24-04-2025
'In 20 years of reviewing, I'm not sure I've read a funnier book, or one I've enjoyed more': The best Literary Fiction out now - FUN AND GAMES by John Patrick McHugh, VANISHING WORLD by Sayaka Murata, OPEN, HEAVEN by Sean Hewitt
FUN AND GAMES by John Patrick McHugh (4th Estate £14.99, 400pp)
I HAD a blast with this super-smart novel about a 17-year-old Gaelic footballer, John, navigating parental break-up after his mother is caught messaging a lover with a picture of her breasts.
McHugh filters the story through the hormone-addled mind of his school-leaver protagonist, first seen as a younger boy in the story collection Pure Gold, also set on a remote island west of Ireland.
Time and again, John scuppers his own burgeoning love life because of how often he lets his actions be dictated by neurotic fretting over what his pals think, rather than what he actually wants himself.
As a mechanism for gripping tragicomedy, that's pretty much unbeatable, and in 20 years of reviewing, I'm not sure I've read a funnier book, or one I've enjoyed more.
VANISHING WORLD by Sayaka Murata (Granta £16.99, 240pp)
Japanese fiction leads a boom in translated novels and Murata is its queen, striking a chord around the world with her weird tales of
urban alienation under patriarchy and capitalism (see Convenience Store Woman).
It probably doesn't hurt that her books are short and easy to read as well as fit to burst with eye-popping twists and conceits.
The latest is no exception, set in a parallel Japan where marital sex is taboo and it's a mark of shame for the heroine to learn that she was conceived not via IVF but through 'primitive copulation'.
We follow her into middle age as she learns to manage her own outlawed lust in a society favouring 'clean love' with cartoon characters (really). A typically wild ride, even if you sense satire standing in for the pleasures of a good story.
OPEN, HEAVEN by Sean Hewitt (Jonathan Cape £18.99, 240pp)
Hewitt, an acclaimed poet, makes his fiction debut with this hushed slow-burner about a gay man drawn back in time to a devastating teenage crush now that his marriage is on the rocks.
Returning to the village where he grew up, the narrator recalls a summer during his shy adolescence in the early 2000s, when he lusted after Luke, a more streetwise teen who turned up at a local farm in flight from his chaotic upbringing.
A novel built on watching, lingering, hoping, it's rich and intense as well as ever so slightly solemn, with lush descriptions of the rural setting relied on for mood music.
As a tale of thwarted yearning, it feels curiously out of time, as if it might have been written at any point over the past half-century, which perhaps tells its own story.
