Fiction

Valeria Luiselli’s previous novel Lost Children Archive (2019) was a formally inventive, highly erudite reworking of the American family road trip, a bravura performance that won both the Dublin Literature Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her follow up, Beginning Middle End, is a formally inventive, highly erudite reworking of a European family road trip. The framework might be the same – even down to the inclusion of Polaroid pictures – but this is far from a pale retread of earlier themes. It is a visionary portrait of three generations of women, as well as the times in which we find ourselves. Mother and Daughter have escaped New York and are housesitting for the Pianist in Sicily.

In his mid-forties, Miles Krzelewski is a graduate student who makes Saul Bellow’s Herzog look like an academic overachiever. After 14 years and 11 changes of subject – including Rabelais’s monsters, Chekhov’s early humour and Tolstoy’s train journeys and farming techniques – he has yet to complete his doctoral thesis. When his wife, Kate, a respected Milton and Blake scholar, is offered a one-year visiting professorship at a rural Vermont college, Miles is thrilled, convinced that a pastoral life will afford him the inspiration he needs for his latest project – a study of Russian peasant folklore. Together with their children, 12-year-old Wesley and nine-year-old Olive, plus their dog, Giuseppe, they undertake the long journey from their Californian home.

Claire Powell’s first novel, At the Table (2022), delineated a year in the life of the Maguire family from south London – a separating couple and their adult children – with each chapter revolving around a meal. This was done so cleverly that not only did it not seem gimmicky, it was not even immediately obvious. The book won many plaudits, including from Philip Hensher and Marian Keyes. All In is even better.  Jo and Dave are about to go on a trip with Dave’s investment broker brother, Teddy, Teddy’s girlfriend, Kayla, and Dave and Teddy’s father, Alan. The brothers’ mother, Val, has recently died. The holiday has been paid for by Teddy, much to Dave’s discomfort.

Nearly ten years ago, the author, critic and classical Indian musician Amit Chaudhuri took up a visiting fellowship in Paris. It’s not quite clear from the pages of his autobiographical novel Château Rouge which branch of his professional life was to be nurtured by the experience, officially at least, but a glance at this slim hardback, liberally adorned with creative white space, will tell you that it is a book which leaves many things unsaid. Chaudhuri is determined to escape the oppressive influence of the many other writers who have gone before him, to try to see this great city afresh. Chief among these is inevitably Ernest Hemingway, a man with whom, on the face of things, Chaudhuri would have little to talk about if they were to meet.

As a prolific writer of literary fiction, Rupert Thomson has had plenty of practice in creating a good story. In Dark is the Morning, he seems drawn to the question of whether a satisfactory narrative structure can be imposed on life. The tug between the meaningless, chaotic nature of reality and the more conventional art of storytelling is at the centre of the novel, which concerns the ill-fated romance between the narrator, Gino, and the enigmatic Franca. Thomson even appears awkward about how neatly fabular this tale turns out to be in his opening chapter: ‘I still find the whole thing hard to believe.’ This self-consciousness is apparent throughout, with Thomson making repeated reference to the power of storytelling in his characters’ lives.

Andrea Bajani’s short novel The Anniversary won Italy’s Premio Strega prize last year and has since become an international bestseller. It is narrated by a 51-year-old man who, ten years earlier, cut all ties with his family, and who, on the anniversary of that audacious and purifying move, looks back and tries to make sense of the events that led to it. It is a deliberately simple story, of considerable and radiating power. In tight, short chapters, a portrait builds up of a family dominated by an abusive father. References accumulate less to incidents than to the overwhelming atmosphere of dread between those incidents, ‘the looming threat that tightens our throats’; ‘a constant sense of impending danger...

At first glance, Tie Ning’s The Passage of Roses appears to be yet another Chinese novel set during the Cultural Revolution in which bourgeois families and pre-1949 intellectuals are purged and banished. But the unnerving characters of Si Yiwen and her granddaughter Mei, whom Si cares for, influences and later harms, soon promise something different. Born into wealth in Old China, Si survives under the new regime as a marginal housewife, insignificant enough to avoid persecution. Yet it is precisely this insignificance that piques her desire for recognition. From an early age, she was denied love with a young revolutionary and was then ignored by her husband and in-laws. Now she finds herself drawn to the political fervour like a moth to a flame.