Sarah Hall Madame Zero
occurs that is literal, a feral Metamorphosis. She becomes a vixen, and raises her cubs in a set in a near-suburban nature reserve. Every other story in the volume hews to this take-no-prisoners vision of female sexuality, or else deconstructs ideal notions of maternal behaviour in some primeval, matter-of-fact kind of way, or else takes some other middle-class night terror and brings it blinking, trembling, into full daylight.
Hall has the delicacy and verbal tact of a poet, the acuity of an analyst, and the eviscerative instincts of some forest creature. These are easy stories to read – they proceed so cleanly, elegantly, and with such neat narrative momentum – but they are well nigh impossible to absorb. And it’s in this disjunction where the author’s genius lies.
BEST NEW TALENT Claire Aman’s warm and tough debut collection Bird Country carries such technical command that Aman is already an established hand at the form.
GUILTY PLEASURE
Philip Pullman’s The Book
of Dust shouldn’t be a guilty pleasure, since he’s a genius – literate, ferociously intelligent and animated by care for the underdog everywhere – but it will equally be embraced by kids smarter and more ethically centred than you.
MOST OVERRATED
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn
Essayistic forays into life’s minutiae, opining on the beauty of plastic bags, among other things. It feels a bit of a jumped shark.
MOST DISAPPOINTING
None – literary fiction is so underloved these days, there’s no overselling it. AF