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The Guardian
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
This year's Booker prize longlist looks in new directions
This year's Booker judges had a crowded field to pick from, with scores of eligible books from previously nominated writers and five new novels from winners alone (John Banville, Kiran Desai, Alan Hollinghurst, Ian McEwan and Ben Okri). Of these, Hollinghurst is one eyebrow-raising exclusion, for his elegiac and beautifully composed panorama of gay life in Britain over the past seven decades, Our Evenings. But it's no surprise that the list is headed by Desai's epic The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a novel in the works since her Booker win two decades ago and due out this September. Clocking in at nearly 700 pages, this is a love story about two people pulled between India and the US, family inheritance and personal ambition, intimacy and solitude. Immersive and gently funny, her vast canvas painted with an exquisitely fine brush, it looks like a leading contender on a canon-building list – nine of the authors are making their first Booker appearance. There is an emphasis on family stories; sometimes intimate and direct, as in Claire Adam's account of a woman forced to give up her baby as a teenager, Love Forms, or Ben Markovits's rueful study of a father contemplating life once the kids have left home, The Rest of Our Lives, but more often as a lens through which to examine the forces of history. Love Forms by Claire Adam (Faber) The South by Tash Aw (4th Estate) Universality by Natasha Brown (Faber) One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (Fitzcarraldo Editions) Flashlight by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape) The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton) Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press) The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (Faber) The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (Sceptre) Endling by Maria Reva (Virago) Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape) Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking) Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Daunt Books Originals) Desai's novel is an intricate portrait of an interconnected world, while Tash Aw's The South, the first in a proposed quartet, looks at two farming families in 1990s Malaysia against a backdrop of tumultuous change and ominous signs of climate crisis. Susan Choi's previous novel, 2019's Trust Exercise, was a standout in American fiction; Flashlight is straighter and less playful, but scales up her ambition and breaks new ground in its examination of one family with roots in Korea, Japan and the US, illuminating the seismic effects of political upheaval on individual lives. The two debut novelists on the list respond to the forces of history with formal invention. Canadian-Ukrainian author Maria Reva begins Endling as a comic caper through Ukraine's marriage industry, from the perspective of a cash-strapped scientist with a passion for endangered snails; Russia's full-scale invasion blows the book wide open, calling into question the role of the writer and the purpose of fiction – and offering answers that are full of energy. Albanian-American author Ledia Xhoga toys subtly with realism. Misinterpretation, her portrait of an Albanian interpreter in New York, caught between two cultures and struggling with compassion fatigue and her own traumas as she tries to help others, is full of misunderstandings and missed connections that echo the faults and gaps of translation. Two slim, slippery books revel in formal disruption. Katie Kitamura's enigmatic Audition, focusing on an American actor and a man young enough to be her son, offers contradictory narratives in order to explore identity, performance, and what we are to one another: this is a book to ponder and argue over. In Universality, Natasha Brown is also interested in the power dynamics of storytelling: she constructs a merciless satire of the current media landscape, with its meretricious culture wars, through the jigsaw-puzzle chronicle of a long read that goes viral. The four remaining books are all by men, an answer perhaps to claims that male writing in the UK is in crisis, and they all do fascinating things with interiority. Jonathan Buckley writes spare, slightly Cuskian philosophical novels; in his 13th, One Boat, a woman's sorties to Greece to work through her bereavements lead into reflections on ethics, memory and the processes of thought. In Benjamin Wood's quiet but immensely atmospheric Seascraper, a young man plies his grandfather's trade of 'shanking', scraping the seashore for shrimp in an England that is moving on without him. Muted but precise prose burrows into his hopes and dreams for a tale that resonates far beyond the telling. Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter is also situated in a postwar England on the brink of change, here the 'Big Freeze' of 1962-3, and travels deep into the hearts of its characters, two young married couples in the West Country. This novel has had my heart since it was published last November, and I'm delighted to see it on the list: I think it's the best book yet from a stellar writer who's been publishing for three decades. (By contrast, this year's Booker blow for me is the exclusion of Sarah Hall; I've been telling everyone that her magisterial, millennia-spanning Helm, out at the end of August, was a likely winner.) The final title, also a favourite of mine this year, creates powerful effects through an unusual tactic: utterly refusing interiority. Flesh by David Szalay is a very modern everyman story, with his central character at the mercy of forces beyond his control, a rise and fall playing out across a depressed childhood in Hungary, life in the army and an upwardly mobile stint in on-the-make London. By keeping his antihero a mystery to the reader, Szalay opens up the biggest questions about what we can and cannot know. It feels like something that hasn't been done before in quite this way – and that only fiction could do. 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 To explore all the books on the longlist for the Booker prize 2025 visit Delivery charges may apply.
Washington Post
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
3 new thrillers do the twist
Take a stack of recent crime novels. Read the description of the book and the blurbs praising the writer. The word you are most likely to see is 'twist.' I have done this experiment many times. Today I picked up five books from my recent pile, and the first three met my criteria. Megan Miranda's 'You Belong Here' is 'twisty … tense and atmospheric.' Delia Pitts's 'Death of an Ex' is a 'twisting mystery.' And Belinda Bauer's 'The Impossible Thing' has a plot that 'twists and turns.'
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Washington Post
What are the best adventure novels? Let's add a hidden gem to the list.
What are the greatest adventure novels ever written? By 'adventure' I don't mean 'exciting' — nearly all fiction should be exciting in some way — but rather stories that emphasize action, danger and heroism. My own nominees — and tastes will certainly differ — would include the following baker's dozen: Homer, 'The Odyssey'
Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
An affair with your aunt? I never made a beeline for mine
T here are not many Booker-winning novels of this century you would be happy to tip your camera at. I suppose you could try with last year's winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, in which some astronauts do absolutely nothing of interest while circling the Earth at 16,000mph. If I were Harvey I'd have put a couple of aliens in it, maybe a horrible one hiding in the water tank and another — a friendly one who helps to defeat the one in the water tank — banging on the porthole trying to get in. Or anything, frankly: a line of interesting dialogue, or a compelling character. Perhaps even a story. And so it has been for most of the century, except for 2014 when the Australian Richard Flanagan took the prize for what was a comparatively conservative work of fiction — and here is The Narrow Road to the Deep North (BBC1/iPlayer) on Sunday nights, the work of Screen Australia and starring Jacob Elordi, who titillated the world in Saltburn and is receiving superlative notices.
Washington Post
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘If You Love It, Let It Kill You' turns navel-gazing into art
A few weeks ago, David Brooks ran out of things to write about in the New York Times and so decided to pour more water over some old tea bag about the death of literary fiction. 'America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,' he wrote, and 'the public taste is occupied with their trash.' No — wait — that was Nathaniel Hawthorne back in 1855, but you get the idea. Our latest novels, Brooks wrote, have grown timid and insular. As someone who's been reviewing fiction every week for three decades and often feels moved and dazzled, I could sense a rebuttal swelling in my evidently easily pleased brain. Just over the last few months, Bruce Holsinger's 'Culpability' tackled the ethical implications of AI, Susan Choi's 'Flashlight' explored the abiding tragedy of North Korea, Karen Russell's 'The Antidote' conjured up a magical tale of environmental destruction in the American West, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 'Dream Count' followed the intertwined lives of women in the United States and Africa. Timid and insular, sir? I think not. But it was then, perched atop my high dudgeon, that I noticed I was reading Hannah Pittard's 'If You Love It, Let It Kill You.' Pittard, as you may know from her 2023 memoir, 'We Are Too Many,' is an English professor in Kentucky whose husband cheated on her. Now she's written a novel about an English professor in Kentucky whose husband cheated on her. It sounds like the kind of book you'd want to keep on the bottom shelf if you had to debate David Brooks about the ambition and audacity of contemporary American fiction. At times, you might even wonder whose side Pittard is on. Early in 'If You Love It,' the narrator admits, 'I'm a chronicler of the everyday mundanities of life.' She imagines her students complaining, 'Where's the plot?' Her partner tells her, 'You're a family of navel gazers.' He's not wrong, but that Brooksian dismissal hardly tells the whole story, because the success of such a novel depends on the navel and the gazer. For all its quirky self-referentiality and cramped plot, 'If You Love It' is an account of female anxiety, depression and sexual dissatisfaction. For decades, male anxiety, depression and sexual dissatisfaction passed as capacious themes for fiction (See: 20th-century novels by White guys named John). That such audacious writers as Pittard, Kate Folk, Ada Calhoun and Miranda July are turning those themes on the lathes of their own sharp fiction isn't just fair play, it's cause for celebration. Pittard's special contribution is her ability to braid strands of pathos and comedy. The melancholy narrator, an avatar of the author trimmed down to 'Hana,' feels besieged by the close presence of family, including her sister's household next door; her severely unbalanced father, who wants to be a charming character in one of her books; her eccentric mother, who's dating three men simultaneously online; and her partner's 11-year-old daughter, who has surely heard Hana say she doesn't like kids. What's worse, Hana has just learned that her ex-husband is about to publish a novel about their ruined marriage that portrays her as a smug, insecure hack. The publisher will be using her full name in the publicity material. 'You can't use fiction as a means of making false accusations about living people,' Hana says. 'It's unethical. Fiction isn't a platform for revenge.' These indignant lines are funnier if you're tuned into the literary kerfuffle that's been rumbling between Pittard and her ex-husband, Andrew Ewell, who did, in fact, publish a novel last year called 'Set For Life' inspired by their ruined marriage. But what's pertinent to most readers is that this story follows a mad woman, a woman mad at life, who lives too much in her head, is dogged by erratic erotic urges and suspects there might be something troubling about her desire to play dead. 'It's all happening too quickly,' she thinks, 'and it couldn't be over too soon.' Hana's humor keeps rolling over these adamantine terrors like waves, but periodically when that tide of comedy pulls back, we find ourselves stranded with a middle-aged woman crying, 'oh my god this is not what my life was supposed to be, is it?' At such moments, 'If You Love It,' feels almost too heartbreaking to bear. But Pittard doesn't leave us there. For one thing, Hana imagines her writing students critiquing her story as it takes place. And they aren't particularly kind — 'Is this some sort of plot device?' they ask impatiently. Hana doesn't hold back on them, either. She portrays her students as chronically unimaginative writers always pestering her for permission to add vampires and talking cats to their work. Until, what do you know, a particularly acerbic kitten paws into Hana's life and starts mewing no-nonsense advice. And with that surreal intrusion, 'If You Love It' tilts another few degrees away from reality's plumb line. If memoir is that pious figure who vows to tell the truth and then lies, autofiction is the cheeky kid who wants extra credit for confessing her deceit up front. Is Pittard working through her own private catastrophes in this novel? Of course — but so is every other novelist. She's just letting us see the splintered timbers of her experience clearly enough to recognize our own. 'This book,' Hana tells us, is 'neither a comedy nor a tragedy but something much worse: real life.' And what is that, really, besides the long struggle to understand — and appreciate — that we're all characters in each other's stories. Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for 'CBS Sunday Morning.'
