Why this will be a classic year for literature
Love, war, crime, immigration – even a thriller co-written by Bill Clinton. With so much choice in the next few months, why not put away your phone and pick up a book, suggests Ben East
Readers might be looking forward to a slew of exciting new novels in 2018, but as the clocks struck midnight on December 31, the publishing industry was slightly more cautious regarding the fortunes of literary fiction. Sales were down amid the recession and in an age where smartphones compete for our attention. Thankfully though, from Arabic and Spanish translations to medieval whodunits, there’s still plenty of pleasingly literary work to get your teeth into this year.
January
Start the new year off by discovering a fabulous new author. We seriously enjoyed The Mermaid And Mrs Hancock
(Harper Collins) by Imogen Hermes Gowar, a wonderfully atmospheric historical novel which is vivid and rich enough in its depiction of 18th century London… before a mermaid turns up. Posing questions of social mobility, the status of women and the role of family, this is a debut novel in which you can get lost.
February
If there’s one Arabic translation into English we would tip to crossover this year it’s Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein
In Baghdad (Oneworld), the Iraqi novelist’s haunting yet humorous horror story set in the United States-occupied capital. It has taken a while to appear in English after winning the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Ipaf) in 2014, but Jonathan Wright’s translation is well worth the wait – a surreal tale of a scavenger who stitches together body parts to create a corpse... but instead creates a monster.
Far more straightforward but no less insightful about the state of the 21st century world is Philip Hensher’s The
Friendly Ones (Fourth Estate) which explores two very different families on one street in Sheffield, one driven away from the subcontinent by war and oppression, one battling secrets and shame.
Hensher’s partner is Bengali, which has given his fiction a fresh impetus and authenticity
in recent years. There are some really exciting debuts this year too, none more so than former Dubai resident Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn
Hardcastle (Bloomsbury). Billed as Gosford Park meets
Inception, it’s a clever murder mystery where the same person (Evelyn) is killed every day, but sleuth Aiden Bishop keeps waking up in the body of someone else, each new person a different guest at the fateful ball at Blackheath House.
March
Another impressive debut is Asymmetry (Granta) by the Milan-based American Lisa Halliday. Comprising two novellas, one chronicles the relationship between a young editor and an older man in New York during the Iraq War, the other explores the life of an Iraqi-American economist detained on his way to see his brother in Kurdistan – the links between the two stories emerging becoming clear in the third act. Daring with form yet profoundly perceptive about the world in 2018, we’d expect this to end up on many first book shortlists.
Talking of debuts, The National spotted Samantha Harvey’s brilliant first novel – about Alzheimer’s – in 2010. Since The Wilderness, this English author has become a consistently interesting contemporary voice, which makes The Western
Wind (Jonathan Cape) so intriguing – it’s a medieval whodunit of sorts, with a 15th-century village priest trying to explain the death of the wealthiest man in the village.
April
A new Aminatta Forna book is always something to relish, given this well-travelled author (she was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Britain, and grew up in Iran, Thailand and Zambia) is so adept at making thoughtful connections between people and places. In Happiness (Bloomsbury) two strangers meet at Waterloo Bridge, one a Ghanaian psychiatrist, the other an American studying the habits of urban foxes. This encounter opens out into a story of immigration, migrant work and how the underbelly of a multicultural city really operates. And yes, there are foxes. Nikesh Shukla’s The One Who
Wrote Destiny (Atlantic) explores similar ground, although given his past form one would expect slightly more levity. Tracking three generations of the same Kenyan/Indian family, Shukla’s novel starts with poverty, loneliness and racism – but finds love, compassion and black humour too.
April also brings one of the quickest translations of an Ipaf-winning novel yet. Rabai al-Madhoun won the 2016 award for Fractured Destinies (Hoopoe), a contemporary and historical four-parter taking on the “tragedy of everyday Palestinian life” across the decades.
May
Remember when everyone was marvelling at ex-soldier Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds, the brilliantly poetic fictional testimony of the US occupation of Iraq? That was six years ago now – and given there have been so many inferior takes on his story since, it’s probably wise that for his follow-up, Powers has altered his gaze. We’re still on a battlefield for A Shout in the Ruins (Sceptre), but this time he takes on the American Civil War and its long aftermath. The themes might be familiar – the nature of random violence and the fragility of life – but with such a different setting it will be fascinating to see how Powers copes when thinly veiled autobiography is no longer a default setting. The Yellow Birds was so good, though, that we expect great things.
Excellence is also de rigueur for Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, and Edith Grossman’s translation of The Neighbourhood (Faber) will delight his many English-speaking fans since it takes on so many of the 81-year-old’s classic themes: this one is a restless political detective novel with masses of Peruvian corruption and scandal – and a murder to solve. Part crime-thriller and part take-down of the Fujimori regime in the last decade of the 20th century, this will be one of the most provocative literary novels of 2018.
June
Hanan al-Shaykh remains one of the most popular writers in the contemporary Arab world, so a new novel is always a great opportunity to catch up with her marvellously wry and perceptive worldview. The
Occasional Virgin (Bloomsbury) explores, as the title suggests, religion, sexuality and cultural identity with al-Shaykh’s trademark wit and truthfulness, as two successful Lebanese women in their 30s try to work out how romance and love fit into their lives. Meanwhile Olivia Laing will be hoping to mirror the recent success Ali Smith has had in making immediate fictional responses to life in the late 2010s. Laing is by trade a cultural critic and non-fiction author – The Lonely City is a great study of isolation – so there’s a lot of interest in her debut Crudo (Picador), which is “about finding love amidst the global chaos of the summer of 2017”.
The rather more established novelist Michael Ondaatje, probably most famous for The English Patient, publishes his first novel in six years in June, with Warlight taking us back to the decade after the Second World War as two teenagers are embroiled in the life of a mysterious character called The Moth when their parents emigrate to Singapore. It’s not the most intriguing book in June though. That feat surely has to go to thriller writer behemoth James Patterson, if only because The President
is Missing has been written with Bill Clinton – and has “the level of detail that only someone who has held the office can know”. Looking forward to the Trump thriller already…
The most intriguing book this June is likely to be James Patterson’s and Bill Clinton’s ‘The President is Missing’