A The son leaves home for university and visits his parents every fortnight for 20 years, dreading every encounter because of his father’s oppressive control and his mother’s self-effacing passivity. Then one day, he changes his phone number and stops all contact. Andrea Bajani’s The Anniversary is written from the perspective of this son, 10
TeaHere’s a scene from Annie Lord’s novel that will be instantly familiar to any young person who has spent time in a pub or nightclub recently. Daisy and Maya, two best friends in their mid-20s, lament the poor state of the dating market. “It’s just shit out there,” says Daisy. “Every time we go out,
IThe year is 2049 and Daniel Connelly is 75 years old. Cynical and lonely after decades of self-imposed isolation, his existence is “Spartan”, a “relentless search, a longing for the pieces that fit together to form a new whole”. He spends his days making sculptures from broken pottery; Pieces of his life. During a warm
TeaIn the summer of 1976 he called for My Generation of Novelists. We don’t remember it, but we remember the texture of daily life in that era, and the heat wave putting daily life under the kind of pressure that fosters imagination. In Guardian journalist Charlotte Edwardes’s debut novel, Trouble Was, the scene is set
DAniel Mason’s latest novel sees her returning to the lush New England landscape that so enchanted readers in 2023’s acclaimed North Woods. This time, however, he crosses the border from Massachusetts to Vermont – and makes a profound change in the process. Where North Woods delved into history by telling the story of a house
In October 2016 I was in the hospital. I had been ill with a disease called chronic fatigue syndrome for 11 years, but in the last six weeks I was struck by a strange, sudden crisis. I was unable to eat – the day I ate a couple of biscuits was a good day; Sometimes
In 2018 Daisy Johnson was the youngest author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her debut novel Everything Under, a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth involving canal boat communities and their complex family dynamics, as well as a strange monster hidden in the depths. Earlier, his short story collection Fen was critically
A The gynecological exam is a good analogy for the kind of painful introspection at which Queenie Jenkins excels. The heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s 2019 debut Queenie memorably begins that novel with a medical appointment for a mysterious illness that turns into a miscarriage. The sequel, Queenie Is Working on It, takes place eight years
IIn 1474, in a fictional location in Southern Europe, Father Alberto arrives from Jormel Abbey, where he has failed in his ambition to become a manuscript illuminator in its famous scriptorium. He is the new parish priest of the villages of Hem and Long, whose congregants are generally “piebald and misguided”, but not the most
mThrough the firecracker of his debut from 2020’s The Young Team, Graeme Armstrong takes the reader from protagonist Eazy’s pre-party pharmaceutical preparation, through the resulting mysterious abandonment and euphoria, and the inevitable crash back to Earth. The narrative of distressed humor is a welcome update of Kingsley Amis’s beer-soaked anxiety in Lucky Jim. All this,