Category Fiction

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Joelle Taylor: ‘I picked up The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in a swoon of nine-year-old despair’

The poet and playwright on queer classics, cinematic TS Eliot and the comforts of a ghost story

My earliest reading memory
I was around five when my mum first pulled out Clement C Moore’s The Night Before Christmas, a bumper blue book with vivid illustrations. There was such suspense in the poem, such inexorable music, the sonic possibilities matching the mystery.

My favourite book growing up
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. I used to spend every spare moment in Bacup library, Lancashire, bag of sweets to the right and a book open before me. I had read all of Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven books, thought Famous Five were all a bit dry, and picked up Weirdstone in a swoon of nine-year-old despair. The darkness was delicious, exciting because many of the landmarks in the story were from my local area.

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Lyra’s last story – exclusive extract from Philip Pullman’s final installment in The Book of Dust trilogy

Thirty years ago, The Northern Lights introduced the world to Lyra Silvertongue. Now, Pullman completes her story in The Rose Field – plus listen to an audiobook extract read by Michael Sheen

She washed herself as well as she could in the little basin with its lukewarm water, and looked in the mirror dispassionately. The bruises on her face were fading, but she was tanned by the sun, and her cheeks and the bridge of her nose not far off from being actually burnt, so she must find some cream or ointment to deal with that. A broad-brimmed hat would help too.

She spread a very little of the rose salve on her nose and lips, her cheekbones and forehead. Then she sat down and thought about Ionides.

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The Captive by Kit Burgoyne review – a literary novelist tries his hand at pulp horror

A kidnapping goes the way of the occult in a gory, wildly entertaining romp from Ned Beauman, writing under a pseudonym

As we meet Luke, a nervous footsoldier in a revolutionary cell, he is on the point of carrying out his first proper operation. He and his colleagues – veteran activist Cam, and fire-in-her-belly true believer Rosa – are about to kidnap Adeline Woolsaw, 23-year-old scion of an obscenely wealthy clan who run an outsourcing company called the Woolsaw Group.

The company’s parasitic, money-grabbing, cost-shaving, data-siphoning activities stand for everything that is sinister and wrong with the conjunction of capitalism and state power. But the problem its opponents have is that the Woolsaw Group’s activities are so far-reaching, and its public profile so blandly corporate, that the public can’t be persuaded to pay any attention to its wickedness: “it’s ‘the largest public service outsourcing company in the UK’, which is so boring your brain just switches off. Which is good for the Woolsaw Group.” The hope of our wee terror cell, essentially, is that kidnapping the Woolsaws’ daughter will wake people up by putting a human face on it.

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Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett review – remembering terrible men

In the latest novel from the acclaimed avant garde author, the narrator considers the impact of the relationships she’s left behind

“English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way,” Claire-Louise Bennett wrote in her first book, 2015’s Pond, a series of essayistic stories by an autofictional narrator. What was her first language, then? She doesn’t know, and she’s still in search of it. “I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.”

Bennett was concerned then – and remains concerned now – with finding words to make inner experience legible, and to make familiar objects, places and actions unfamiliar. Pond was a kind of phenomenology of 21st-century everyday female experience, concentrating on the narrator’s momentary physical and mental feelings and sensation, isolated from the larger social world. Bennett became an acclaimed avant garde writer, and if acclaimed and avant garde may seem at odds, then that tension has powered her books ever since, as she’s been drawn to working on larger scales. In Checkout 19 she showed this phenomenological vision unfurling across a life. It was a kind of Künstlerroman, a messy, sparkling book that threw together the narrator’s early reading history with her early story writing (she retold the picaresque antics of her first literary protagonist, Tarquin Superbus) and her experiences of menstruation and sex.

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‘I wanted to write more than I wanted to have children’: author Sarah Perry on rejecting motherhood

When the novelist was faced with the decision of whether to pursue fertility treatment or focus on her career, her literary ambitions kicked in

Fifteen years ago, having said all my life that I never wanted a baby, that I couldn’t fathom why any free woman would do such a thing to her body and her mind, I suddenly and passionately wanted a child. I remember where I was when this feeling, so heretical to me, arrived: it was early morning in London, and having come down Fleet Street on my way to work, I was standing at the till of a newsagents to pay for a Diet Coke, a flapjack and a pack of Silk Cut. There were no children there and no pregnant women; nothing had been said or done to change my mind. It had simply landed on me, and more or less immediately – because I’ve never known how to control an impulse, and because I was 30, which seemed to me then a great age – my husband, Robert, and I set about trying to have a child.

When for some months nothing happened, I turned to the websites where women who’ve never met scrutinise their bodies for signs of pregnancy or fertility or miscarriage, and my vocabulary changed. I became able to communicate in acronyms impenetrable to anyone who hadn’t held a dozen ovulation sticks in a dozen urine streams, and it is all so long ago now that I only remember one: 2WW. At first I took this to be some dry reference to the second world war, since they did seem to be always in battle, these women, or in flight – but in fact it refers to the “two-week wait”, the fearful, hopeful days between sex and ovulation, and the first signs the uterus had succeeded or failed (that these signs can be identical sometimes invokes a kind of madness, to which I also briefly succumbed).

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‘I’m going to write about all of it’: author Chris Kraus on success, drugs and I Love Dick

A decade after her debut became a cult hit, the US author talks about the true crime that inspired her latest novel, #MeToo overreach and being married to an addict

Chris Kraus regards the late success of her first book, I Love Dick, with ambivalence. A work of autofiction, first published in 1997, it chronicles Kraus’s infatuation with a cultural theorist named Dick, a doomed, one-sided love affair that nonetheless pulls Kraus, a depressed, 39-year-old failing film-maker languishing in a sexless marriage, out of her personal and artistic rut. After a slow start, the book became a cult classic and in 2016 it was made into an Amazon Prime Video TV series, with Kraus played by Kathryn Hahn. “To me, success would have been like a long review in the New York Review of Books, not being a character on a sitcom,” Kraus says now. Her commercial success was a financial boon, of course. “But who can stand by a book they wrote 20 years ago? It was massively embarrassing to go out and support the book as if I’d written it last year.”

She had, however, promised herself that if she ever achieved mainstream success she would write about it with the same candour that she brought to her struggles. “I’m going to write about all of it. Not just about youth, but about middle age,” she says. “Middle age is so much harder to write about, because youth is kind of like a trope. We’re very familiar with reading books about the aspirations or disappointed aspirations of youth, but middle age is much crazier ground. It’s not as sexy, it’s not as familiar. So, to write about middle age in the same way takes commitment.”

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Colm Tóibín: Why I set up a press to publish Nobel winner László Krasznahorkai

The Irish novelist discovered the Hungarian writer two decades ago, and was excited by the verbal pyrotechnics of a rule-breaking storyteller

That Christmas – it was almost 20 years ago – I came back from America with news. My friend Daniel Medin had recommended two books to me, both by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, one called War and War and the other The Melancholy of Resistance. We had also watched some Béla Tarr films, whose screenplays had been written by Krasznahorkai. The sense of slow, seething menace in the film Werckmeister Harmonies, based on The Melancholy of Resistance, and the lack of easy psychology and obvious motive in the film, the camera moving like a cat, made it exciting, but not as exciting as the two novels.

Krasznahorkai, I noticed, loved the snaking sentence, the high-wire act, mild panic steering towards a shivering fear felt by his characters, followed, in clause after clause, by fitful realisations and further reasons for gloom or alarm, and then, with just a comma in between, ironic (and even comic) responses to what comes next into the mind. These extraordinary sentences had been translated by the poet George Szirtes with considerable rhythmic energy.

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The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup

All That We See Or Seem by Ken Liu; When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift; The White Octopus Hotel by Alexandra Bell; Darker Days by Thomas Olde Heuvelt; Remain by Nicholas Sparks with M Night Shyamalan

All That We See Or Seem by Ken Liu (Head of Zeus, £20)
In this thriller from award-winning author Liu, Julia Z wants to leave behind the notoriety she gained as a teenage hacker. But she’s drawn into danger when she agrees to help a man whose wife, an artist skilled in the new art of “vivid dreaming” – using AI and virtual reality to allow her live audience into her stories – has disappeared. He has seen a video from someone claiming to have kidnapped her and hopes Julia can tell him who sent it. The near-future setting is convincing, and the story is rich in interesting ideas about potential developments in the use of AI and social media. Julia is a strong, complex character, and there’s a suggestion there could be a series of novels about her. Action-packed as well as thought-provoking, this is one of the best science-fiction books of the year.

When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift (Arcadia, £20)
Like Swift’s previous novel, The Coral Bones, this book is powered by a passionate love of nature and deep concern for the planet’s future. Beginning with the character-forming effects of major events during the childhoods of the two main characters – Covid lockdowns for Lucy, the Chornobyl disaster for Hester – the novel tracks their separate journeys in climate activism and documentary film-making as both make their own contribution towards a better world, until 2070, when they meet at last. Evocative and beautifully written, this character-driven novel also inspires as an argument for rewilding in Britain.

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‘A sparkle that extends beyond fiction’: readers on what Jilly Cooper meant to them

Fans pay tribute to the author’s escapist tales, her real-life largesse and her unexpected passions

I was the manager of Books Etc in Oxford Street, where Jilly Cooper’s novel Polo was launched in 1991, with polo-dressed senior publishers posing in the window. Jilly visited our shop several times for signings and she was our favourite author visitor. She always spoke to all the staff, brought a gift for staff with her and always wrote us a note of thanks afterwards. Lovely with customers and just an absolute delight. Judith Denwood, retired bookseller, Hastings

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