Fiction

Exhibition, Alex Hyde’s second novel, recounts the intimate, messy, ambiguous and ultimately ill-fated relationship between two fictionalised Young British Artists in the early 1990s. Rosie ‘Rabble’ Stone, the narrator, is a gifted but grounded Mancunian photographer, newly arrived in London to begin her studies at a prestigious art school. There she meets, and soon moves in with, a beautiful and accomplished (and throughout nameless) figurative artist destined for greatness. They are inspired by, though very different from, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas and the works they produced in this period. The story begins in Brixton, at an ‘upside-down’ house to which Rabble has been directed to find lodgings.

In photography, balance, whether radial, conceptual or symmetrical, is critical to the success of a composition. An unbalanced photograph can confuse, obfuscate or otherwise diminish an image. It is the same for a literary writer (Nicholas Shakespeare has twice been Booker-longlisted) taking on the thriller genre. Finding an equilibrium between prose styling and fine plotting requires considerable skill and a gentle touch. In his second outing for the former journalist John Dyer, Shakespeare treads this tightrope nimbly. Following the events of The Sandpit (2020), Dyer is in Tasmania, engaged in research for a book on the Tupian peoples of the Amazon. He is soon interrupted by a voice from the past, that of Miguel Girondo de Belew, an Argentinian photo-journalist.

‘Across the courtyard the water glistens a pale blue, the sun’s rays shimmering on its surface. The surrounding garden is wild and overgrown with trees and bushes tinged reddish orange, overlooking a valley of scorched grass fields.’ This is the setting of Chloë Ashby’s Family Friends. Taking place over one eventful holiday between old university friends in the south of France, it’s a sun-soaked work simmering with secrets that lurk just below the surface. First, a look at our cast of characters. There’s the ‘endlessly reliable’ Maggie, with weak, ‘beautiful in a boyish way’ Will and their two children, Alice and ‘gangly’ teenage Sammy.

Who would be a child made famous by a book? A.A. Milne’s son, immortalised as the teddy-trailing Christopher Robin in the ‘Pooh’ books, became a global celebrity and was remorselessly bullied at school for the privilege. Alastair, the spoilt offspring who inspired Kenneth Grahame’s Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, felt moved to step in front of a train at university in return. And it is perhaps best for Alice Liddell that she never lived to read contemporary concerns about Lewis Carroll’s true motives for immortalising her in his Wonderland. This cost to children for enabling, even fuelling, an adult’s artistic ambition, is the starting point for the American YA author Melissa Albert’s first novel for adults, The Children.

Like the Booker, the Prix Goncourt’s laureates now tend to veer between diamonds and duds. One of the strongest recent novels to take France’s premier book award was, in 2021, The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, from Senegal. Almost a West African Possession, it sent its narrator on a quest for a cult writer named T.C. Elimane – inspired by the Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem – who had vanished after claims of plagiarism shredded his reputation. A combination of mystery, satire and cultural inquiry, it spotlit the fate of African authors who are lionised and then forsaken by the Parisian literary elite. The Goncourt coup has prompted English-language publishers to revisit Sarr’s backlist.

The extraordinary correspondence between Albert Camus and the love of his life Maria Casarès must rank among the most passionate ever written. Rarely can two lovers have expressed with such fervour a comparable range of emotions, from ecstasy to darkest despair. At times one shies away from the letters’ raw, searing intimacy, feeling like an intruder; but the sheer force of the feelings expressed and the finesse with which they are articulated propel one through. These letters were first published in France in 2017 by Camus’s daughter Catherine, who was given them for safe-keeping by Casarès shortly before her death in 1996.

Maggie O’Farrell’s two previous historical novels, Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, made her a household name. Land marks a return to her Irish roots: ‘Every family has its myths and ours was that my great-great-grandfather had worked on the early maps of Ireland.’ The year is 1865 and 31-year-old Tomás, a mapmaker, accompanied by his ten-year-old son Liam, is in the employ of the English redcoats and tasked with surveying and mapping Ireland from top to bottom, rocky outcrop to drumlin.

Melissa Harrison’s bestselling 2018 novel All Among the Barley, set in the early 1930s, was much concerned with the pace of change in the countryside. The interfering outsider Constance FitzAllen passionately advocated for tradition, while worn-down farmers welcomed any innovation that would ease their punishing workload. Almost a century later, in another fictional English village, change can be neither debated nor resisted. While Barley was narrated by an elderly woman looking back at her rural childhood, The Given World portrays a whole community, granting a chapter each to significant characters over six months, with birds, blossom and crops forming a restless backdrop.

Writing a state-of-the-nation novel that is also tense and funny is no mean feat, but that’s what Amanda Craig seems to have accomplished in High and Low. Ambitious and far-reaching, ittakes not a scalpel but a machine gun to the issues of modern city living, leaving no target safe. Set on a north London street over the course of a single day, it compresses time and space, which, together with its plethora of characters, gives a feeling as oppressive as the city itself. Cross Street houses a cosmopolitan mix of the privileged and the poor. Prospect Park and the Cross Estate are both metaphorical and geographical parallels, rubbing together while rarely intersecting. Alongside these highs and lows, Craig focuses on the world of the writer.