Please enjoy Quizlit’s selection of 21 Best British Books for the 21st Century.
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
It’s 1808 and that Napoleon is battering the English army and navy. Enter Mr. Norrell, a fusty but ambitious scholar from the Yorkshire countryside and the first practical magician in hundreds of years. What better way to demonstrate his revival of British magic than to change the course of the Napoleonic wars?
Susanna Clarke’s ingenious first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, is a fantastic comedy of manners, complete with elaborate false footnotes, occasional period spellings, and a dense, lively mythology teeming beneath the narrative. Mr. Norrell moves to London to establish his influence in government circles, devising such powerful illusions as an 11-day blockade of French ports by English ships fabricated from rainwater. But however skillful his magic, his vanity provides an Achilles heel, and the differing ambitions of his more glamorous apprentice, Jonathan Strange, threaten to topple all that Mr. Norrell has achieved. A sparkling debut from Susanna Clarke–and it’s not all fairy dust. —
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara is an AF – an Artificial Friend – androids bought by parents to provide companionship for their teenage children, who, for reasons that become clearer over the course of the book, are home-schooled by “screen professors” in the novel’s polluted and anxious future America. Klara is chosen by Josie, a fragile young woman who we soon learn has an illness that may kill her as it killed her sister.
Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
Spring by Ali Smith
Ali Smith’s Spring, the third installment in the novelist’s seasonal quartet, is somewhat about the weather but mostly about us. Like the previous novels in the series, Spring is steeped in contemporary politics. Vestiges of the Brexit vote that framed Autumn and the post-truth Trumpian state of Winter fold into Spring, which wrings out the messy, inhumane state of our world to look at humanity at its most vulnerable. The new novel responds to the current refugee crisis, specifically the thousands of people regularly detained in the United Kingdom’s “Immigration Removal Centres” (IRCs).
There are three main characters in Spring: Richard Lease, a television director who last enjoyed popular relevancy in the ’70s; Brittany Hall, a twenty-something who works at an Immigration Removal Centre just outside London. They are brought together by Florence, a 12-year-old schoolgirl.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of twelve very different people in Britain, predominantly female and black. Aged 19 to 93, they span a variety of cultural backgrounds, sexualities, classes and occupations as they tell the stories of themselves, their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.
With a dazzling rhythm, Evaristo takes us on a journey of intergenerational stories, moving through different spaces and heritages: African, Caribbean, European.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
This is a novelisation of a true encounter of a British war ship in the only port with communication with the West in 18th century Japan. We follow the exploits of a young Dutch trader, Jacob de Zoet, hoping to make his fortune and impress his high class love’s father back in Holland.
With beautiful language, and intense storytelling, Mitchell draws us into this hidden world and takes us to places we could never conceive with the consummate ease of a great writer.
Atonement by Ian McEwan
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house.
Watching her too is Robbie Turner who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever, as Briony commits a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, Atonement is a profoundly moving exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution.
Love Marriage by Monica Ali
In present-day London, Yasmin Ghorami is twenty-six, in training to be a doctor (like her Indian-born father), and engaged to the charismatic, upper-class Joe Sangster, whose formidable mother, Harriet, is a famous feminist. The gulf between families is vast. So, too, is the gulf in sexual experience between Yasmin and Joe.
As the wedding day draws near, misunderstandings, infidelities, and long-held secrets upend both Yasmin’s relationship and that of her parents, a “love marriage,” according to the family lore that Yasmin has believed all her life.
A gloriously acute observer of class, sexual mores, and the mysteries of the human heart, Monica Ali has written a social comedy and a moving, revelatory story of two cultures, two families, and two people trying to understand one another.
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s historical novel tells the story behind a 19th-century triple murder in a remote crofting community – a crime that shocked the nation.
In 1869, Roderick Macrae was accused of the brutal slaying of three people, in a murder trial that gripped the British public. Roderick’s memoir, along with court transcripts, medical reports, police statements and newspaper articles, show that he readily admitted his guilt. But do they reveal just why a young man would commit the most atrocious acts of violence? Why didn’t he defend himself more vigorously, or try to cover up the crime? And will he hang?
Mr Wilder & Me by Jonathan Coe
In the summer of 1977, naïve Calista Frangopoulou sets out to venture into the world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing.
While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history.
At once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of a Hollywood icon, Mr Wilder and Me explores the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia . . .
Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan
Evoking a fully-rounded friendship with wit and psychological truth, O’Hagan’s masterful novel charts an epic night of debauchery in 1980s Manchester and its tragic aftermath thirty years later.
Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life.
In the summer of 1986, James and Tully ignite a friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over, they rush towards a magical weekend of youthful excess in Manchester played out against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded. And there a vow is made: to go at life differently.
Thirty years on, the phone rings. Tully has news.
The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.
So begins Julian Barnes’s first novel since his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. A story about the collision of Art and Power, about human compromise, human cowardice and human courage, it is the work of a true master.
The Noise of Time tells the story of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and his turbulent life under Joseph Stalin. As Shostakovich rises to fame and prestige, his constant fear of displeasing Stalin and falling out of favor threatens to destroy his career and life at any moment.
The Man who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything, is a work of philosophy and art. Unreliable narrator Saul Adler, more absorbed in his own beauty than anything else, journeys from London to Communist East Berlin in 1988, ostensibly to publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). He brings Walter, his host and translator, a photo of himself (Saul), a weak facsimile of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album as a “gift,” instead of the can of pineapple Walter asked for, a special request for his sister Luna’s 18th birthday.
A car hits Saul as he awaits his photographer girlfriend Jennifer to shoot his picture. The events of this day change the trajectory of his life and that of most of the people he knows.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
The Midnight Library: with a young woman on the verge of making a terrible choice. She’s lost her job, her best friend, her brother. Her relationships are in shambles and her cat is dead. More importantly, she is just deeply, seemingly irretrievably, sad. She can’t imagine a day that is better with her in it. Living has become nothing but a chore.
So she ends it. Overdose. Antidepressants. The world goes black.
And then Nora wakes up. Not in heaven (dull) or hell (overdone) or purgatory (insert Lost joke), but in a library. The Midnight Library, which is the place people go when they find themselves hanging precariously between life and death and not entirely sure about which way to go.
The library is immense. Perhaps endless. And it is filled with nothing but books, shelves and, curiously, Nora’s school librarian, Mrs. Elm. “Every life contains many millions of decisions,” says Mrs. Elm.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Released from prison, Shadow finds his world turned upside down. His wife has been killed; a mysterious stranger offers him a job. But Mr. Wednesday, who knows more about Shadow than is possible, warns that a storm is coming — a battle for the very soul of America . . . and they are in its direct path.
American Gods is a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an American landscape at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. It is, quite simply, a contemporary masterpiece.
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is a classic international bestseller and an unforgettable portrait of London
One of the most talked about fictional debuts ever, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing – among many other things – with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
A novel that evokes the tumult, events and iconic faces of our time, as it tells the story of Logan Mountstuart—writer, lover and man of the world—through his intimate journals.
Here is the “riotous and disorganized reality” of Mountstuart’s eighty-five years in all their extraordinary, tragic and humorous aspects. The journals begin with his boyhood in Montevideo, Uruguay; then move to Oxford in the 1920s and the publication of his first book; then on to Paris (where he meets Joyce, Picasso, Hemingway, et al.) and to Spain where he covers the civil war.
During World War II, we see him as an agent for Naval Intelligence, becoming embroiled in a murder scandal that involves the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The postwar years bring him to New York as an art dealer in the world of 1950s abstract expressionism, then on to West Africa, to London (where he has a run-in with the Baader-Meinhof Gang) and, finally, to France where, in his old age, he acquires a measure of hard-won serenity.
A moving, ambitious and richly conceived novel that summons up the heroics and follies of twentieth-century life.
Skagboys by Irvine Welsh
Prequel to the best-selling phenomenon Trainspotting, this exhilarating and moving novel shows how Welsh’s colorful miscreants first went wrong.
Mark Renton’s life seems to be on track: university, pretty girlfriend, even social success. But, in this prequel to Trainspotting, after the death of his younger brother, Rent falls apart and starts hanging around with his old pals, including Sick Boy, Spud, and Begbie, and being drawn irresistibly into their wacked-out plans.
Set against 1980s Thatcher-era Edinburgh—with its high unemployment, low expectations, and hard-to-come-by money and drugs? Irvine Welsh’s colorful crew lunges from one darkly hilarious misadventure to the next. Gritty, moving, and exhilarating, Skagboys paints their dizzying downward spiral with scabrous humor and raw language.
The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel
With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with her peerless, Booker Prize-winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.
Eagerly awaited and eight years in the making, The Mirror & the Light completes Cromwell’s journey from self-made man to one of the most feared, influential figures of his time. Portrayed by Mantel with pathos and terrific energy, Cromwell is as complex as he is unforgettable: a politician and a fixer, a husband and a father, a man who both defied and defined his age.
Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman
In Malorie Blackman’s groundbreaking novel, the population is divided into two: the white Noughts are second-class citizens, and the black Crosses are highly-revered and perceived as the superior race. 15-year-old Callum is a Nought, and his best friend, Sephy, as well as being a Cross, is also the daughter of one of the most influential politicians in the country.
The story focuses on their relationship, which is frowned upon by society, and explores the discrimination they encounter at every turn. By reversing traditional racial stereotypes and presenting the White population as the oppressed race, Blackman has cleverly shown racial prejudice from a different perspective.
As well as being a compelling tale of love and friendship, this is an outstanding and thought-provoking exploration of the futility of prejudice. A contemporary classic.
The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed
A brutal confrontation in pre–civil war Somalia intertwines three women’s lives in this devastating second novel by Mohamed (after Black Mambo Boy). The story opens in 1987 in the city of Hargeisa, as the widow Kawsar and the orphan Deqo prepare for a pro-government rally that all locals are required to attend. Deqo, who is nine, has been promised a new pair of shoes if she dances for the crowd. When Kawsar saves Deqo from a beating for forgetting her dance steps, a female soldier, Filsan, arrests Kawsar and beats her so severely that she can never walk again.
As Somalia descends into revolution, Kawsar struggles with her painful memories; little Deqo survives on the streets, selling stolen fruit and sleeping in a barrel; and duty-bound Filsan’s career unravels along with the country. The three women’s paths, cross again later, and they take refuge together behind the “grief-blue walls” of Kawsar’s home near the titular orchard. Mohamed is a lyrical writer, and although her material could easily be exploited, she does not so much milk it for emotion as elevate it to a kind of searing poetry.
Cane Warriors by Alex Wheatle
Moa is fourteen. The only life he has ever known is working on the Frontier sugar cane plantation for endless hot days, fearing the vicious whips of the overseers. Then one night he learns of an uprising, led by the charismatic Tacky. Moa is to be a cane warrior, and fight for the freedom of all the enslaved people in the nearby plantations. But before they can escape, Moa and his friend Keverton must face their first great task: to kill their overseer, Misser Donaldson. Time is ticking, and the day of the uprising approaches . . .
Irresistible, gripping and unforgettable, Cane Warriors follows the true story of Tacky’s War in Jamaica, 1760. The story begins with Moa being awoken in the middle of the night by one of the rebels who informs him that the revolt will begin on Easter Sunday. Moa’s father doesn’t like the idea of Moa joining the rebellion but his mother gives Moa her blessing. Moa’s best friend is Keverton who is two years older than him. They are the main protagonists of the drama and through them we see brotherhood, courage, faith and sacrifice. We see them launch attacks on slave masters and free slaves from neighbouring plantations.
It’s an untold story that pays homage to freedom fighters all over the world.
Check out our profile of the wonderful Deborah Levy
Where is Foster?
by Claire Keegan?, great story but she’s Irish not British