If, like us, the rain and lengthening evenings have come as something of a shock after what has been a truly long, hot summer, the bonus is that all those extra nighttime hours are all the excuse you need to hole up inside with a good book. And my, do we have some good books for you to explore this season. From Emma Cline’s Booker-shortlisted tale of a man’s final days, to the latest heartbreaking read from former Women’s Prize shortlistee Louise Kennedy, and, of course, ‘that’ book about ‘unnamed’ (*cough* Natalie Port- *cough*) film star by Rachel Cusk. Add to that a tale of an astrophysicist searching for the meaning of life rather closer to home, another of life-changing secrets shared on an overnight train journey, a rediscovered masterpiece about a singular woman, and a study of the aftermath of a brutal gun crime, and you’ll have some idea of the worlds waiting for your between the covers. Enjoy!
Editor’s Picks
Cline does something pretty astonishing in this, her third novel (shortlisted for the Booker before publication, and justly so), which tells the the tale of retired Americian finance CEO David, who is on his way to Switzerland–the ‘Switzy’ of the title–to end his life. David is in the weeds of dementia and the window is fast closing on the time he has left to be allowed to do so within the ‘of sound mind’ rules outlined by the organisation (clearly modelled on Dignitas) that will oversee that act. Before that, however, he is on a kind of apology tour–travelling first to London where his estranged daughter lives–then to a small town outside Zurich to where he hopes to right an unspecified wrong inflicted on Tom, an old school friend, in their youth.
Cline made her name with her 1960s-set debut novel The Girls, which traced the build-up to LA’s notorious Manson killings from the perspective of the young women he enticed into his cult, and followed it up with a tale of a down-on-her-luck grifter drifting through a Long Island summer in The Guest. Switzy is something else entirely, not only for having a late-middle-age man as its narrator, or even the insight she offers into David’s condition–with its ‘quick-brown-foxes’ and the ‘click-click-click’ of Solitaire cards that serve as the tricks David employs in his attempts to remain in the present, she writes about dementia in a way that gets inside the confusion and dislocation he experiences that feels vividly authentic–but for the control she exercises over the unspooling of his life and choices. We are drawn into David’s past and the burden of the memories that are, at this point in his journey, so much stronger to him than the slipperiness of the present, bringing with them not only a reckoning, but an excavation into all he failed to have the courage to do when he could. Switzy is bold, vital storytelling that demonstrates a writer at the top of her craft.
Magnolia is in her local Miami mall, shopping for her daughter’s birthday present, when she’s caught up in an attack by a lone gunman that leaves several people dead. Shocked and shaken, she tells no one, but the aftermath of the incident looms large despite her attempts to put it behind her. “I try to convince myself that I wasn’t there, that I’m just following the story from a distance. But I was there,” she says of her obsession with tracking the media coverage weeks later. The shooting stalks her sleeping, bleeding into her waking hours and drawing uneasy parallels with the unrest affecting her parents, who had retired from Brooklyn to their native Haiti several years before, where they now find themselves faced with growing violence and civil unrest on a near-daily basis.
When we meet her, Magnolia is trying to reorient herself within what she perceives to be the limitations of her life–she is recently separated from her long-term partner in an attempt to better connect with her own needs, while attempting to balance those of both her wider and immediate family. As such, Dèy (the title is the Kreyòl word for mourning), weaves an powerful story not only of the aftermath of a single act of violence and its reverberations in a society beset by issues including gun control, immigration and colonial legacy, but the complications and balancing act of any modern life. And for all those complications, her life is rich with family, friends and filled with love. It’s this balance, between the brutality of external threats and the intimacies and connections of daily life, that gives the novel its tender power and hope. Just wonderful.
From One Day to Normal People, tales of two young, star-crossed, friends-and-or-lovers told over years or decades has become a well-trodden narrative path in contemporary fiction. So when we first meet teenagers Róisín and Red in the opening of Kennedy’s follow up to her Women’s Prize short-listed debut, Trespassers, we appear to be in pretty familiar territory. The novel opens in 1982, in a small Irish town outside Dublin, as Róisín is enlisted to act as a go-between for a short-lived romance between Red and a classmate. The pair quickly connect over their shared outsider status and become fiercely close friends–until Red is hounded out of town by his bullying father aged just 16.
Róisín eventually follows him to London, where the pair share a squat and become ever more complicatedly entwined before changing fortunes cause their paths to fatally diverge. Over a decade since they last met, Róisín sets out to find Red, uncovering difficult truths along the way and it is here, as the tale shifts from what could so easily have been a will-they-won’t-they romance into a search for buried truths, that Kennedy’s tale fully sets out its stall, laying out Red and Róisín’s tortured histories in intelligent, agile, bites that are equal parts hopeful and devastating.
Armstrong’s masterful second novel opens on a restored Irish peat bog where a young man, Patch–newly separated, unemployed and deeply lonely–is out walking on the restored peatland near his house when his dog discovers what is revealed to be an ancient, centuries-old antler preserved within the soil. He becomes obsessed with retrieving it, only to discover it’s one of many Irish elk preserved within the bog’s depths.
It’s not the only significant discovery to have been found there–a generation or so before, the body of a young girl now known as Belrose Woman was also uncovered from its depths by an archaeologist whose own obsession with the bog’s spoils went on to define his career and change the lives of his two young daughters. Obliquely tying the threads of these two narratives together is young, socially anxious scientist, Maeve, who is sent to assess the land, making her own discoveries along the way. Armstrong expertly draws the connections between all three, pulling out themes that touch on everything from climate change and economic deprivation to social isolation and the perils of legacy, all bound by the deep, dark, imperviousness of the bog and its surrounding landscape.
Johnson’s third novel defies easy description. Most simply, it is a tale of three generations of women who become young mothers and, for various different reasons, struggle with that role. Beneath that, it is a tangled tale of legacy, secrets and the finely drawn threads of memory and loss that reverberate through generations and across decades. Which is not to say it is necessarily easy to follow: who is connected to whom, and at which point in time is not, initially at least, gifted to us as readers or straightforward to align.
We meet Ori as a young child having apparently been abandoned by her mother on a remote island. Elsewhere, Ori’s mother Ruth is introduced to us as a child herself, growing up in a small English village where she believes she witnesses a pregnant woman attempting suicide by wading into the nearby river (no body is ever found) and is later locked away in her room by her mother, Edith, to hide the shame of a teenage Ruth’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy. But Johnson’s prose is so beautiful and her narrative command so total (she is still the youngest ever Booker shortlistee for her 2018 debut novel Everything Under, when she was just 27 years old), that it is a pleasure to sink into her world and trust the various threads will untangle. Which they do. To deeply satisfying and equally devastating conclusion.
Abra is digging in the garden of her remote woodland cottage–a place where there are no clocks, no mirrors and, crucially, no memories–when she’s disturbed by that rarest of things, a visitor. The young woman identifies herself as Abra’s daughter, Kate, stirring long-forgotten recall of a time before Abra’s life revolved around nothing more than the cycle of the seasons and a permanent present. Nine years earlier, she had been a suburban housewife, feeling anxious, trapped and dissatisfied in her life when a small ad for a house for sale in the woods caught her eye and, using money from a long-ago inheritance that had been earmarked for her two children’s college funds, fled without a trace.
Barfoot’s novel caused a sensation when it was first published in 1978, (under the title Abra), but had become forgotten in the decades since. To read it now, it feels as fresh as if it could have been written yesterday. This is a woman who–for all the so-called selfishness of her actions (which read another way are in fact a desperate last-gasp at survival in the face of what is clearly a crushing depression) and its themes of the pursuit of self-realisation and the dissatisfactions and limitations of the roles so many women continue to be defined by, including motherhood, will offer familiar reading to many Yet, it also could not, because it’s also astonishing to realise how much has changed–the legal hoops Abra has to jump through to buy the property as a woman on her own are enough to make you shiver, and serve as a cautious reminder of the ever-present danger of the erosion of women’s hard-fought-for rights. Under all of which, the same perennial questions remain: what do we owe others? Society? Ourselves? A fascinating read.
More Recommended Autumn Reads
Well, hasn’t this one got the socials buzzing? Cusk’s latest slice of autofiction is an alleged biography of a famous film star. Said film star is alleged to be Natalie Portman, who in turn is alleged–without solid foundation–to be furious about it, though we would love to believe Portman’s in on the whole thing (‘Will you make it up?’ her subject says at the top when Cusk announces her new plan). We’ll likely never know, of course, but the surrounding brouhaha has succeeding in addressing the fascinating and facile call-and-response to fame rather beautifully either way.
Not that it really matters. For all the obviousness of the trail of clues pointing to Portman (the film star was the lead in a big movie that is clearly Black Swan, etc, etc), as ever with Cusk, Life of... is as much about her as it is the depiction of the film star in question. We spend lots of time spent gliding through Paris and other destinations riffing on alienation, watching through windows and offering elevated literary side-eye on society and fame.
Sander’s tale of generations of the many strands of a Black American family from the Deep South is deceptively jaunty. We meet 32-year-old Aubrey dressed to impress for a date with her boyfriend, convinced she's about to get a marriage proposal. Instead, he dumps her, she loses her wallet and ruins both her outfit and her blowout in the rain. Oh, and all this is narrated by a 27-year-old relative Aubrey never met. Who just happens to be a ghost–and one wearing a much better dress at that. Le-Dar is just one of four ghost-narrators who power The Great Wherever, which tells the story of a Southern family farm, a share of which was left to Aubrey after her father died the previous year. Now she and three other cousins must decide whether to sell the land a developer.
As the relatives gather, so do the ghosts, representing the eight generations of family who lived and work there before, including Zena, who was enslaved on the farm back when it was a plantation, and Peter, whose mysterious death was never accounted for. The ghosts remain tied to the land and so, naturally, would prefer it remains in the family rather than find themselves watching over a Costco, but can do little to control their cousins choices. Instead, we hear their stories of the land. And what brilliant stories they have to share. Sander’s hook is rendered with depth and feeling by the righteously angry tale of enslavement and prejudice her ghosts share, yes, but also by the love that runs through its soil. Just wonderful.
Pérez-Carbonell’s fascinating debut plays on themes around memory, interpretation and ‘truth’–in both the telling and its recall. We meet Spanish translater Alicia in Madrid shortly after the pandemic having accepted a job offer in London. Travelling by train to Edinburgh on the overnight sleeper service one evening, she meets two men, Terence Milton and Mick “Bo” Boulder–an American literature professor and his assistant–who are heading to the city to attend a conference. Terence has published a novel, Rocco, that has recently caused a huge scandal for allegedly being too closely based on the life of a real man (in the life of the novel we’re reading, that is), named Hans, who has since disappeared. As Alicia learns more about Hans/Rocco’s life, and in turn shares stories from her own past. A pursuit that just gets stranger when, some time later, Alicia is sent to Switzerland in search of the real Hans. A novel within a novel, within an anecdote, within... this is clever, thought-provoking stuff.
‘Last night I dreamed of Daphne,’ writes the narrator in Tremain’s latest, riffing on what has to be one of the most famous opening lines of any novel written in the English language. The Daphne in question, of course, being one Ms du Maurier, writer of that perennial gothic classic, Rebecca–a tale of deceit, jealousy and deception in which a young bride is brought to live in a grand English house that is metaphorically forever haunted by her predecessor (the Rebecca of the title).
Our narrator, Mrs Danowski–known as Danni–was the housekeeper of a similarly grand estate, Manderville, which in this ‘origin story‘to Rebecca serves as the blueprint for du Maurier’s fictional Manderley to come. Daphne is drawn to Danni during a visit to the house in 1936, seducing her into an affair (du Maurier was famously bisexual) and, after their affair sours, turning her into Rebecca’s fictional villain, Mrs Danvers. It is a romp of a read–littered with Easter eggs, emotionally wrought and, at time, gloriously camp. Yet it is also incredibly thoughtful in its depiction of the two women’s illicit passion and the wider prejudice of the time, with Danni’s outsider status reinforced not only by her position in society, but as a Polish Jew refugee as the world tilts toward the horror of World War Two.
Astrophysicist Gunn has taken leave from her teaching job at ‘the Institute’ and is living a remote farmhouse on the edges of the city that has been left to her by a local woman, Magna, from which she tracks the stars and records bursts of astronomic activity. It is a quiet life, but one of her choosing, offering clear night skies and the quietude in which to pursue her work into the origins of the universe. But all is not well. Her friends are few, and seem to be becoming fewer (“Sometimes it feels like I turned left at the crossroads and everybody else turned right,” she notes at one point), while the remoteness of her location offers too much time to ruminate on her past, and too much attention from the few other nearby inhabitants, who veer from well-meaningly nosy to downright hostile.
As we slowly piece together Gunn’s backstory, we uncover an uncommonly intelligent, deeply sensitive (and, though it is never overtly stated, likely neurodivergent) woman who has spent so long attempting to fit into the shape of both society and her own ambition, she has never allowed herself the chance to reflect or look back. And as she does, Nor’s tender, touching, deeply heartfelt novel gets right to the lonely, messy, beautiful core of what it is to be human.
Fascinating study of the making of an artist–or in this case, two. Rabble Stone, a working-class would-be photographer who travels to London from her [northern] home town to attend art school, where she shares a flat with a wealthy fellow student who is slumming it, a la Jarvis Cocker’s posh bird in ‘Common People’, but whose talent, focus and unflinching self-portraiture is pure Tracey Emin. From the top we understand she has died young, at the peak of her success, and Stone is now, after some long-tangled historical back-and-forth in terms of their personal history, in charge of their archive. It’s an intriguing setup and fun for anyone looking for a hit of 1990s art grunge, YBA-style. More than that, however, it’s about the value of friendship, fame and remembrance. And, as witnessed in the fatally tragic decline of the mutual friend who brought them together in the first place, the tenuous tightrope walked by the creative soul.
We’re in the not-to-distant future and commercial time travel has become a thing–so long as you’re rich enough to pay for it. Naturally, the one percent have cash as well as time to burn, and this gripping thriller from husband-and-wife writing team Lloyd demonstrates the danger of butterfly-effecting your way into the future when a trip back to the Blitz sees one member of this new elite stuck in the past. Documentary filmmaker Phoebe has been commissioned by tech entrepreneur Inigo Frank to capture his latest commercial wheeze and is there to capture it all–but when she recognises the missing woman as someone from her own past, things begin to get very strange, and very complicated indeed.
The Great Gatsby has served as the source text for any number of ‘reimaginings’ over the years, few of which have served the original particularly well. Gonzalez, we’re very happy to report, bucks that trend with a contemporary-ish update set in a rapidly gentrifying noughties Brooklyn where advertising copywriter Alicia Canales Forten lives across the street from the glamorous La Garza–a feted fashion designer who throws fabulous parties and whose background and dubious source of wealth are much rumoured-about. When Alicia finally receives one of these most coveted of invites, she quickly discovers why: Garza wants to reconnect with Alicia’s married cousin Devon, a wealthy Wall Streeter who was her first love. You don’t have to have read Gatsby to know things are not going to end well, but if you have, you’ll recognise Gonzalez hits all of Fitzgerald’s main points and adds a few pertinent ones of her own about gentrification and nostalgia, among other things, amid a stirring elegy to the places (those landmarks she namechecks are real) old-school Brooklynites once called home.
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