Fiction

Sophocles’s Antigone is a battle over the burial of a body and the war between law and divinity. What rules – the decree of a king or conscience? This is the crux of Sofka Zinovieff’s Stealing Dad. When Alekos, a Greek sculptor, is struck down in 2018 by a heart attack and drowns in a London canal, he leaves behind not just a spiky widow, Heather, but seven children and five colourful ex-wives. The children find it hard to imagine that his death could be so mundane: more fitting would have been ‘swimming the Hellespont or shredded by sharks’. Alekos is a ‘Zorba-like figure’ whose selfishness has caused chaos: ‘the human collateral damage consisted of furious women, abandoned offspring and wounded spirits’.

It is remarkable the web Katie Kitamura can spin around a scene as simple as a woman joining a man for lunch. His name is Xavier. We don’t know her name, but we do know she’s a successful actress. He’s beautiful, almost half her age, and she’s aware of how that must look to the other diners, the waiter hovering at her elbow, and her husband, who inexplicably enters after their food arrives before exiting in a hurry. She and Xavier had met two weeks earlier when he appeared at the theatre where she was rehearsing for a play and said he had something ‘complicated but important’ to tell her: he had good reason to believe she might be his biological mother. This is the piece of information around which Kitamura’s confounding and quietly intense fifth novel shapeshifts.

Borders have always played an important part in Mexican literature. Not only geographical/political frontiers but the more porous boundaries between past and present, the living and the dead. Between what is real and what is not. Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo were all drawn to this shifting, unreliable territory. Time moves on and new talents emerge. Guadalupe Nettel is widely regarded as a leading writer of her generation, and in various ways her four novels and three short story collections continue to seek out the fantastic that lurks in the interstices of everyday life.

Show Don’t Tell, a collection of 12 short stories by the American writer Curtis Sittenfeld, explores marriage, sex, money, racism, literature and friendship from the 1990s to the present. There is a fine line here between memoir and fiction, with many of the female protagonists being Midwestern, bookish Democrats – quite like Sittenfeld herself. In the eponymous story, Ruthie, a writer, dismisses the notion that ‘women’s fiction’ is perceived as giving off ‘the vibe of ten-year-old girls at a slumber party’. She reflects on internalised misogyny: ‘It took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.

A horror story in three words: London property market. That’s the starting point for Roisin Lanigan’s brilliantly creepy debut novel, set in the sheer hell of being a young renter. Because once you’ve run the gamut of carbon monoxide-leaking boilers, coked-up estate agents, absentee landlords and frosty housemates (and been gouged in rental costs for the privilege), maybe a haunting isn’t a deal-breaker. The main character, Aine, is adrift in her twenties with a vaguely online job and a prescription for unspecified mental health issues. She’s also pathologically passive: she ends up in London because Laura, her best friend from university, asks to flatshare and Aine can’t think of anything else to do. ‘So why not London?

Michelle de Kretser, of a Sri Lankan family living in Australia, is an exceptional novelist – perhaps among the ten best at work in English today. She has been recognised with literary prizes, but it’s surprising that she hasn’t made quite the impact on the public she deserves. She is one of those writers who one presses upon intelligent acquaintances and whose books reward rereading. One of her regular subjects – she is a novelist of bookish, intelligent lives – is the inability of the Australian intelligentsia ever to read an Australian novel. As the author of The Life to Come, perhaps the best Australian novel since Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, she does well to present this worrying disengagement with amusement.

Before Brian Friel earned renown as a dramatist, he wrote short stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker. These were later published in two collections, A Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966). Now ten of the stories, selected by Friel before his death in 2015, along with three chosen by his widow, have been brought together in Stories of Ireland. These are deeply rooted in the counties of Tyrone and Donegal. Friel blends actual locations with fictional ones, such as Ballybeg, the setting for several of his plays, and the splendidly named Mullaghduff. They are home to tightly knit rural communities, where an old woman ventures no further than 52 miles in her life, a boy, who has never seen a ‘coloured’ man, asks ‘Will he attack us?

In May 1940, as the Nazis invade Belgium, the residents of a sedate apartment block in Place Brugmann, Brussels, wake to find that their longtime neighbours, the Raphaëls, have disappeared. Alice Austen uses this moment as the starting point for her subtle debut novel about how a diverse group of Belgians react to the Nazi occupation. She tells her story in snapshots, writing in the multiple first-person voices of those who remain at 33 Place Brugmann and those who flee. Charlotte is a young artist who may not see colours, but has ‘vision’. Miss Hobert is a gossip with ‘a rabid imagination’. The courageous and pragmatic Colonel Warlemont resists the occupation with the assistance of his dog Zipper.

Stephen May used to write contemporary novels about men who ‘live outside big cities, lack self-confidence and rarely feature in contemporary fiction’, as he once put it, adding: ‘Even Nick Hornby’s characters are more sorted than mine.’ But a chance discovery of a Wikipedia page about the three weeks that a young Stalin spent in Edwardian London sent May’s imagination hurtling back through the decades. The result was Sell Us the Rope (2022), his sixth novel, which imagined what Koba, the Georgian then better known as Joseph Dzhugashvili, got up to in 1907 while attending the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party. May mixed the real with the fictional to great acclaim.

In James Cahill’s first novel, Tiepolo Blue, Don Lamb, a Cambridge art historian, expressed outrage when ‘Sick Bed’, a Tracey Emin-like installation, is erected in the college quad. It is tempting to imagine what Lamb would now make of the many artworks on display in The Violet Hour. Here, Cahill steps away from the rarefied world of academia and public galleries to expose the excesses of the international art market. At the centre of the book’s many strands is Thomas Haller, whose violet-coloured panels partially inspire the title. He is a world-renowned artist who, in the words of his erstwhile best friend and dealer, Lorna Bedford, has become ‘the moneyed ghost of his former self’.