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The Guardian
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Love Groundhog Day and Russian Doll? These are the novels for you
Florence Knapp's first novel The Names, publishing this month, tells not one story but three. As it opens, a mother is preparing to take her newborn boy to formally register his name. Will it be Bear, as his older sister would like, her own choice of Julian, or Gordon, named after his controlling father? The universe pivots on the decision she makes. Knapp plaits together the three stories that follow to trace the three different worlds in which the boy grows to manhood. Think of it as Sliding Doors for nominative determinism. In this universe, at least, it is going like gangbusters. Described as 'the book of the fair' at Frankfurt two years ago, Knapp's publisher secured the rights in a 13-way auction and it's already due to appear in 20 languages. It is a prime example of a renewed interest in what might be called 'high-concept fiction'. Knapp, though, says that the first time she even heard the epithet was in a meeting with an agent after she'd finished writing her book. 'I looked it up when I came home, and even now, it still feels like a really intangible thing: something to do with a hook, and maybe something to do with structure?' She says she's not a science fiction reader, but her husband is an avid fan and she found herself fascinated when he talked to her about world-building in that genre. The idea for what became The Names first came to her in 2017 or 2018, but 'I'd written a completely different book in between that I thought would have more commercial appeal, and it never found a publisher. So when I was setting out to write this one, I didn't have a sense of it being a big idea at all: it was just the thing that, when I was faced with quite a lot of rejection, I kept coming back to.' The narrative structure was, she says, 'really helpful. I think I realised early on that I wanted to show, in a very crystallised way, those moments in a person's life that are formative. If I hadn't had that structure, it would have been quite amorphous for the reader.' Instead, she says, 'it felt like stepping stones. OK, I just need to get to the next place, and then the next place …' 'High concept' is a tricky notion to define, but you know it when you see it. It's a story with a ready-made elevator pitch; a grabby gimmick in the narrative or world-building that can be summarised in a couple of sentences. Another recent example is last year's hit debut The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: a story about refugees finding their feet in London, but the refugees are from other eras rather than other countries. And probably the hottest piece of translated fiction since Knausgård, Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume, announces early on: 'Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November.' Think the classic movie Groundhog Day, or the TV show Russian Doll, in which Natasha Lyonne's character relives her 36th birthday party over and over – only with a Danish antiquarian bookseller and an International Booker shortlisting. There are two accounts you could offer of why these stories are popular now, one of them cynical, one of them less so. There's a bit of truth in both. The cynical one is that high-concept books are much easier to get past marketing meetings. A novel with a gimmick sticks in the mind. Its fanbase can sell it on TikTok – 'it's High School Musical – but with giant crabs!' – and buyers at bookshops will remember that book with the cool premise in the absence of a marquee author name. The less cynical version is that these books find readers because they use their MacGuffins to deft literary effect – and because a public that used to be sniffy about genre fiction is coming to appreciate its imaginative possibilities. The novelist Jenny Colgan describes the increased appetite for high-concept fiction as a sign that readers are 'getting over their prejudices to discover how many amazing worlds there are out there'. As she puts it, 'sci-fi is just shorthand for using certain tropes – time travel, rockets, apocalypse – to tell the kind of story you are telling: a love story, or a story about sadness or loss. And some of those work very well but loads sink without trace.' The vital ingredient, she argues, is quality. 'If you do something brilliantly you can smash through people's genre walls.' The Names is perfectly pitched between so-called literary and popular fiction, full of heart, and works out its premise compellingly. Meanwhile Bradley's book is consistently funny and inventive, and crackles at the level of the sentence: the fun the author is having is contagious. And Balle explores her world absorbingly; the generative idea at the heart of it grips the reader's imagination from the off. The same was true of those high-concept books that broke through in recent years: Kate Atkinson's Life After Life (an alternate-realities precursor to The Names, spliced in with a touch of Groundhog Day); Audrey Niffenegger's time-jumbled romance The Time Traveler's Wife; Naomi Alderman's The Power (what if, overnight, women were a physical threat to men rather than vice versa?) and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, to name just a few. Kaliane Bradley, who is both a publisher (she's an editor at Penguin) and a novelist, says she sees a high-concept pitch as 'an easy way into something that might be more complex or with multiple strands'. She uses the example of Dracula: 'There's a mysterious foreigner, and it's partly about fear of the immigrant, and it's about nervousness around female sexuality … but the high-concept pitch is: 'It's a guy who sucks your blood.'' She thinks the present boom is attributable to a 'certain loosening around the boundaries of genre' which has made people less anxious about approaching a book through a keynote idea: 'There was perhaps a time when people would have been only attracted by that or only put off by it.' She says she wrote her own high-concept novel by accident. 'I thought my first novel would be a big literary book about Cambodia,' she says. The Ministry of Time began as a jeu d'esprit to amuse Bradley's friends, 'and the conceit was: what would it be like if your favourite polar explorer, because we were all very into polar exploration, lived in your house? That's it. That's the concept […] The very first version was almost an experiment, really, and then it turned into a book by mistake.' She adds: 'The difference between this book and the book that I was writing that's now in a bottom drawer, is that one I felt like I had to take very seriously, and I had a real obligation to write. Whereas for this, it was just like: this is a fun idea. What if I just mess around with it? I realise it's different for every writer, but for me, that was just the more fertile way of thinking about writing.' The Names by Florence Knapp is published by Phoenix (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Kaliane Bradley: ‘I dreaded the book going to people I know'
Kaliane Bradley, 36, lives in east London and works as an editor at Penguin Classics. Her debut novel, The Ministry of Time (Sceptre), was published last year to critical acclaim and a place in the bestseller charts and is out in paperback now. It's a vivid time travel tale following Lieutenant Graham Gore, a crew member of Franklin's lost 1845 Arctic expedition, who is brought back to life in the 21st century as part of a government experiment. He develops an unlikely relationship with his 'bridge', a contemporary character helping him assimilate to the modern world. It was longlisted for the 2025 women's prize for fiction and the BBC has commissioned a TV adaptation. What has the past year been like for you?Lovely and discombobulating. I veer wildly between immense gratitude and intense impostor syndrome. But I'm still working 4.5 days a week, so I'm grounded by my job. How did The Ministry of Time come about?In 2021 I started watching a TV series called The Terror. I didn't know anything about polar exploration but – because this was during lockdown, and I was just roving around the house – I started thinking a lot about the Franklin expedition. I looked up one of the characters, Graham Gore. Then I came across a very sweet community of people online, some of whom were fans of the show and others who were more generally interested in polar exploration. They shared a lot of their research with me. I started writing what would become The Ministry of Time as a kind of gift for them. What drew you to Graham Gore?I do think the photo of him that's published in the book is great. He's dashing, frankly. Many people disagree – I simply cannot say why the Americans took the photo out of the book. But also, when I read about him, it suggested he was a very competent, kind, calm man. And I'm not a calm person at all. That really appealed to me. What modern invention was most fun to describe to someone from a different time?Spotify. It's mad that for most of human history, music was something you had to make together. And now you can just play music endlessly by yourself. And you don't even have to treat it as something to respect. You can play some of the greatest symphonies in history while you're doing the washing up. That's just stupid. The book's narrator, 'the bridge', is British-Cambodian, and you use time travel as a metaphor for the immigrant experience. How did that come to you?It wasn't with me immediately. The story started off very playful: what would happen if we introduced this man to a washing machine? But a satisfying book is one where you take a silly conceit seriously, where you prove the emotional possibilities of it. The more I tried to imagine what it would be like for a person torn from history to experience London in the 21st century, the more it became obvious to me that what I was looking at was the refugee experience. It was probably at the forefront of my mind because the book I was trying to write before this was a 'serious' novel about Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, my family and the diaspora. What is your relationship to your Cambodian ethnicity?It's a family relationship – a relationship with my mother and my mother's family. And I feel like there are multiple versions of Cambodia that I have relationships to. One of them is a past Cambodia that no longer exists; that's the Cambodia of my mother's stories. But the internalised sense of my ethnicity changes on a daily, hourly basis. Though I feel very strongly that I am a British-Cambodian writer at this time in my life. It's had a significant impact on the way I write. How?I was brought up Buddhist. There are frameworks that I continually refer to in my writing that come from Buddhism, such as the idea of attachment. We become attached to things that are impermanent. But they have to leave us, so we will always mourn their loss, and the only way to free ourselves from this pain and yearning is to accept the transience of life, even the transience of self. But I worry about how you apply that to human solidarity. That comes up in Ministry: the bridge is someone who continually fails to show solidarity, and moves towards complicity. You first sent out your novel to agents under a pseudonym. Why?I masochistically wanted to check that the work was good enough that it could pass without me leveraging my contacts. And there was the absolute dread that it would go to people I know and respect and they'd talk to one another and say: 'God, did you get that book? It's shit, isn't it? What do we tell her? Should she just leave the industry?' The idea of that was mortifying. Which book made you want to work with books?Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. The first one I ever picked up was Interesting Times, which is actually not one I recommend. But reading Pratchett when I was very young – I mean, I was still losing milk teeth – made me excited about the possibilities of literature, books, series, authors. He has influenced my writing more than anyone else. Is there a book you return to often?I read King Lear every five years or so. I think it's the greatest play ever written. And I always come back to Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier. I'm drawn to that idea of yearning and loss. Which new book are you most excited about?Moderation by Elaine Castillo, which is coming out in July. It's about moderating comments on a social media platform. I think it's going to really startle people. What can you tell us about your second novel?It's about a lighthouse that occupies a border between the land of the living and the land of the dead. The person who runs the lighthouse takes on an apprentice every winter to look after the crossings, and she starts to experience very weird phenomena. There is something wrong with the border, so she has to investigate. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is published by Sceptre (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Samantha Harvey and Téa Obreht shortlisted for inaugural Climate fiction prize
Samantha Harvey and Téa Obreht are among the writers in the running for the inaugural Climate fiction prize. Harvey's Orbital, her Booker-winning novel set on the International Space Station, and Obreht's novel The Morningside, about refugees from an unnamed country, have both been shortlisted for the new prize, which aims to 'celebrate the most inspiring novels tackling the climate crisis'. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre) And So I Roar by Abi Daré (Sceptre) Briefly Very Beautiful by Roz Dineen (Bloomsbury) Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Cape) The Morningside by Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld) Also in contention for the £10,000 award are And So I Roar by Abi Daré and Briefly Very Beautiful by Roz Dineen. In Daré's novel, a sequel to her internationally bestselling debut The Girl with the Louding Voice, 14-year-old Adunni is living in Lagos, having escaped the rural village in which she was a victim of abuse and enslavement. The novel exposes 'the harsh realities faced by women and girls worldwide, underscored by intersectional environmental issues', according to judge Tori Tsui. 'It's a tough but essential read.' Meanwhile former Times Literary Supplement journalist Dineen's debut, about a mother looking after her three small children in a city rocked by global catastrophe, was described by judge Nicola Chester as 'a haunting, fierce narrative of love, beauty and the desire to live through an accelerating crisis and a world on fire'. Kaliane Bradley's novel The Ministry of Time, which has also been longlisted for this year's Women's prize for fiction, completes the shortlist, and was praised by the Climate fiction prize's chair of judges Madeleine Bunting as 'climate fiction which manages to be both surprising and still make its point powerfully'. Described by Guardian reviewer Ella Risbridger as '50% sci-fi thriller and 50% romcom', The Ministry of Time is a love story about a disaffected civil servant working in a near-future London and Commander Graham Gore, first lieutenant of Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition to the Arctic. Though it contains 'vast themes' – the British empire, the refugee crisis and the Cambodian genocide among others – they are 'handled deftly and in deference to character and plot', Risbridger wrote. Journalist Bunting, climate justice activist Tsui and author Chester were joined on the judging panel by birdwatcher and writer David Lindo and the Hay festival's sustainability director Andy Fryers. The shortlist was whittled down from a longlist of nine that also included Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright, The Mars House by Natasha Pulley, Water Baby by Chioma Okereke and Private Rites by Julia Armfield. The five chosen books 'promote and celebrate the power and joy of storytelling, to show us how we might see ourselves anew in the light of the climate crisis, and how we might respond to and rise to its challenges with hope and inventiveness', said Chester. 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 Launched in June 2024 at the Hay literary festival, the Climate fiction prize will be awarded annually to 'the best novel-length work of fiction published in the UK engaging with the climate crisis'. It is supported by Climate Spring, a global organisation dedicated to transforming how the climate crisis is represented in film, TV, mainstream entertainment and popular culture. The winner will be announced on 14 May.
