So fresh! Our pick of 2022’s brightest new novelists

Whether it’s an undertaker’s BDSM adventures or a family cursed to fall out of windows, the season’s best debuts are full of surprises

CS Lewis’s adage that we read to know we are not alone may have become a banal observation, but being inside a character’s interior struggles while they navigate personal crises with all their human flaws is one of the novel’s perpetual strengths.

Four of the new year’s most accomplished debut novelists, Sara Freeman, Renée Branum, Ella Baxter and Jakob Guanzon, take us back to this elemental function of literature. Poverty, grief, family ties, lack of self-knowledge – their heroes variously face them all. That our sympathies are engaged so skilfully and hope so adeptly snatched from the jaws of defeat is proof of the strength of these new writers’ storytelling, and the sincerity of their enterprise: chipping away at the truth of how people are, how they behave and what they feel.

Australian artist and writer Ella Baxter has admitted to being in a “valley of grief ” when she wrote New Animal (Picador, £14.99), in which Aurelia, a young funeral parlour cosmetician in New South Wales, hurls herself into the shame and tawdry exploitation of the BDSM scene after her mother dies. Baxter is fascinated with the female body, which “trots everywhere with you like an indebted lover”, and how it assimilates extreme emotions. Aurelia investigates, through often savage humiliations, how far she can use sex as a violent displacement activity.

Self-destructive anti-heroines are in vogue, but what Aurelia’s story makes clear is how underrepresented female sexuality still is. A key scene in which Aurelia first tries out the position of a “dom”, rather than a “sub”, is a direct challenge to the reader’s conception of what is admissible sexual behaviour for a woman – even more so as it is partly played for laughs.

By the end, Aurelia counter-intuitively finds a renewed bond with her body after placing it under duress. The novel closes with her preparing a stillborn baby girl for a funeral, prompting a reflection on the power of the female body, with its almost infinite capability to reabsorb pain, “like a mechanical ocean recycling its own salt”.

A stillborn child also lies at the centre of Canadian writer Sara Freeman’s Tides (Granta, £12.99), in which 37-year-old Mara flees to a New England coastal town in the wake of losing her baby. While her behaviour is in no way as extreme as the protagonist of New Animal, her plight feels more precarious.

With little money, she lives as an itinerant before getting a job in a local wine store and embarking on an affair with its owner. The seaside town for Mara feels less like a place of possible renewal, a fresh tide, than a pull toward death, where after losing a child “you go along with her”. “You won’t be happy until you’ve burned the whole house down,” she recalls a friend telling her. Is redemption even a possibility? Here, as in New Animal, deliverance is far from guaranteed.

If Freeman lacks Baxter’s leavening humour, she makes up for it with a honed lyricism: “When she pictures it – herself in this town forever – it reminds her of a silent movie she once saw in which a man, shot dead on a sidewalk, steps out of the outline the police chalked, looks down at his own figure, then, satisfied with the line, settles back down, closes his eyes, dies all over again.”

Mara’s brush with near-destitution in 21st-century America pales in comparison with the privations faced by the hero of Filipino-American writer Jakob Guanzon’s Abundance (Dialogue, £14.99). A single-father ex-convict, Henry is living with his eight-year-old son in his pickup in the Midwest, after being evicted from their home on New Year’s Eve. We learn in flashbacks how his life has unravelled; each chapter tells us exactly how much he has in his pocket. In such dire straits, can he function as a father?

Guanzon carefully builds a portrait of a character with at least one tragic flaw, searching for dignity and clarity. The honest and tender scenes with his son form the novel’s heart and soul, but it is also ignited by tense crime-novel confrontations and some brilliantly sustained descriptions of down-at-heel discount America. In a Walmart, “None of them walk. They trudge and shuffle down the main lane, as if their rickety shopping cart wheels were propelled by some hidden motor that was actually towing them along, like a tractor hauling off a felled rodeo steer”.

Whereas in Abundance a fatherson bond is the pathway for salvation, in Cincinnati-based writer Renée Branum’s Defenestrate (Jonathan Cape, £14.99) the relationship between a twin sister and brother is a Gordian knot of selfhindering, stagnation and denial. Co-dependent and regressed, 20-somethings Nick and Marta move to Prague from the Midwest to indulge their obsession with their family’s “falling curse”, said to be traceable back to Czech ancestors. The jinx dooms the bloodline to lose their footing at some point. It is an original conceit, with an idiosyncratic humour that reminded me of Ottessa Moshfegh. Nick and Marta’s shared hero is Buster Keaton, king of the pratfall, and there are some wonderful digressions about that comic genius that shouldn’t really work, but do.

When Nick takes a serious fall from his apartment balcony, Marta begins to wonder: was it attempted suicide? Branum cleverly suggests how Marta’s preoccupation with this nagging conundrum allows her to avoid confronting her own demons. Branum’s primary fascination is with the binds of family and the dread of autonomy, but her gaze is wider and more mystical, as when she considers the siblings’ mother’s Catholicism: “My mother sees, in the fall of the apple from the mouths of the first of us, a great need opening up through centuries until Christ reversed the arc of the fall with his body… It is strange that we try to keep ourselves safe in the light of this, to dare survival when God himself could not keep himself alive in our midst.”

If a single theme unites these books, it is about finding a way of coming face to face with what Tides calls “the dark possibility of the road”. Or, as Henry puts it, at the close of Abundance, “It was his job to keep looking forward, to keep looking up”, despite “the dread or anticipation of the sprawling freedom that was closing in on them”.

These writers all chip away at the truth of how people are, and what they feel

it to the Great Cham. Like popular etymology, this was a mistake.

In 2006, Fred Shapiro of the Yale Law Library (and a leading OED contributor) brought out the fruit of nine years’ research: The Yale Book of Quotations. Using the level of research that the internet had made accessible, and aiming for the kind of bibliographical and chronological exactitude that Oxford demands of its lexicographers, he took a new look at the field. And in so doing brought the old stagers up to date. His collection acknowledged much of the monochrome trustworthiness of the classical canon, but added the sometimes lurid colour of modernity, and even moved to embrace the CGI specialities of the digital world. This, the revised and expanded second edition, carries on as before.

If the book has a USP, it is reattribution, not least in the section “Anonymous Was a Woman”, a paraphrase of Virginia Woolf who opined that, “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” So, inter alia, Voltaire loses his best-known saying to Evelyn Beatrice Hall, Hemingway his to Mary Colum and, perhaps most revelatory of all, Churchill hands over “iron curtain” to Ethel Snowden.

Shapiro has spread a wide net. Some familiar names are missing, but the stars of the baby-show have resisted eviction with the bathwater. On the cover, he namechecks Plato, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton and Mark Twain, though we should note also Alicia Garza, who came up with “black lives matter”. Within, things are broaderbrush. Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) gets his entries, but so does Helen, of Bridget Jones renown. Galen, the Greek physician, has his line, next door to Tony “Two Ton” Galento, the prizefighter. Eric Partridge, my predecessor as a slang lexicographer, has a walk-on. The second edition adds Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Barack Obama and David Foster Wallace to the thousands of voices. Readers will have their favourites; rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot’s celebration of “big butts” may not appeal to all.

Quotation (Johnson again) “is a good thing: there is a community of mind in it”. Once, undoubtedly, true; but Shapiro’s book, with its infinitely wider embrace than Johnson would have permitted, may be less soothing. Perhaps the problem will not simply be who gets to be quoted – there is one bear of nugatory brain here, whom I for one would have excluded with joy – but the choice of lines. Shapiro has the right to impose his own tastes. But then this is a book, and only so many pages can be bound; the limits of physical space are something else that digitisation has abolished.

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was my first reference book, a birthday gift in 1959. If we emphasise the term “book”, then I suspect that Shapiro’s fine compilation may be my last. One only need look at the disappearance of once-mighty reference publishers, the everthinner “reference” shelves in the equally diminished world of bookshops, to see that print reference is another victim of digital modernity.

For once, however, I cannot grieve. (I’m parti pris: my own Dictionary of Slang last demanded dead trees in 2010; since then it has been online, and infinitely improved for it). Yet as the essayist Louis Menand, writing the foreword, notes, this is “a fun book to browse” – and browsing, the flipping of pages, the pursuit of something that catches the eye, requires a tangible object. It is also, he adds, a fun book for scholarship, the reverse of the reference coin. Wit and wisdom: what else, readers, could we need?

Shapiro reassigns Churchill’s famous ‘iron curtain’ line to Ethel Snowden