Page -turners so good even Santa can't put them down
Our critics select their pick of the year’s novels to put under the tree
NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney (Faber £14.99, 288 pp)
THIS follow- up to Rooney’s first novel, Conversations With Friends, is about the fluctuating and evolving sexual relationship between two school friends from different economic backgrounds at Trinity College Dublin.
It’s very different in tone to Rooney’s debut, but conveys her seemingly effortless ability to track the intensely experienced, minute- by- minute shifts in thought and feeling within a relationship and to make each and every shift matter.
I suspect the talented Rooney will go on to write a more ambitious novel than this, but I very much doubt it will be more enjoyable. CLAIRE ALLFREE
MILKMAN by Anna Burns (Faber £8.99, 368 pp)
IT IS surely the literary story of the year that this tricksy novel, which won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, should have now sold upwards of 300,000 copies.
It is not a straightforward read. Set in a Troubles-riven Belfast in the Seventies, it’s a high-voltage stream of unhinged, raconteur lyricism that centres on the predatory attentions of the titular Milkman from the point of view of an 18-year- old known only as Middle Sister.
But it also offers a sideways — and all the more devastating — account of the psychological legacy of Ireland’s violent 20thcentury history.
At the same time, it manages to be bleakly funny. CA
MELMOTH by Sarah Perry (Serpent’s Tail £16.99, 288 pp)
Perry’S follow-up to her hit The essex Serpent is an altogether darker creature, which, from its opening scenes in snowy, jackdaw-haunted Prague to its terrible, triumphant conclusion, keeps you racing towards the very revelations you fear.
Melmoth herself is an unforgettable creation — barefoot and black-cloaked, a witchy, eternally wandering witness to the darkest chapters in mankind’s history.
But Perry’s other central character, fortysomething translator Helen, gets under the skin, too. Just what has cast such a shadow over her life? For what awful crime is she seeking to atone?
This is a top-notch Gothic of unmistakably serious intent. STEPHANIE CROSS
CRUDO by Olivia Laing (Picador £12.99, 176 pp)
Olivia Laing’s blistering debut novel is a full-throttle, caution-to-the-winds delight.
Spanning a handful of months in the summer of 2017, it is narrated by Kathy, a permanently itchy- footed author. She is modelled partly on laing and partly on the late American novelist and punk poet Kathy Acker.
The ‘plot’ is minimal: we simply follow Kathy as she adjusts to life as the wife of a much older man, sells her flat, dreams of her ex, attends arty events and compulsively checks Twitter. But what might sound humdrum is, in fact, electric — a blow-by-blow, appalled/amused account of the way we live now. SC
THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS by Pat Barker (Hamish Hamilton £18.99, 336 pp)
THIS brings the grit and gristle of Pat Barker’s wartime fiction to the Bronze Age, revisiting Homer’s Iliad through the eyes of Briseis, a Trojan queen squabbled over by the Greek captors who sack her city.
As Briseis struggles to retain her dignity in the face of savage handling, Barker makes brutally explicit what the original poem left implicit.
The brazenly modern dialogue makes it clear that scholarly exactitude is hardly the main point of this lesson in the value of reading between the lines.
The stunning simplicity of Barker’s concept, and the vigour of her execution, will ensure that this novel is read for generations to come. ANTHONY CUMMINGS
PERFIDIOUS ALBION by Sam Byers (Faber £15.99, 400 pp)
While Jonathan Coe’s Middle england has been tipped as the novel for our fractious political times, Sam Byers’s satirical postBrexit dystopia — centred on the proposed bulldozing of an east Anglian housing estate — is, for my money, by far the better bet.
It involves a tech company scheming to rig out the revamped estate with sinister gadgetry intended to make life harder for the poor.
But the project hits the skids when a resident refuses to leave, finding himself in the eye of an internet storm.
The hounds of Fleet Street 2.0 seize upon him as a symbol of a left-behind white working-class.
One key thread involves two journalists who, beginning at opposite ends of the political spectrum, converge in a race for clicks.
It’s sharply observed and full of startling reversals — I’m still wondering exactly what happens at the end. . . AC