This highlights how vulnerable we’re made to feel in the modern world with frequent news of terrorist attacks or gun violence in America. There’s a randomness to this violence which makes it particularly nerve wracking. This is highlighted further with a description of how their house is positioned perilously close to a dangerous road and she fears that at any moment a car might come crashing through their home. It shows how we’re living in an anxiety-ridden age but “we all go on pretending things are fine, hoping everything’s a-okay, even though everything is nowhere near okay and we all know it, no matter how many candlelit vigils you hold”.

Does this novel justify its length? Absolutely yes, but it's hard to articulate why looking at the structure from the outside. There’s little plot, frequent repetition and extensive lists. Yet there's an accumulation of detail which builds to something truly monumental in its depiction of her life and the sympathetic way she shows how we're made to feel like we're burdened with the weight of the world on our shoulders today. But it's also incredibly funny and this humour adds a compulsive momentum to her story. There’s the pleasure of identifying with her so strongly because even though there’s so much about her experience which is particular she becomes a kind of everyman or everywoman. As a movie fan, I found all the commentary on particular film plot lines fun and when an occasional line from a film appears amidst her thoughts it gives an enjoyable jolt of recognition. I also particularly appreciated the wordplay - how the sound of one word will connect her to another disconnected word which will make her recall something entirely random sending her off on another tangent unrelated to what she was thinking about before. It’s what gives this style of narration such propulsion and makes it so tempting to emulate. The final sections of the novel also had me gripped and I was pleasantly surprised by the dramatic turns it took. I'm going to miss being inside her head.