Category Fiction

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Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin review – grasping the essence of horror

The Argentinian writer maps a journey through fear, healing and the terrifying permeability of our boundaries

Horror, in essence, is about porousness. Our terrors take varied forms but horror probes their single, existential source: the terrifying permeability of our boundaries. If spirits can swim back from the world of the dead, if the living body can degrade to the point where it becomes malleable or parasitically possessed, what hope can there be for our fantasy of security and selfhood?

Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s most recent collection of stories, her third in English, may not be categorisable as “horror” in the traditional sense, but it shares with the genre its spiritual core. In Schweblin’s vision, the barriers that separate one thing from another – the wanted from the unwanted, the environmental from the bodily, the unthreatening from the violent and chaotic – are so porous as to be nonexistent. True horror, she reminds us, is neither otherworldly or supernatural, it is simply the acknowledgment of life’s fundamental conditions.

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The best recent translated fiction – review roundup

Discontent by Beatriz Serrano; Hunter by Shuang Xuetao; Blurred by Iris Wolff; Cooking in the Wrong Century by Teresa Präauer

Discontent by Beatriz Serrano, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (Harvill Secker, £14.99)
Ambivalence towards working life is the subject of this tremendously entertaining debut novel. “I only come into the office to lower my air-conditioning bill,” says 32-year-old Marisa. She’s “head of creative strategy” in a Madrid ad agency. “That’s a big deal,” says a friend. “No,” Marisa replies, “it just sounds like one.” She kills time between projects by posting trolling comments on dismal YouTube videos. Eventually she faces the worst horror of all: a team-building retreat, which she ends up dealing with in a masterfully perverse way. There’s pain underlying her quips (“No one knows who I really am”), but her story is peppered with pithy insights into the modern workplace, and plenty of vivid characters, such as the friend who’s “had work done”. “I’m filled with plastic,” she tells Marisa. “I’m the Atlantic Ocean.”

Hunter by Shuang Xuetao, translated by Jeremy Tiang (Granta, £12.99)
Set largely in the Chinese cities of Beijing and Shenyang, these diverse stories share a blend of urban grittiness and surreal strangeness. In one, a man accompanies his father in an ambulance to hospital, but finds everyone else – including the driver – is asleep. In another, a man goes from stalking women to shooting squirrels; elsewhere, we encounter a remake of The Tempest, and a man who claims to be the last survivor from another planet. Motifs recur – actors, parents, people needing urgently to pee – bringing a sense of unity, however warped. The frequent surprises in these stories, which are darkly charming and hard to shake off, suggest Xuetao may have followed the advice of one of his own characters on writing: “Just sit there, smack your head and let the words flow out.”

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Banned! The 20 books they didn’t want you to read

From Instagram poetry to Greek classics, the works of fiction that have caused uproar through history – and into the present

The banning of books, it would be easy to think, is a relic of less enlightened ages. The Catholic church, in a last spasm of rectitude, added Jean-Paul Sartre, Alberto Moravia and Simone de Beauvoir to its Index of Forbidden Books during the 1940s and 50s, but then abandoned the list, which had lasted four centuries, in 1966.

Public book burnings by Nazis or McCarthyites, too, might be assumed to be nothing more than a baleful warning from the past. Yet the burning of books still appears an irresistible act to some – even in the country with the strongest statutory protection of free speech, the United States. In 2019, students at Georgia Southern University burned copies of visiting Cuban-American author Jennine Capó Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers, some shouting “Trump 2020!”. In 2022, the Nashville pastor Greg Locke held a public bonfire for “demonic” books, including the Harry Potter and Twilight series.

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Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea review – a love song to Italy

A sculptor and his unlikely soulmate navigate the political turmoil of the 20th century in a prize-winning blockbuster

In a remote monastery perched perilously on top of a crag in Piedmont, Italy, an old man lies dying. Thirty-two monks stand vigil at the deathbed; “Mimo” Vitaliani has lived among them for 40 years, yet few of them know exactly why. Nor did Vitaliani come alone, but with a mysterious statue that is kept under lock and key in the depths of the Sacra di San Michele, a pietà depicting the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of Christ, whose faces must not be seen. And all the while, the abbot tiptoes around the dying man, waiting for a word. These and others are the mysteries French writer Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s prize-winning fourth novel sets out to solve, mapped on to the course of an extraordinary century in the history of a resilient, self-sabotaging and remarkable nation.

Born in France to Italian parents in 1904, at the dawn of a new world order, Mimo is destined never quite to fit (nor, incidentally, ever to grow taller than 4ft 6in). His father was a stone carver who had hubris enough to christen the boy Michelangelo before getting himself conscripted and blown to bits; Mimo refuses the name, and yet finds himself taking up the art all the same.

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Helm by Sarah Hall review – a mighty epic of climate change in slow motion

A Cumbrian wind is the central character in this hugely ambitious, millennia-spanning novel, which was 20 years in the making

Even if Sarah Hall did not begin her acknowledgments by saying that it’s taken her 20 years to write Helm it would be evident. Not from a cursory glance at her bibliography, perhaps: in that time Hall has published six other novels and three volumes of extraordinary short stories. But in every other way, and the moment you begin reading.

There’s the subject, for starters. Ever since the first paragraph of her first novel, Haweswater, in which an early 20th-century man drives his horse and cart through the waters of a Cumbrian valley recently drowned by a dam, Hall has been concerned with landscape, with weather, with nature in all its forms, with the ways in which we affect each other. In The Carhullan Army, climate change has already happened. Cumbria is semi-tropical, temperate England a folk memory; a dystopian vision that feels, this baked summer, uncomfortably close to reality. The Wolf Border, published in 2015, was, among many other things, about the ethics and unpredictabilities of rewilding an apex predator, while Hall’s last novel, Burntcoat, written in the first lockdown, was set in and after a pandemic. Her story Later, His Ghost is set in a perpetual windstorm of total climate breakdown; in One in Four, a virologist writes to his wife, apologising for getting things wrong. In this new novel, weather and climate are not just potent settings but the main event. The central character in Helm is the Helm, Britain’s only named wind.

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From V to Vineland and Inherent Vice: Thomas Pynchon’s books – ranked!

With fans eagerly awaiting the reclusive author’s first book in more than a decade, the noir caper Shadow Ticket, we assess his best fiction of the past 60 years

A collection of early short stories that is chiefly of interest for the introduction, in which the author spells out why he thinks they fail. Pynchon does not spare himself but, unfortunately, he is right. For aficionados only.

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Blue sky thinking: why we need positive climate novels

Environmental fiction is booming – but can it move beyond dystopia to a brighter vision of the future?

Nearly a quarter of a century ago when I published my first novel, Haweswater, about the impact of dam-building in north-west England, nature writing felt quite different, at least for me. Several landmark novels about climate apocalypse and survivalism had been published, including Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien and The Death of Grass by John Christopher, but there was no imperative to write about such things. These stories involved anomalistic catastrophes – a mutated virus, nuclear war – and they were very bleak. They resonated but also seemed unusual. At the other end of the scale, Ben Elton’s Stark had comedically outlined the nature of oligarchic greed, resource consumption, and the ruination we were hurtling towards, while the Bezos and Musk equivalents could head off-world – not quite so funny now.

The public knew about climate issues, though terminology often stressed them individually – ozone depletion, greenhouse warming, desertification, coral bleaching – rather than total Earth systems breakdown. Disparate, visionary science fictions didn’t indicate a genre movement yet. There was a luxury of choice regarding stories related to nature – no elephant in the room (or polar bear), if you didn’t tackle climate-change concerns.

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In the Green Heart by Richard Lloyd Parry review – neocolonial jungle fever

An intensely political story of a new father’s escape with his baby through a rainforest during wartime

Richard Lloyd Parry, a longtime foreign correspondent whose experiences of war and regime change are recorded in his remarkable 2005 memoir In the Time of Madness, can be said to know whereof he speaks. Many of that book’s issues, including the psychic damage he incurred from events he witnessed in Indonesia, East Timor and Afghanistan in the 1990s and early 2000s, are reinflected in this, his first novel.

Kit and Lara live in a remote village in the deep rainforest. She works for a small, undependably financed NGO. He’s a stay-at-home husband, living for their baby daughter Helen. While Lara presents as impulsive yet practical and barely able to contain her own energy, Kit is dreamy, internalised, exhibiting a calmness that falls easily into dissociation. “This is your life,” she shouts at him shortly before they leave the UK, “a day of your life, and it requires your presence.” He’s struggling with the local language. His wife has neglected to tell him that he’s speaking it in the female register, which is why the villagers are so amused by him. Beneath the trees, the light is “filtered to a soupy dimness”. The villagers claim to be able to tell a child’s fortune from its teeth. The baby, kept in a heavily air-conditioned pod in the space beneath their stilted house, has a rash. Her future, it seems, will feature a long journey: a prediction, Kit observes politely, that he recognises from fortune tellers in his own country.

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Yorùbá Boy Running by Biyi Bándélé audiobook review – from enslaved teenager to celebrated preacher

The novelist’s final work tells a remarkable tale of resilience, based on the life of Samuel Àjàyí Crowther, who was kidnapped by slavers but won his freedom

Set in 19th-century Òsogùn in what is now Nigeria, Yorùbá Boy Running opens with 13-year-old Àjàyí reporting a premonition to his mother about dark days ahead. A week later, the town is surrounded by Malian slave raiders and Àjàyí is kidnapped along with his mother, sister, best friend and neighbours. He is taken to Lagos and sold to Portuguese slavers preparing to ship their human cargo to the Americas. But they are intercepted by the British navy, which releases Àjàyí in Sierra Leone, where he is recruited by missionaries. From there, he is put on a path that leads to him to study at Oxford and become a celebrated preacher, linguist and abolitionist who meets Queen Victoria.

A remarkable tale of barbarism and resilience, Yorùbá Boy Running is the final work by the Nigerian novelist and film-maker Biyi Bándélé, who died in 2022 aged 54. Weaving in Africa’s colonial history and imagined – and improbably comic – conversations between warring Yorùbá factions, it is based on the real-life story of Samuel Àjàyí Crowther, who was kidnapped in 1821 and sold into slavery. Crowther secured his freedom and went on to become the first Black Anglican bishop in west Africa.

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Katabasis by RF Kuang review – a descent into the hellscape of academia

The bestselling author’s sixth novel is far from perfect, but this journey into the underworld is delivered with heretical glee

The more academia has broken your heart, the more you’ll love RF Kuang’s new novel. Katabasis knows the slow grind of postgrad precarity: the endless grant grubbing and essay marking; the thesis chapters drafted, redrafted and quietly ignored by a supervisor who can’t be bothered to read – let alone reply to – an email. Living semester to semester, pay shrinking, workload metastasising, cannon fodder in a departmental forever war. Katabasis knows how it feels to spend your best thinking years doing grunt work to further someone else’s ideas, clinging to the bottom rung of a ladder you will never be allowed to climb: less an ivory tower than a pyramid scheme.

Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal. The American author’s sixth novel is an infernal twist on the campus farce: David Lodge with demons. Kuang’s previous book, 2023’s Yellowface, satirised the publishing industrial complex with an irresistible mix of gallows humour and gossip. A tale of toxic allies, commodified identity and hollow moralising, it was lapped up – with predictable irony – by the very people it skewered, like a real-life version of the stunt novel in Percival Everett’s Erasure. The year before Yellowface, in the cult hit Babel, she invented an elaborate, counter-historical version of Oxford University – and then blew it up. A literary Rhodes Must Fall.

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