Memoir, poetry and time travel stories are among the BBC Culture picks, write Rebecca Laurence and Lindsay Baker.
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
Douglas Stuart, the author of the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain (2020), has won rapturous praise once again for his second novel, a heartbreaking queer love story between Protestant Mungo and Catholic James, who come together across the divided landscape of a Glasgow council estate in the post-Thatcher era. "Young Mungo is a suspense story wrapped around a novel of acute psychological observation. It's hard to imagine a more disquieting and powerful work of fiction will be published anytime soon about the perils of being different," says Maureen Corrigan, book critic of NPR's Fresh Air. "If the first novel announced Stuart as a novelist of great promise, this confirms him as a prodigious talent," writes Alex Preston in The Observer. (RL)
(Credit: Little Brown)
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
In Jennifer Egan's 2011 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, Bix Bouton featured as a minor character. Now he is back as a tech visionary at the opening of The Candy House, as CEO of internet giant Mandala who is in search of his next "utopian vision". Bouton's invention, Own Your Unconscious, is the catalyst for the novel's exploration of the end of privacy in the digital age and how tech turns the world upside down. Meanwhile, the underlying temptation metaphor of Hansel and Gretel's "candy house" permeates the book. It is an "exhilarating, deeply pleasurable" novel, says Prospect, while The New York Times calls it "a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes". (LB)
Either/Or by Elif Batuman
A sequel to her 2017 Pulitzer-Prize nominated debut, The Idiot, Batuman's semi-autobiographical second novel continues the adventures of Selin Karadag, a Russian literature student in her sophomore year at Harvard University in 1996. Using Kierkegaard's classic philosophical work as a starting point, Soren ponders the meaning of life through the Danish philosopher's theory of the choice between morality and hedonism, using her literature syllabus as her guide. "Either/Or is a sequel that amplifies the meaning of its predecessor while expanding its philosophical ambit," writes Charles Arrowsmith in The Washington Post, while Sophie Haigney in The New Republic praises Batuman's "brilliant, funny observations." (RL)
(Credit: Penguin Random House)
Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson
In her follow-up to 2015's Negroland, Margo Jefferson blends criticism and memoir, recalling personal experiences and family members she has lost, as well as jazz luminaries, artists and writers she admires. The veteran critic draws on a rich life full of cultural experience, as well as new thinking about the part race has played in her life, and addresses the core theme of black female identity. "Her approach is an almost poetic presentation of fragments of her experiences as they ricocheted off artists whose work and lives she has found meaningful," says The Washington Post. "It's an extraordinary reading experience - the first book I recall wanting to reread immediately after reaching the end." Or, as The Observer puts it: "It is impossible not to be stirred by her odes to fellow black American strivers of excellence." (LB)
In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom
Described by Hephzibah Anderson in The Guardian as "a courageous howl of a memoir" In Love… is the story of novelist and psychotherapist Bloom's journey to aid her husband to end his life, after a 2019 diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's. The narrative jumps back and forth, documenting the frustrations and administrative red tape Bloom encounters and the ethical considerations involved with assisted suicide, while drawing a vivid picture of her husband, the architect Brian Ameche, with wit, compassion and dark humour. The memoir acts as a powerful testament to the couple's "stickily close" and tender relationship, as Bloom, writes Salley Vickers, also in The Guardian: "has written about him [Brian] with all the brave-spirited, undaunted love to which the book bears stupendous witness." (RL)
Love Marriage by Monica Ali
The tragicomic novel Love Marriage tells the story of Yasmin, junior doctor and dutiful daughter, who, as her wedding day draws closer, begins to dismantle her own assumptions about the people around her. Both her and her fiance's family face an unravelling of secrets, lies and infidelities, and Yasmin must ask herself what a "love marriage" really means. Monica Ali's 2003 novel Brick Lane was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and this is her most acclaimed book since then. It is a "rich, sensitive and gloriously entertaining novel – her fifth, and possibly her best," says the TLS, and "juggles so many questions and plot lines that we keep expecting one of them to break free and become detached… yet everything remains utterly coherent and convincing." The Spectator praises the novel too: "It dares to be deliberately funny," it says, and is "absolutely terrific… genuinely touching." (LB)
(Credit: Hachette)
Tiepolo Blue by James Cahill
Don Lamb is a repressed 40-something Cambridge art historian working on a monograph about the the paintings of the eponymous 18th-Century Venetian master. It's 1994, the contemporary art world is rapidly changing, and after an embarrassing faux pas, Lamb is removed from Cambridge to manage a South London gallery, where he encounters Ben, a young artist who introduces him to the capital's hedonistic nightlife and a reckoning with his sexuality. Tiepolo Blue combines "formal elegance with gripping storytelling," writes the FT. "[Its] delicious unease and pervasive threat give this assured first novel great singularity and a kind of gothic edge," writes Michael Donkor in The Guardian. (RL)
Fire Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise by Jack Parlett
In his meditative look back at the famous queer party island in New York, Jack Parlett adds his own autobiographical asides. The result is a place-based memoir about hedonism, reinvention and liberation that has been widely acclaimed. The New York Times says: "[Parlett's] concise, meticulously researched, century-spanning chronicle of queer life on Fire Island captures, with a plain-spoken yet lyric touch, the locale's power to stun and shame, to give pleasure and symbolise evanescence." Populated by the mid-century literati – WH Auden, James Baldwin, Patricia Highsmith all make appearances – the book explores the culture and hierarchies of Fire Island's communities. "Utopias tend to be flawed in revealing ways," says the TLS, and this "sets the tone for an island history that's deeply felt and keenly judged." (LB)
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
A follow-up to her 2018 novel Motherhood, Sheila Heti's Pure Colour is billed as "a book about the shape of life, from beginning to end," and combines the real with the abstract and surreal in its story of Mira. An aspiring art critic, she meets and falls in love with Annie, who opens up Mira's chest to a portal with her enormous power. Later, when her father dies, Mira transforms into a leaf for a long section. Pure Colour is "simultaneously wise and silly, moving and inscrutable" writes Lily Meyer in NPR. "The apocalypse written as trance, a sleepwalker's song about the end of all things… Pure Colour is an original, a book that says something new for our difficult times", writes Anne Enright in The Guardian. (RL)
Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St John Mandel
The prescient 2014 novel Station Eleven – a dystopian story of a devastating pandemic – was a hit for Emily St John Mandel, winning the Arthur C Clarke award, and also spawning a TV series. Her new book, the time-travelling story Sea of Tranquillity, begins in 1912, with a listless young British immigrant starting a new life in Canada who, when wandering in the woods, experiences an incomprehensible paranormal event. The narrative moves forward to the present day, and then to two futuristic time zones, weaving together disparate threads. The novel has "intellectual heft", says The Scotsman, and "St John Mandel is an intelligent, acute and sympathetic writer". Sea of Tranquillity is, says the Guardian, "hugely ambitious in scope, yet also intimate and written with a graceful and beguiling fluency." (LB)
(Credit: Penguin Random House)
Memphis by Tara M Stringfellow
"A rhapsodic hymn to black women," writes Kia Corthron in the New York Times, of poet, storyteller and former lawyer Stringfellow's first novel, which spans 70 years and three generations: Hazel, daughters Miriam and August and granddaughter Joan. Memphis is, Stringfellow says, "an ode to my city and the black women living here in it... full of mystery and magic and humour and grit." The Irish Times praises Stringfellow: "Her women are vivid, formidable and funny, exposing the legacy of racial violence not just within the microcosm of family or the titular city, but nationally," while The Washington Post writes: "With her richly impressionistic style, Stringfellow captures the changes transforming Memphis in the latter half of the 20th Century.” (RL)
Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
In his second poetry collection, written in the aftermath of his mother's death, Ocean Vuong contemplates personal loss, the meaning of family, and tenderness in the face of violence. The episodic poem Dear Rose addresses his dead mother about her journey as an immigrant from Vietnam to the US. "Because Vuong plays with time by the millisecond – slowing down or speeding up old memories or conversations – he uncovers new enlightening details that have a life of their own," says The Guardian. Artfuse describes Time is a Mother as a "dazzling investigation of love and loss, inspiring both nostalgia and release", and says the poet's language, "recognises the trauma of death, but also revels in the glory of life". (LB)
(Credit: Bloomsbury)
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Much of Nagamatsu's debut novel was completed before 2020, and its themes will strike readers with their prescience. Set in the near-future, a team of scientists in Siberia discover a mummified pre-historic female corpse they name "Annie", which holds a disease that sets off a catastrophic pandemic named "the Arctic Plague". Nagamatsu focuses on the human side of the crisis, leaping forward 6,000 years to reveal a society that has commercialised death, and the long-reaching legacy of past decisions. Expansive and genre-defying, it is told through discrete stories that slowly coalesce. "Like a Polaroid photograph, How High We Go in the Dark takes time to show its true colours. When they finally appear, the effect is all the more dazzling," writes the Guardian. It is, writes the New York Times, "a book of sorrow for the destruction we're bringing on ourselves. Yet the novel reminds us there's still hope in human connections, despite our sadness." (RL)
Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood
Now in the seventh decade of her remarkable literary career, Margaret Atwood has written her third collection of essays that, says the i newspaper, "brims with enthusiasm and verve". Broadly looking at events of the past two decades, the range of subjects is wide – from censorship and Obama, to #MeToo and zombies. And there are insights into her own craft and the function of fiction. As the i puts it: "Atwood always makes the idea of big questions a little more digestible. You find yourself asking: what can fiction do? What can we do, generally?" The essays are full of a "droll, deadpan humour and an instinct for self-deprecation" says the Guardian. "Atwood remains frank, honest and good company." (LB)
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire
This is Warsan Shire's long-awaited, first full-length poetry collection, after two pamphlets, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011) and Her Blue Body (2015). It arrives nearly six years after the Somali-British poet shot to world-wide fame collaborating with Beyoncé on the latter's ground-breaking visual albums, Lemonade (2016) and Black is King (2020). The poems in Bless the Daughter… draw from Shire's own experiences, bringing to vivid life black women's lives, motherhood and migration. "Shire's strikingly beautiful imagery leverages the specificity of her own womanhood, love life, tussles with mental health, grief, family history, and stories from the Somali diaspora, to make them reverberate universally," writes Dfiza Benson in The Telegraph. (RL)
(Credit: Europa Editions)
In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante
In the Margins is a collection of four essays in which the best-selling, pseudonymous author of the Neapolitan Quartet articulates how and why she writes – and her inspiration, struggles and evolution as both a writer and reader. Ranging from philosophical to practical, the essays give the reader an insight into the enigmatic author's mind, and include an exploration of what a writer is – less an embodied entity, she says, than a stream of "pure sensibility that feeds on the alphabet". As the New York Times puts it: "For those who wish to burrow gopher-like into the author's mind, Ferrante has prepared a tunnel." (LB)
Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James
The Booker Prize-winning novelist returns with part two of his Dark Star fantasy trilogy, after 2019's Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which the author initially described as the "African Game of Thrones" (he later insisted this was a joke). A female-centric counternarrative to the first novel, Moon Witch, Spider King follows Sogolon, the 177-year-old antihero, and Moon Witch of the title, on an epic and characteristically violent journey. "Like an ancient African Lisbeth Salander," writes the FT, "she dedicates her lonesomeness to meting out lethal rough justice to men who harm women." Praising the novel in The New York Times, Eowyn Ivey writes, "the Moon Witch lit my path and showed me how a woman might navigate this dangerous, remarkable world". (RL)
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
Identity, elites, race and capitalism are the areas explored in this multi-layered novel, the first by Xochitl Gonzalez. This "impressive debut", says the Observer, is "deeply satisfying and nuanced… a tender exploration of love in its many forms". Set in New York City in the months around a devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico, Olga Dies Dreaming follows the story of wedding planner Olga and her congressman brother Prieto. Family strife, political corruption and the notion of the American dream all feature in this "irresistibly warm yet entirely uncompromising" novel, says The Skinny. (LB)
(Credit: Penguin Books)
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
NoViolet Bulawayo became the first black African woman – and first Zimbabwean – to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for her 2013 debut, We Need New Names. Nine years later, Glory is an Orwell-inspired fable set in the animal kingdom of Jidada, which satirises the 2017 coup that toppled Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe (Bulawayo has explained that Glory began its life as a non-fiction account of this history). As a fierce but comedic allegory, Glory can be seen as a companion piece to Wole Soyinka's 2021 satire of Nigerian society, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. "By aiming the long, piercing gaze of this metaphor at the aftereffects of European imperialism in Africa, Bulawayo is really out-Orwelling Orwell," writes the New York Times. "Glory," writes the Guardian, "with a flicker of hope at its end, is allegory, satire and fairytale rolled into one mighty punch". (RL)
French Braid by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler's 24th novel is "an extraordinarily rich portrait of a family in flux," according to the Evening Standard. "Tyler's set pieces seem undramatic, but her rhythms are masterly." The novel tells the story of the Garrett family across six decades, and like most of Tyler's works, is an ensemble piece that spans the generations, set in Baltimore. The story starts with a lakeside family holiday, where rifts emerge that are largely unvoiced, and that unravel in the lives of each family member as the years progress. It is "thoroughly enjoyable," says the Guardian, "and at this point any Tyler book is a gift". French Braid is "funny, poignant, generous… it suggests there's always new light to be shed, whatever the situation, with just another turn of the prism." (LB)
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
Yanagihara's highly-anticipated third novel follows her bestselling, Booker Prize-shortlisted 2015 breakthrough, A Little Life. To Paradise, which was released in January to both rapturous acclaim and cries of dissent, is, like its predecessor, lengthy (at 720 pages) and dwells on deep suffering rather than joy, which has drawn criticism in some parts. Multi-form, and spanning three centuries, it is a compelling and wildly ambitious work, offering no less than an alternate retelling of the US, through 1890s New York, Hawaii and a dystopian, late-21st Century. "Resolution is not available here, but some of the most poignant feelings that literature can elicit certainly are," writes Vogue, while the Boston Globe calls it "a rich, emotional, and thought-provoking read." (RL)
(Credit: Doubleday)
The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
Frida Liu is a working single mother in a near future who makes the mistake of leaving her child alone at home for a couple of hours one afternoon. Authorities are summoned by the neighbours, and her daughter Harriet is taken from her. Frida is given the choice to either lose her child permanently, or to spend a year at a state-run re-education camp for mothers where inmates must care for eerily lifelike robot children, equipped with surveillance cameras. Calling this novel "dystopian" doesn't feel quite right, says Wired. "Near-dystopian, maybe? Ever-so-slightly speculative? This closeness to reality is what turns the book's emotional gut punch into a full knockout wallop." The School for Good Mothers is, says the New York Times, "a chilling debut". (LB)
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
The Hanrahan family gather for a weekend as the patriarch Ray – artist and notorious egoist – prepares for a new exhibition of his art. Ray's three grown-up children and steadfast wife, Lucia, all have their own choices to make. This fifth novel by Mendelson has been longlisted for the Women's Prize, and has been highly praised. The Guardian points to the author's "succinct specificity of detail," and "a precision of observation that made me laugh frequently and smile when I wasn't laughing". According to the Spectator, Mendelson excels at "vivid, drily hilarious tales about messy families". The Exhibitionist is "a glorious ride. Mendelson observes the minutiae of human behaviour like a comic anthropologist." (LB)
Free Love by Tessa Hadley
Described by The Guardian in 2015 as "one of this country's great contemporary novelists," British writer and academic Hadley has been quietly producing works of subtly powerful prose for two decades. Like her recent novels, The Past (2015) and Late in the Day (2019), Free Love – Hadley's eighth – explores intimate relationships, sexuality, memory and grief, through an apparently ordinary-looking suburban family. But, Hadley writes, "under the placid surface of suburbia, something was unhinged." Set amid the culture clash of the late 1960s, the novel interrogates the counterculture's idealistic vision of sexual freedom, in, writes the i newspaper, "a complex tale of personal awakening and a snapshot of a moment in time when the survivors of war were suddenly painted as relics by a new generation determined not to live under their dour and hesitant shadow." NPR writes, "Free Love is a fresh, moving evocation of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius." (RL)
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
A debut novel, Black Cake tells the backstory of an African-American family of Caribbean origin, and two siblings who are reunited after eight years of estrangement at their mother's funeral where they discover their unusual inheritance. The plot is driven by an omniscient narrator, dialogue and flashbacks. It is, says the New York Times, full of "family secrets, big lies, great loves, bright colours and strong smells". The themes of race , identity and family love are all incorporated, says the Independent, "but the fun is in the reading… Black Cake is a satisfying literary meal, heralding the arrival of a new novelist to watch." (LB)
Auē by Becky Manawatu
Told through several viewpoints, Auē tells the story of Māori siblings who have lost their parents, with each sibling telling their tale, and later their mother, Aroha, also telling hers from the afterlife. The novel has already won two awards in New Zealand, and is now gaining wider praise. "The plot reveals are masterful," says The Guardian. "Auē has done well because it is expertly crafted, but also because it has something indefinable: enthralling, puzzling, gripping and familiar, yet otherworldly." (LB)
