Category Fiction

What happens to a boy called Gordon, Julian or Bear? Irish actor Dervla Kirwan narrates this smart tale about a how a boy’s name influences his life

How influential is a name? This is the question underpinning The Names, which opens with Cora taking her newborn son to register his birth. Her abusive husband Gordon wants his son to be named after him, though, secretly, Cora isn’t keen. She notes how the second syllable lands with “a downward thud like someone slamming down a sports bag”. She prefers Julian, which means “sky father”, though their nine-year-old daughter Maia would like her little brother to be called Bear, since it sounds “soft and cuddly … but also brave and strong”.

Florence Knapp’s smart debut novel features a Sliding Doors-style plot in which the three names are tried out for size, each triggering a different reality. By defying her husband and choosing Bear, Cora is subjected to a beating that prompts a neighbour to intervene and call the police; when she names him Julian, young Maia steps in to defend her mother and break the tension. And when she registers him as Gordon, peace is maintained but not for long; when Cora asks for money to buy baby formula, her husband dispenses a different style of punishment. The repercussions of her decision are felt by their son, too, whose lives under the different names are traced across three decades.

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The political and emotional journey of a young communist revolutionary is brought sensuously to life, in a magnificent epic that took 25 years to write

The observation by architect Louis Kahn that you “can only really see a building … once the building becomes a ruin” runs through this book like the Hooghly river through India’s former capital. There’s no better Indian ruin than Kolkata, a city that still clings to the centrality of its role in the 19th-century intellectual renaissance that buttressed the case for Indian self-rule. The adage back then was that “what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow”.

Great Eastern Hotel, the second novel from the author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, is 920 pages and well over 300,000 words long. The staff of your local Waterstones will kindly describe it as “an undertaking”. It is set in and around the still-standing, now eye-wateringly expensive Great Eastern Hotel, which is, as the book points out, a model for the city itself: a place that was once the confluence for an entire subcontinent, where conquerors and subjugated, foreigners and natives met and danced and governed and suffered. When the book opens in 1941, instead of today’s sunburnt German tourists, we have whisky, secret societies, spies, anti-colonial firebrands and over-rouged raciness, with the hotel as the stage on and around which the characters play out their political struggles, love lives and artistic endeavours.

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This brilliantly over-the-top comedy about an unworldly heckler explores art and authenticity – being tripped up by it is part of the fun

As TonyInterruptor begins, musician Sasha Keyes is in the middle of an improvised trumpet solo. A man stands up in the audience and says, “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?” He points at Sasha and adds, “You especially.” Soon a video of the episode appears online, with a companion clip of Sasha’s vitriolic reaction: “Some random fucking nobody … some dick-weed, small-town TonyInterruptor.”

Given the times we live in, this naturally leads to Sasha’s trial by social media for artistic fraudulence and abusive conduct. But the shockwaves soon extend to everyone adjacent to the event: Fi Kinebuchi, the self-styled “Queen of Strings”, who was playing with Sasha at the time; India Shore, the teenager who posted the first video; India’s father, Lambert, an architecture professor with a secret crush on Fi Kinebuchi; his wife Mallory, who divides her time between parenting her daughter, Gunn, who has special needs, and venting intellectual spleen; and even to TonyInterruptor himself, real name John Lincoln Braithwaite, an otherworldly outsider whose “main occupation – his duty, even – is to observe and assess the falling and the catching of light”.

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The crime author on rediscovering Edith Wharton, and the brilliantly twisted author who changed her ideas about writing

My earliest reading memory
I have a distinct memory of sitting by the bookshelves in the first house we lived in and suddenly realising I could understand the words in lots of the books. It was like discovering I could perform magic – pulling out one book after the other and disappearing into other worlds. I bumped into a childhood friend the other day who told me she remembers being annoyed when I came for a play date at her house and the first thing I wanted to do was see if she had any books I hadn’t read.

My favourite book growing up
I loved Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge series as a girl. The exquisite intricacy of the pictures, their evocation of a hidden world … I’m enjoying rediscovering them with my four‑year‑old. The High Hills has a wonderful, Tolkien-esque quest element to it.

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More than 40 years on from its first publication, this exploration of one woman’s thoughts and fantasies is a gem worthy of rediscovery

There’s no getting around it: Dreaming of Dead People is an extremely strange book. Born in 1941, Rosalind Belben was first published in the 1970s; this, her fourth novel, first came out in 1979. Her eighth and most recent, Our Horses in Egypt, won the James Tait Black award in 2007.

Dreaming of Dead People might best be described as an early example of autofiction: its narrator, Lavinia, is the same age as Belben was at the time of writing, and she recalls a similar childhood in Dorset, including a father who was a Royal Navy commander and who was killed when she was three. Belben has described the book as “a study of the human figure”, and given its parallels with her own life story and its raw and deeply personal style any reader could be forgiven for assuming that the figure is her own.

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Set a decade from now, this coming-of-age caper offers a child’s-eye view of family troubles in a ‘post-democracy’ USA

Gary Shteyngart is the observational standup of American letters, a puckish, playful Russian-born author who views the US through the eyes of an inquisitive tourist. The immigrant melting pot of New York is his stage; the intricate English language his prop. Shteyngart’s characters, typically lightly veiled alter egos, are always getting lost, tripping up and mangling basic social interactions. It’s the missed connections and short circuits that give his fictions their spark.

Shteyngart’s sixth novel is a lively, skittish Bildungsroman, shading towards darkness as it tracks the journey – literal, educational, emotional – of 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, an overanxious, over-watchful academic high achiever whose run of straight As has just been blighted by a B. “Being smart is one of the few things I have to be proud of,” laments Vera, who diligently maintains a “Things I Still Need to Know Diary” in which she makes note of difficult words and intriguing figures of speech. The girl is articulate and precocious, bent on self-improvement, and never mind the fact that she confuses “facile” with “futile” and “hollowed” with “hallowed” and is wont to wax lyrical about the “she-she” districts of Manhattan. Her vocabulary is almost – but crucially not quite – sufficient to give us the whole story and explain what it means.

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