Category Fiction

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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This tale of two entrepreneurs dips into the perspectives of real-life tech moguls, with thrilling results

Scottish-German author Alexander Starritt’s debut, The Beast, followed a tabloid journalist; his second novel, We Germans, was about a Nazi. His new book gets us rooting for two wealthy management consultants fresh out of Oxford, both of them men (assuming you haven’t already tuned out). I suspect his agent might have found it easier to pitch a novel about sex criminals, not least because Drayton and Mackenzie’s approach is so unfashionably traditionalist: it’s a chunky, warmly observed, 9/11-to-Covid saga that, while comic in tone and often extremely funny, doesn’t labour under any obligation to send up its protagonists, still less take them down.

James Drayton, born to north London academics, is a socially awkward high achiever who privately measures himself against Christopher Columbus and Napoleon. Joining the McKinsey consultancy firm after coming top of his year in philosophy, politics and economics hasn’t eased the pressure he has always felt to “come up with something so brilliant it was irrefutable, like the obliterating ultra-white light of a nuclear bomb”.

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Bristling with sexual, political and emotional angst, this finely tuned coming-of-age tale thrives on the grey areas of adolescence

Father Figure opens with a memory of murders, bought and paid for; then skips briskly to scholarship girl Gail, who is on the verge of being expelled from her expensive London academy for writing a scandalous essay. The connection between death and day school is new girl Agata, the daughter of notoriously corrupt East End businessman Ezra Levy.

Ezra, a man who takes phone calls from Putin, buys football clubs and has had people killed, wants more for Agata than he had when young. Her anorexia is killing her, and he, “fleshy and stupid”, can’t stop it. Gail sets her sights on Ezra: part compulsion, part seduction, an adolescent power game taken to dangerous conclusions.

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