Annie Walton Doyle

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.

Following the enormous success of Butter’s English translation in 2024, it seemed inevitable that another of Asako Yuzuki’s novels would surface in the UK. Nairu pachi no joshikai (The Nile Perch Women’s Club), published in 2014, has now become Hooked. Billed as a literary thriller about female friendship, loneliness and obsession, it is a deeply strange, unsettling read. The novel follows Eriko, a high-flying project manager, and Shoko, a slacker housewife blogger, who both struggle with life – or, rather, with the behaviour expected of Japanese women. Both have achieved a level of acceptance socially (Eriko in her career, Shoko in her relationship), but they find the pursuit of ‘gal pals’ a major stumbling block in their quest for the appearance of normality.

The Vulnerables represents Sigrid Nunez’s foray into pandemic literature, a genre we can only expect to see grow in the coming years. The topic is handled with a level of absurdity, making elements of the story eerily (and sometimes traumatically) recognisable. Nunez’s musings on how writing can represent the strangeness of life are never more poignant than when she reflects on the ‘uncertain spring’ of 2020. You’d think she was inventing it if you hadn’t been there yourself. The question of how to write when life is stranger than fiction is at the centre of the book. ‘More and more, fictional story-telling is coming across as beside the point,’ she declares. ‘More and more writers are having difficulty quieting a voice that says, Why are you making things up?

Set over the course of the same April day, with morning, afternoon and night ascribed to consecutive years, Michael Cunningham’s Day is built around time’s march towards an inevitable ending. This feeling of being caught up in time and trapped by its onward force is shared by the novel’s small cast of characters. A married couple, Isabel and Dan Byrne, along with Isabel’s brother Robbie, are struggling with their floundering careers, ageing bodies and their place in the world. They are also balancing a painful platonic love triangle, with both Dan and Isabel more in love with Robbie than with each other. The claustrophobic domesticity of the novel is amplified by its timespan: 2019-21.