Category Fiction

The lives of Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, who found love and fame and lost it all, are vividly reimagined

What if the protagonist of a novel was not a single person but a couple? Damian Barr takes on this challenge, and he’s found a historic couple who make the ideal source material. Working-class Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun were rarely apart after they met in 1933. They lived and worked together, became famous together and then declined into desperate squalor together – even poorer than when they began.

Barr knows what it’s like to conquer Glasgow from a small, working-class town on its outskirts; he knows what it’s like to find yourself feted for your portraits of the place you’ve left irrevocably behind. His memoir, Maggie and Me, was a hard-hitting yet rambunctious tale of growing up gay near Motherwell under Thatcher, uneasily aware that the woman who pushed his parents deeper into poverty also taught him that the ruthless exercise of his talents offered his escape. He expanded his exploration of how brutality can take hold in his novel You Will Be Safe Here, set in South Africa. Now he returns to Scotland in this moving meditation on art, love and home.

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A young shrimp fisher’s horizons are broadened by the arrival of a stranger in this atmospheric Booker-listed tale

You don’t think you need a novella about a folk-singing shrimp fisher living with his mother on a fictional stretch of isolated coast until you read Benjamin Wood’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel, Seascraper. Wood conjures wonders from this unlikely material in a tale so richly atmospheric you can almost taste the tang of brine and inhale the sea fog.

As unexpected as his previous four books – which range from a campus intrigue (The Bellwether Revivals) to a sensitive study of a Glaswegian painter (The Ecliptic) – Seascraper follows the daily trials of Tom Flett, a “shanker” who scrapes the sand for its yield at low tide with his trusty horse and wagon, risking his life in a job that is simultaneously boring and dangerous. Tom is clearly in the Hardyesque tradition of unworldly young men who tend the land or work with their hands (Gabriel Oak, Jude Fawley), and it’s this that alerts us to his vulnerability to charmers and chancers.

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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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