Fiction

This is the sixth novel and tenth book overall by the highly successful journalist and podcaster Elizabeth Day. She hit her stride as an author with her third novel Paradise City (2015), which was leaps and bounds ahead of her first two in terms of narrative propulsion. Her next was what might be considered her breakout book, The Party (2017), after which came Magpie (2021).  One of Us returns to the characters and story of The Party, but it can easily be read as a standalone. Day has said that the earlier novel was partly inspired by reading The Great Gatsby at the age of 12; and while she has conceded that no one can write like F.

We often forget to ascribe agency to modern Tibet. Politically, it seems to lie mute in the behemoth shadow of China. Culturally, we encounter it more as the backdrop to journeys of self-discovery than a producer of modern culture in its own right. But the villages of the Tibetan plateau are defiantly cosmopolitan in Ning Ken’s novel, the first by this important Chinese writer to be translated into English. Sardonic and erudite, it’s the only major literary treatment of Sino-Tibetan relations to appear in English in decades. The author belongs to the generation of such era-defining Chinese novelists as Mo Yan and Yan Lianke, publishing his first fiction in the heady days of reform and opening-up.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s everyone read John Irving, or so it seemed. You had to have a copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany, The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire and The Cider House Rules. After a while even the most obtuse reader realised that a novel by John Irving was very likely to contain elements that had appeared in other John Irving novels. In fact, a friend of mine invented John Irving Bingo: cross off a box every time one of the following is mentioned: an orphanage; bears; Vienna; sex that is in some kind of way weird; and sudden acts of violence, usually brought about by ill luck or something worse.

The fourth novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s spooky supernatural series differs from the others in that it is a standalone and doesn’t involve previous characters. Gone, too, are the multiple narrators; and there is only the briefest mention of a new star in the sky – which in the other three books coincided with all sorts of inexplicable occurrences. But it is no less compelling. This is the story of an arrogant young Norwegian, Kristian Hadeland, who arrives in London in 1985 to study photography at a prestigious art college. Though enthusiastic about his subject, he finds it hard to accept the constructive criticism of his lecturers.

Love Divine, the debut novella by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, is set in the leafy, fictional parish of Lamley Green and weaves together a tableau of stories about the community. The title comes from the hymn ‘Come Down, O Love Divine’; but beneath this bourgeois Church of England world of round-robins and milky tea is a satirical portrait of a parish with a dark underbelly. Maxtone Graham perfectly captures hypocritical English chit-chat, and the polyphony of perspectives works well. The central thread concerns Lucy Fanthorpe, 54, who is hit by the sudden death of her beloved husband Nick and the gradual realisation that he might have been having an affair. One of my favourite characters is Hugh, the lonely schoolmaster.

In the middle of The Rose Field, the third volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy, Lyra has a conversation with an angel about storytelling. What matters most in a dream, says Lyra, is not information but emotion. It reads like Pullman’s own manifesto: the power of the His Dark Materials and Book of Dust novels is how much they make us feel – about the tie between characters and their daemons, the fear of Lyra’s sinister mother Mrs Coulter, the love between Will and Lyra, the protectiveness of the courageous pot boy Malcolm Polstead... The driving emotional force that carries us through The Rose Field is our desire to see Lyra and her daemon Pan reconciled.

A girl in a tower. The words trigger instant curiosity. Who is she? Who locked her away, and why? Was it punishment, or sequestration to keep her safe? Thea Lenarduzzi’s The Tower is a literary Russian doll, one story concealed within another, blurring identities, blocking memory. A far from reliable narrator – ‘let’s call her T’ – steers us between fiction and real life while the author herself occasionally amends the telling. Clues are offered as we turn the pages, but we may have misread some of them, or been misled, and the conclusion upends expectations. If this is all beginning to sound rather too Fernando Pessoa, breathe easy. Lenarduzzi’s book is a compelling read, elegant and artful, intertwining myth, fairy tale and reality. Is it a novel or a memoir?

Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) made his name as a film theorist. His critical writings have long been available in English, and now his fiction is finally getting its due. The first of his two novels – published in Germany in 1928, five years before Kracauer fled the rise of Nazism – uses as its title his journalistic pseudonym. The protagonist inherits other autobiographical details, too, starting from the opening sentence: ‘When the war broke out, Ginster, a young man of 25, found himself in the provincial capital of M.’ Germany’s descent into the Great War is sketched in vividly cubist images. One character ‘consisted of three spheres stacked on top of one another to form the outline of a bowling pin’; another’s ‘figure possessed the amiability of a rectangle’.