Fiction

For more than half a century, M. John Harrison has been writing about decay and dispossession in a style that is at once restless and exacting. Often an audacious weaver of science fictions, he has also operated in a ruggedly realistic vein – though the distinction would probably strike him as bogus, a marketing position rather than useful framing. The End of Everything occupies typical Harrison terrain, with notes of J.G. Ballard and David Lynch as well as more than a hint of Stanley Spencer’s paintings (think compost heaps and clutter).

Two people make an awkward stab at a relationship, even as both flounder under the realities of modern life. Yes, we’ve seen elements of I Want You to Be Happy before – and it even comes with an endorsement from Sally Rooney. But Jem Calder still succeeds in offering something fresh, and the novel stands on its own two feet as an intricate analysis of love in the 2020s. Chuck and Joey meet at a nightclub. He is in his thirties, recently single, with a steady job as a senior copywriter. She is in her early twenties and works as a barista. The chapters alternate between their perspectives as their relationship develops. It’s a very east London book. The couple’s dates include a trip to ‘an independent bookshop, whose branded tote bag they both owned’.

In the tradition of literary lowlifes and lushes as conceived by Charles Bukowski or Jean Rhys, Keshed is a story about an alcoholic, with a distinctive 21st-century, northern English working-class setting. Formally inventive, the ‘now’ sections of the novel are not sentences but strings of words, effective and short: ‘Rancid liquid squirting chin soggy torso peristaltic rush rapid.’ One such section opens the book, setting the uncompromising tone. The protagonist, Sean (‘He was pissed when I met him and he hasn’t changed’), a bright, charismatic lad from an unnamed small Yorkshire town, has been to university in Manchester where he drank heavily. He then moved back home, and we meet him working as a plasterer, living to get smashed.

For his third novel, Douglas Stuart moves north from the Glasgow tenements of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo to the island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. John-Callum, known as Cal, returns to his family croft after spending four years at a mainland textile college, following a call from his father, John, to tell him that his grandmother is dying. John is the precentor of his local church, a congregation of Free Presbyterians, who adhere to an extreme biblical morality. The 26 remaining members attend four services each Sabbath and believe that fathers have authority over children and husbands over wives, since women ‘rarely know what is best for themselves’. Stuart treats this faith, which will be inimical to the majority of his readers, with great respect.

It is both a comfort and a discomfort to yield to a new novel from Elizabeth Strout, who writes with such perspicacity that any time spent in her world unsettles as much as it consoles. So it proves with The Things We Never Say, her 11th book and the first since My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) to feature a new character. He is Artie Dam, a misunderstood 57-year-old history teacher from a Massachusetts coastal town. He is married, popular – ‘“Damn-dam, the greatest man,” his students would sometimes say to him’ – and likes nothing better than to take his sailing boat out in Massachusetts Bay. But it soon transpires that the joviality so treasured by his friends is a sham.

What marks out Chloe Aridjis as a novelist is her ability to create atmospheres and ambiences. These often have hints of the uncanny, but rather than making her writing unsettling they give it an appealing intimacy. Her fourth novel begins as the narrator Flora visits her parents in Mexico City. Without warning, the family’s Alsatian leaps up and savages her hand. In hospital, she suffers from insomnia and wanders from her room to encounter ‘a mysterious figure’ at the end of a corridor. This turns out to be Wilhelmina, an elderly German patient with pneumonia, who befriends Flora. Wilhelmina collects antique toys and instruments, and Flora becomes fascinated by a magic lantern in her possession.

Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us into their quiet lives. But the protagonist in The Last Movement is a celebrated historical figure: Gustav Mahler. For those in search of biographical information, as W.H. Auden put it, a shilling life will give you all the facts. Today we’d go online. How will Seethaler, a distinguished miniaturist, deal with an icon? We meet the composer in 1911 aboard the SS Amerika on his final journey across the Atlantic, homebound and dying. A respectful ship’s boy brings him a tray of tea as he sits on the sundeck, wrapped in a blanket, contemplating the ocean and his turbulent life.

Set in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Tayari Jones’s Kin follows the parallel lives of Annie and Vernice. The ‘cradle friends’ are both motherless, Annie having been abandoned and ‘Niecy’ orphaned, leaving them with a painful ‘wound’. They are as vulnerable as ‘unshucked, naked peas’. Though they are trauma-bonded, the ways in which they approach their lives differ hugely. As her mother is still somewhere out there, Annie becomes fixated on finding her and ‘trying to climb back in her womb’. She’s unable to move forward until she arrives at a resolution. Tracking her mother down becomes ‘the point of her whole life’ – much to Niecy’s dismay: ‘Finding your mama won’t fix you.