Latest news with #SallyRooney
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
More sex please, we're bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel
When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden's brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women's prize for fiction last month, they weren't just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July's exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic's work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality. While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and 'romantasy' – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today. Ours is a dual age of identity politics and porn. We get our identities from sex – queer or straight, pansexual or 'incel' – but it's also the white-hot arena in which identity melts down. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, when pornography is everywhere and Gillian Anderson is collecting thousands of sexual fantasies with anthropological zeal, it seems we still need literature to tell us new things about sex. What I found, reading recent work by authors including Rooney, Van der Wouden, Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Eimear McBride, were unpredictable fusions of the two impulses. Lovers, dutifully preoccupied with questions of identity by day, find that in bed they can transcend selfhood, outstripping their identities. To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence's wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos. Then the outrageously argumentative Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose frank delight in the female form called out for a feminist backlash. It came in the shape of Kate Millett's wittily polemical 1970 Sexual Politics and a new wave of sexually explicit novels by women concerned less with celebrating than with demythologising sex. Erica Jong's epochal 1973 Fear of Flying ushered in the 'zipless fuck' – sex without strings – and allowed a generation of feminists to experiment with promiscuity, but for all its brilliance on psychoanalysis and marriage, the book is pretty terrible on sex. It took another backlash – within feminism itself – to make sex great again. In 1967 Susan Sontag had written The Pornographic Imagination, an essay defending writers such as Bataille from prudery and fighting to classify pornographic writing as literature, even or especially when it exceeded realism. 'Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,' she wrote – so why not make it a resource for 'breaking through the limits of consciousness'? Angela Carter took on Sontag's ideas in her 1978 study, The Sadeian Woman, arguing against feminists concerned to outlaw porn, and making the case for the 'moral pornographer' – an artist who 'uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders'. Sontag and Carter saw that the power of sex lay in opening selfhood to otherness with extravagant force. Otherness and innovation go together, so great writing about great sex always has radical potential. The parameters they set out still define the best possibilities of what sex writing can be, though plenty of men – from Philip Roth to Michel Houellebecq – came along in the meantime to try to prove that male desire was still fascinating. Reading in our contemporary era, I find myself most riveted by writers who continue Carter's tradition. Published earlier this year, Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic tells the satirical story of a young woman's attempt to make herself into the ideal girlfriend and, in doing so, exposes the patriarchal nature of porn culture. But precisely because it's so clever and sassy it reveals the limits of satire, whereas other contemporary novelists are bringing together the pornographic and the transcendent in a more transporting way. It's telling that these writers are more often writing gay than heterosexual sex. Garth Greenwell, who has described himself as wanting to write scenes that are '100% pornographic and 100% high art', is more trammelled by questions of identity than Alan Hollinghurst was when he wrote The Swimming-Pool Library – a book Greenwell credits as an inspiration. Greenwell is writing sex in the age of consent and dutiful identity politics, but arguably it's these constraints that power his existential quest. There's a scene in Greenwell's 2020 Cleanness where the pornographic and the transcendent explicitly entwine. The narrator has a BDSM encounter with a Bulgarian man he calls Svetcheto, 'the little saint'. The usually submissive narrator has agreed to dominate. It's a brutal scene, all the more frightening because it mirrors an earlier encounter when the narrator was dangerously violated. We're worried both that he'll reenact that violence and that he won't carry off this new role. But then it becomes clear he's enjoying himself. Suffused by mutual, unexpected transcendence, the couple's porn-inspired identities simultaneously break down and burst into flower. Laughing, Svetcheto licks away the narrator's tears. 'Do you see? You don't have to be like that,' he says. 'You can be like this.' Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Yael van der Wouden write moving, powerful portraits of lesbian desire, full of anatomical detail. Beagin's Big Swiss is a large-hearted tale of a love affair between Flavia, an absurdly beautiful gynaecologist, and Greta, the more klutzy, down-at-heel writer who's paid by Flavia's sex therapist to transcribe her sessions. 'Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth.' The sex scenes in Patrick's Mrs S are less metaphorical and more breathlessly desiring, though the prose is taut in its lyricism. It can feel like the plot – a love affair between the 22-year-old new teaching recruit and the headmaster's wife in a girls' boarding school – is an excuse for the sex scenes, but in a way that's the point. In both books, it is striking how quickly sex reveals the existential need for transformation. Even in that first sex scene, Greta feels as if she's reached a place 'she's been visiting in her dreams for years and forgetting'. Mrs S is casually historical – set in the 1980s or 90s – which means its identity politics can be implicit: the narrator wears a chest binder but the book doesn't raise questions of trans identity. Instead it is preoccupied with the loss of identity, as the narrator feels herself remade as the 'You' she becomes in her lover's mouth. 'It is as if she has always been waiting for this arrival, of me into my body. You. I don't have a name. Isn't it so much better, to not have a name, to be dropped straight from the clouds?' The sex scenes are more shocking in Van der Wouden's The Safekeep because the subject matter is so serious. This is the story of a violently sudden passion that becomes a love affair between Eva, a displaced Jew, and Isabel, a gentile woman who has unwitting power over her. The book is set in the aftermath of the second world war and, given the gravity of the material, some reviewers have wondered if the sex scenes are necessary. But this is to miss the point, which is that the book only works if the relationship throws both women entirely off-kilter – using the edges of porn to show sex derailing not only their lives but their selves, and indeed the conventional novel form itself. Isabel finds herself vulnerably, joyously powerless in an unfamiliar body: 'At Eva's mercy, trapped between the cage of her teeth, she had grown a new shape.' Van der Wouden insists that her complex sense of character development justifies sexual explicitness. But she has also been clear in interviews that no justification is needed: 'The girls deserve to have some fun. This was my mantra while writing: Let them have some fun!' So what about those writers daring to write explicit, ecstatic heterosexual sex? The most compelling are Eimear McBride, whose The Lesser Bohemians makes the reader feel as though they are almost inside the bodies of the protagonists, and Sally Rooney, who is casually magisterial at writing sex scenes that are at once radiant and minutely observed by her overthinking characters. Like Greenwell, Rooney balances a commitment to a contemporary vision of identity and consent with a willingness to explore the pull of dissolution and abjection. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
More sex please, we're bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel
When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden's brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women's prize for fiction last month, they weren't just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July's exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic's work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality. While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and 'romantasy' – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today. Ours is a dual age of identity politics and porn. We get our identities from sex – queer or straight, pansexual or 'incel' – but it's also the white-hot arena in which identity melts down. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, when pornography is everywhere and Gillian Anderson is collecting thousands of sexual fantasies with anthropological zeal, it seems we still need literature to tell us new things about sex. What I found, reading recent work by authors including Rooney, Van der Wouden, Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Eimear McBride, were unpredictable fusions of the two impulses. Lovers, dutifully preoccupied with questions of identity by day, find that in bed they can transcend selfhood, outstripping their identities. To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence's wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos. Then the outrageously argumentative Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose frank delight in the female form called out for a feminist backlash. It came in the shape of Kate Millett's wittily polemical 1970 Sexual Politics and a new wave of sexually explicit novels by women concerned less with celebrating than with demythologising sex. Erica Jong's epochal 1973 Fear of Flying ushered in the 'zipless fuck' – sex without strings – and allowed a generation of feminists to experiment with promiscuity, but for all its brilliance on psychoanalysis and marriage, the book is pretty terrible on sex. It took another backlash – within feminism itself – to make sex great again. In 1967 Susan Sontag had written The Pornographic Imagination, an essay defending writers such as Bataille from prudery and fighting to classify pornographic writing as literature, even or especially when it exceeded realism. 'Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,' she wrote – so why not make it a resource for 'breaking through the limits of consciousness'? Angela Carter took on Sontag's ideas in her 1978 study, The Sadeian Woman, arguing against feminists concerned to outlaw porn, and making the case for the 'moral pornographer' – an artist who 'uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders'. Sontag and Carter saw that the power of sex lay in opening selfhood to otherness with extravagant force. Otherness and innovation go together, so great writing about great sex always has radical potential. The parameters they set out still define the best possibilities of what sex writing can be, though plenty of men – from Philip Roth to Michel Houellebecq – came along in the meantime to try to prove that male desire was still fascinating. Reading in our contemporary era, I find myself most riveted by writers who continue Carter's tradition. Published earlier this year, Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic tells the satirical story of a young woman's attempt to make herself into the ideal girlfriend and, in doing so, exposes the patriarchal nature of porn culture. But precisely because it's so clever and sassy it reveals the limits of satire, whereas other contemporary novelists are bringing together the pornographic and the transcendent in a more transporting way. It's telling that these writers are more often writing gay than heterosexual sex. Garth Greenwell, who has described himself as wanting to write scenes that are '100% pornographic and 100% high art', is more trammelled by questions of identity than Alan Hollinghurst was when he wrote The Swimming-Pool Library – a book Greenwell credits as an inspiration. Greenwell is writing sex in the age of consent and dutiful identity politics, but arguably it's these constraints that power his existential quest. There's a scene in Greenwell's 2020 Cleanness where the pornographic and the transcendent explicitly entwine. The narrator has a BDSM encounter with a Bulgarian man he calls Svetcheto, 'the little saint'. The usually submissive narrator has agreed to dominate. It's a brutal scene, all the more frightening because it mirrors an earlier encounter when the narrator was dangerously violated. We're worried both that he'll reenact that violence and that he won't carry off this new role. But then it becomes clear he's enjoying himself. Suffused by mutual, unexpected transcendence, the couple's porn-inspired identities simultaneously break down and burst into flower. Laughing, Svetcheto licks away the narrator's tears. 'Do you see? You don't have to be like that,' he says. 'You can be like this.' Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Yael van der Wouden write moving, powerful portraits of lesbian desire, full of anatomical detail. Beagin's Big Swiss is a large-hearted tale of a love affair between Flavia, an absurdly beautiful gynaecologist, and Greta, the more klutzy, down-at-heel writer who's paid by Flavia's sex therapist to transcribe her sessions. 'Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth.' The sex scenes in Patrick's Mrs S are less metaphorical and more breathlessly desiring, though the prose is taut in its lyricism. It can feel like the plot – a love affair between the 22-year-old new teaching recruit and the headmaster's wife in a girls' boarding school – is an excuse for the sex scenes, but in a way that's the point. In both books, it is striking how quickly sex reveals the existential need for transformation. Even in that first sex scene, Greta feels as if she's reached a place 'she's been visiting in her dreams for years and forgetting'. Mrs S is casually historical – set in the 1980s or 90s – which means its identity politics can be implicit: the narrator wears a chest binder but the book doesn't raise questions of trans identity. Instead it is preoccupied with the loss of identity, as the narrator feels herself remade as the 'You' she becomes in her lover's mouth. 'It is as if she has always been waiting for this arrival, of me into my body. You. I don't have a name. Isn't it so much better, to not have a name, to be dropped straight from the clouds?' The sex scenes are more shocking in Van der Wouden's The Safekeep because the subject matter is so serious. This is the story of a violently sudden passion that becomes a love affair between Eva, a displaced Jew, and Isabel, a gentile woman who has unwitting power over her. The book is set in the aftermath of the second world war and, given the gravity of the material, some reviewers have wondered if the sex scenes are necessary. But this is to miss the point, which is that the book only works if the relationship throws both women entirely off-kilter – using the edges of porn to show sex derailing not only their lives but their selves, and indeed the conventional novel form itself. Isabel finds herself vulnerably, joyously powerless in an unfamiliar body: 'At Eva's mercy, trapped between the cage of her teeth, she had grown a new shape.' Van der Wouden insists that her complex sense of character development justifies sexual explicitness. But she has also been clear in interviews that no justification is needed: 'The girls deserve to have some fun. This was my mantra while writing: Let them have some fun!' So what about those writers daring to write explicit, ecstatic heterosexual sex? The most compelling are Eimear McBride, whose The Lesser Bohemians makes the reader feel as though they are almost inside the bodies of the protagonists, and Sally Rooney, who is casually magisterial at writing sex scenes that are at once radiant and minutely observed by her overthinking characters. Like Greenwell, Rooney balances a commitment to a contemporary vision of identity and consent with a willingness to explore the pull of dissolution and abjection. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
Irish Independent
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Dash of romance, spot of jeopardy, pinch of hope – the recipe for a perfect summer blockbuster
Ostensibly, Emily Henry and Sally Rooney don't have much in common, but their most recent titles, Great Big Beautiful Life and Intermezzo, are two books that you will see repeatedly on holiday, on the beach, by the pool, peeking out of carry-on luggage this summer.
Irish Times
23-07-2025
- General
- Irish Times
50 years of women's writing: The 21st century – a boom time... or is it?
This series has revisited women's writing of the past 50 years, tracking its recognition and visibility, and in the 21st century there has been undeniable progress. Irish women have fared exceptionally well, with Anne Enright and Anna Burns winning the Booker Prize, Lisa McInerney and Eimear McBride the Women's Prize; and the rise and rise of the cultural phenomenon that is Sally Rooney . Literary gatekeepers, it would seem, have seen the error of their omission and moved to rectify it. It would be cause for celebration were it not for the pesky numbers. In the past 25 years, there have been 17 male Booker Prize winners to 10 female, two of whom had to share. That's a ratio of almost 2:1, or to spell it out, two great male writers to every great woman writer. In the 21st century. Other prizes tell a similar story. Since 2000, nine women have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction compared to 16 men (two shared). READ MORE The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (formerly the Samuel Johnson), first awarded in 1999 and billed as the UK's premier annual prize for non-fiction, boasts just eight women winners to 17 men. The shortlists tell their own story: 98 men were shortlisted compared to 50 women, and on only three occasions did a shortlist feature more women than men. These three years boasted a woman winner. Coincidence? No. Shortlists matter. It goes without saying that this year's 25th anniversary one-off 'winner of winners' was a man. The Pulitzer General Non-fiction prize did no better: eight women, one shared with a male winner, to 19 men. (Literary prizes only seem to be shared when there's a woman involved.) It's almost as if subjects of interest to women historians and biographers and journalists could not possibly be of interest to anyone else. Once again, the Women's Prize took up the slack, introducing a non-fiction prize in 2023. Writer and broadcaster Kate Mosse , announcing the launch of the prize, said it was 'not about taking the spotlight away from the brilliant male writers, it's about adding the women in'. You can't argue with the numbers, yet so often that is precisely what happens. To those who would claim that one doesn't need gender balance on every shortlist and panel as long as it evens out in the long run, know this: it never evens out. The counts tell us this again and again: the VIDAs; #WakingTheFeminists' gender analysis of Irish theatre; Anne Enright's 2017 London Review of Books essay, Call Yourself George (fun fact: VIDA, in 2016, found that the London Review of Books had 'the worst gender disparity' in its reviews, with women representing only 18 per cent of reviewers and 26 per cent of authors reviewed). If we are to even pretend that we consider women writers equal to men, gender balance is needed in every literary journal, every newspaper review section, every prize list, long and short: everywhere. Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which won the 2014 Women's Prize for Fiction. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien In spite of a system stacked against them, 21st-century women writers flourished. For this woman writer, books kept me sane (by 2008 I had four children), and finally, after an extended apprenticeship, I wrote a couple myself. My PhD on women writing trauma kept me firmly in the zone, with a focus on Eimear McBride's singular novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and its astonishing stage production directed by Annie Ryan. There are too many books to talk about in this period, so I will pretend there is a gun to my head and I must choose just two. The Baillie Gifford in 2004 could not overlook Australian Anna Funder's brilliant Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, which sheds light on life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), 'the most perfected surveillance state of all time', where it was estimated that there was one informer for every 6.5 citizens. [ A breakthrough era for women's writing, from Edna O'Brien's risks to JK Rowling's Harry Potter debut Opens in new window ] Funder placed an ad in a newspaper asking to speak to former members of the secret police force, the Stasi, and received an overwhelming response. Following leads that took her to the most unexpected of places, she writes about the women 'who sit in Nuremberg puzzling together the shredded files the Stasi couldn't burn or pulp', and East Germans such as Sigrid Paul, who found herself on the opposite side of the wall to her baby, who was being cared for in Westend Hospital in West Berlin. Stasiland is not a history, trotting out impersonal facts; rather, it's a collection of essays, and essays digress. Deploying what Edward Hoagland calls the artful 'I' of an essay and other tools of fiction, Funder weaves her own story through the book, revealing life in the GDR in engaging, witty and often highly personal prose, joining the ranks of the many women essayists who made their mark over the timespan of this series: Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay, Rachel Cusk, Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine, to name but a few. The Booker got it right with Milkman, Anna Burns' 2018 novel, which was also named best Irish fiction title of the 21st century in a recent Irish Times survey. I would go one further and take out the word Irish. Milkman is an extraordinary feat of telling the truth, slant, to invoke Emily Dickinson. Who knew that one of the most insightful and enlightening voices of the Troubles would be that of an unnamed teenaged protagonist who likes to read while walking? 'The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died,' it begins, and if you haven't read it yet, what are you waiting for? The category and methods that have largely defined this series – women and counting – show that progress has been made, albeit from a very low base, yet the gender gap in the literary field stubbornly remains. Not only are women authors seen as producing literature of lower literary value – literary prizes hammer this home again and again – there is even a gendered genre hierarchy. [ The Wardrobe Department by Elaine Garvey: Evocation of youthful self-discovery is well wrought and truthful Opens in new window ] Dutch researcher CW Koolen uses computational analysis and other methods to demonstrate that so-called 'chick lit', usually perceived to have been written by women, is seen as of lesser quality than spy or thriller novels, usually perceived to have been written by men. Counting is dull work, but as long as we live in societies that value and prioritise men's voices and experiences over women's, it remains necessary. (Space does not allow for distinctions of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, economic status, age, education, disability, etc, of the writers discussed in this series, but 'woman' is not a monolith, and over the past 25 years, across forms and genres, women writers have provided essential global sociopolitical perspectives.) This series has been about accountability, but it has also been a celebration of brilliant writing by women that informs, entertains, provokes and inspires. Women like myself, writing in the 21st century, owe an enormous debt of gratitude to our literary foremothers – the essayists, poets, dramatists, critics and novelists – of the past 50 years. Leaning into my personal fiction bias, what other 21st-century flavoured novels would I press into your hand? In no particular order: Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin; 2003's Adolescence; My Year of Rest and Relaxation – the ultimate Millennial read, in which Ottessa Moshfegh's unnamed narrator spends most of the novel sleeping (yet we're still talking about it); Room by Emma Donoghue; Zadie Smith's White Teeth; Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers; A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – playing with all the forms; the Neapolitan novels, of course, by pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein), starting with My Brilliant Friend in 2012; The Weekend by Australian author Charlotte Wood; Theory and Practice by Sri Lankan-Australian author Michelle de Kretser, for anyone who has ever experienced the dubious pleasures of literary theory with a capital T; and there are so many more. Looking back has been a joy. And now I'm looking forward: here's to the next 50 years of women's writing. Paula McGrath is a novelist and assistant professor of Creative Writing at UCD Reading list Stasiland by Anna Funder (2004) – pulling back the Iron Curtain one essay at a time. Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life (2024) – yes, I'm sneaking in Funder's novel, too. Wifedom combines the biography of Eileen O'Shaughnessy, wife of George Orwell, with personal memoir, exploring for both women what it means to be a writer and a wife. Milkman by Anna Burns (2018) – the GOAT, in this writer's humble opinion. Generation (2015) and A History of Running Away (2017) by Paula McGrath – because if you liked this series, you might enjoy the novels ...
BBC News
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Buzzy titles to blockbusters: 10 of the best summer reads
From buzzy titles like Vincent Latronico's Perfection to Taylor Jenkins Reid's latest blockbuster, here's our pick of the best books to escape with this summer. Whether you're packing for a fortnight spent poolside or just taking advantage of the long evenings in your own garden or local park, the heady days of summer bring with them the desire to lose ourselves in a great book. Luckily, there are plenty to choose from this year. Depending on your tastes, the perfect summer read might mean catching up with 2025's most talked-about novels, immersing yourself in an epic family saga, or enjoying some biting satire on the current state of the world. Either way, these 10 titles are all worthy of escaping with for a few hours. The following numbered list is not ranked. 1. Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst A huge bestseller in Denmark, Waist Deep has now been translated into 10 languages, including English by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg. It follows a group of university friends, now in their 30s, who are reunited for a summer holiday in a rural cabin. What begins as a week of swimming, sunbathing and relaxing turns into uneasy self-examination of choices made over the past decade, and lives not lived. Vogue has dubbed this sensual book the "quintessential millennial novel" and it has drawn plenty of Sally Rooney comparisons. Its sun-soaked setting and languid literary vibes are ideal for this time of year. 2. The Names by Florence Knapp Arguably the most buzzed about debut of the year, The Names is a Sliding Doors story of how a name can determine your destiny. Cora sets out to register the birth of her second child, with the three options for his name coming from herself, her husband, and her young daughter. Each choice sends the story in a different direction, showing how split-moment decisions can shape our whole lives. The themes are heavy – namely, domestic violence – but the writing is not, with Knapp skilfully weaving the three stories together to create a book that is as full of hope as it is horror. 3. Perfection by Vincent Latronico This slim (120-page) novel is perfect for when you want to travel light but still read one of this year's most discussed books. Translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes, it tells the story of an expat millennial couple living and working in Berlin as digital nomads. Everything in their lives is carefully curated, from the houseplants and vinyl collection in their Art Nouveau apartment to their social life in the city. It all looks perfect from the outside (especially on the internet), but there's a creeping uneasiness about the inherent emptiness of a life in which aesthetics take priority. This short, sharp satire might make you think twice about posting that poolside selfie. 4. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid It's no coincidence that the latest book from Taylor Jenkins Reid was published just in time for summer. The powerhouse author's novels, which include Daisy Jones & The Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn, have become go-to sun lounger fare thanks to their glamorous retro settings (the '70s rock scene, Golden Age Hollywood; the '90s professional tennis world) and emotional love stories. Reid's latest novel – her ninth – is set in the world of space travel, specifically the 1980s Nasa Space Shuttle mission. Its protagonist, Joan, becomes one of the first women to join the programme and is confronted with huge challenges, both in Mission Control and her relationships with the other astronauts. 5. Flashlight by Susan Choi Choi's last novel, Trust Exercise, was a huge success, scooping the National Book Award for Fiction and making countless best-of-2019 lists – including Barack Obama's. Her follow up looks set to make a similar impact. An ambitious generational saga meets mystery thriller that spans several decades and countries, it is told from the perspective of three members of the Kang family: a white American mother, a Korean father born in Japan, and their mixed-race daughter. The story begins with a disappearance, then ripples out from there for a compulsive read. 6. So Far Gone by Jess Walter Jess Walter is responsible for one of the classic contemporary beach reads, 2012's Beautiful Ruins, which combined a glamorous Italian location with a dose of old Hollywood romance – and even featured appearances from Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Walter's latest has a less chic setting but an equally compelling premise. A retired, reclusive and disillusioned environmental journalist tries to opt out of modern life by going off-grid in his ranch but is forced to re-enter the real world when his daughter goes missing and his grandchildren are kidnapped. Cue a comedic road-trip through a divided America plagued by conspiracy theories. 7. The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine With two short story collections, Wendy Erskine has already gained a reputation as one of the most exciting voices to emerge from Northern Ireland in recent years, and her debut novel only cements that. It centres on three mothers brought together when their teenage sons are accused of sexual assault, but features an expansive cast of characters who together paint a vivid picture of life in contemporary Belfast (The Times said it has "the style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens"). An absorbing, powerful novel about class, trauma and consent. 8. Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis It may have lost out on the Women's Prize, but Fundamentally is still one of the most lauded debut novels of the year. The subject matter - a British academic trying to de-radicalise IS brides – might not immediately scream beach read, but the writing is more hilarious than harrowing. Younis, who spent years working in international relations, even took a stand-up comedy course before writing the book because she wanted it to be a story that, above all, entertains people. Its word-of-mouth success proves it has succeeded at that. 9. The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri Summer downtime is a great opportunity to tackle a doorstopper novel and, at more than 700 pages, this one is certainly meaty, not only in length but in subject. The sixth novel by Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri is his first written in English (he then wrote it all over again in Swedish) and has been called "a staggering achievement." Following three sisters over three decades and three continents, the novel is told in six parts, each covering a progressively shorter timespan – from a year to a day all the way down to one minute. One to sink your teeth into on the sun lounger. 10. Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin With the New York social scene providing a backdrop, Great Black Hope will allow you to vicariously experience a sweltering summer in the city – though this debut is much more than a simple tale of hedonism. Protagonist David Smith is a queer black Stanford graduate caught between two different worlds. His future looks bright, but when his roommate dies suddenly and he is arrested for cocaine possession at a party in the Hamptons, things start to unravel. This coming-of-age story explores the intersection of wealth and race, as well as friendship, grief and identity, with Vanity Fair hailing it "the novel you'll see by every Hamptons lounger this summer." -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
