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A vivid outback tale, an anguished 80s love triangle and real life are cleverly held in play in the Australian novelist’s inventive memoir-novel-essay hybridThis book starts as an evocative, shifting novel of time and place: a young man travelling in Switzerland, distracted by thoughts of a beautiful music teacher he met in London, recalls how, in his Australian childhood, he was evacuated to live with his grandparents at a sheep station in New South Wales in the second world war. There follows a brief story of how the boy that he was pocketed an emerald ring owned by his grandmother and chucked it away in the nearby woods. The shame did not end there. A young Aboriginal maid was blamed for the theft, and he did not have the courage to step in to save her from dismissal.Just as you are losing yourself in this immersive little story, however, its author, Michelle de Kretser, steps in to inform you that “at this point, the novel I was writing stalled”. She goes on to explain how that writer’s block was a product of her difficulties with the “theory and practice” of her novel’s title: the gap between ideas about the novel – particularly those promoted by those French deconstructionists of the 1970s, and earlier by Virginia Woolf – and the impetus for storytelling. Continue reading...

Artists, gallerists and collectors vie for power in a rollicking mystery that pokes fun while also examining desire and regretJames Cahill’s debut novel, Tiepolo Blue, was full of interesting things but weakened by implausibilities. In his second novel, he gets around this by setting it in the world of modern art, where the implausible and ridiculous are de rigueur.After a punchy intro in which a young man falls to his death in London (“abruptly, he toppled back – his body separating from the building”), we’re introduced to three vivid characters, each circling the others. There’s Leo Goffman, a New York-based octogenarian real estate mogul and art collector, a man who sees money everywhere. His walls are lined with Richters and Warhols, and to mark his character for the reader, he obligingly yells at his housekeeper when she throws out his favourite magazine. Continue reading...

In the American writer’s wry, understated second short story collection, the past comes back to jolt her largely middle-aged charactersCurtis Sittenfeld is irresistibly drawn to the awkward: to the geeks, and to those who are not quite as attractive, confident, rich or successful as the peers with whom, often to everyone’s surprise, they find themselves sharing space and time. Her readers, one suspects, feel a strong pull of identification with these less accomplished and veneered characters, not least because Sittenfeld allows us to believe there are significant compensations on this side of the social balance sheet. She took that optimistic outlook to its limits in her last novel, Romantic Comedy, in which a dating-averse backroom TV writer finds love with a front-page celebrity.Sittenfeld might also have titled this collection of a dozen short stories The Hare and the Tortoise, although it is not always entirely clear that slow and steady does win the race. Many of her protagonists, who are often also narrating their own stories, find themselves in middle age, in domestic and familial circumstances of varying contentedness and stability; and whatever their feelings towards husband, wife, children or job, they are inclined towards looking back, perhaps to stave off the less certain prospect of looking forward. Continue reading...

The journalist’s debut novel about a London girl gang of the 1950s expertly toys with gender and explores young people’s place in the worldIn Kelly Frost’s fast-paced debut novel, girls rule the streets. It’s 1957 in Finsbury Park, north London, and the boys that make up the Coshers gang are away on national service. In their place, the Seven Sisters are guarding their turf, but not without backlash from a neighbouring group of young women – the Kings – who aren’t happy watching a rival gang get their way.The book opens with Tony in 2017, as she waits to meet her old mates in the pub that was once their meeting place. “Not long after the millennium, someone suggested we start these reunions – although there wasn’t much union left to re,” Frost writes, setting the book’s jocular tone. We learn that Tony escaped Finsbury Park for an international modelling career. What about the rest of them? Continue reading...

A globe-spanning study of the waste industry reveals how wealthy nations dump their garbage on the poor while the rate at which we produce near-indestructible rubbish only increasesYou know the drill: plastic and glass containers go in the blue recycling bin, paper and cardboard in the blue sack, vegetable matter in the green compost bin, and the rest in the grey general rubbish bin. Households up and down the land go through variations of these familiar refuse-sorting tasks each week. But where does it actually all go?Into the trucks that pick them up, yes, but after that? It’s a kind of act of faith that we imagine our detritus that we’ve carefully – or not so carefully – categorised is transported to the right location where appropriate measures are taken to dispose of it in the most sensible and ecological manner. Continue reading...

This powerful new book examines the moral contradictions of the west and asks what liberal values mean in the face of such brutal and sustained obliteration of human lifeLike many people, I have followed the unrelenting horror that has unfolded in Gaza since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 mainly through the medium of social media. The Instagram reels of citizen journalists on the ground have become for me and countless others the most powerful testimony to the slaughter, destruction and trauma visited on the already beleaguered Palestinian population. Recorded at great risk, they are often heartbreaking and enraging: so many dead infants; so many maimed and traumatised children; so many obliterated families and communities.Some of these witnesses have achieved heroic status among their millions of followers, the likes of Motaz Azaiza, a photojournalist who was evacuated to Qatar after 108 days covering the carnage at close hand; Wael Al-Dahdouh, the Al Jazeera correspondent, whose wife, daughter, son and grandson were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in the Nuseirat refugee camp; Bisan Owda, who shares videos of the destruction that begin with the same defiant mantra of survival: “This is Bizan from Gaza and I am still alive.” Continue reading...

The Hungarian-English author on addressing what it’s like to be a male body in the world, learning the tricks of literature from Frederick Forsyth, and the feeling of nearly winning the BookerDavid Szalay, 51, grew up in London and now lives in Vienna with his wife, having previously moved in 2009 to Hungary, his father’s birthplace. In 2016 he was shortlisted for the Booker prize with his fourth novel, All That Man Is, nine separate stories “self-assembled in the reader’s mind into a sort of collage-novel” (London Review of Books). His new novel, Flesh, follows the fluctuating fortunes of a young Hungarian ex-convict who makes his life in the UK after serving in Iraq.Tell us how Flesh came to be. I decided to abandon a book I’d started in 2017. It just wasn’t working, so it felt like a weight off my shoulders; nevertheless, I was under contract and had to come up with something. Literally nothing in Flesh is directly autobiographical, but it started with my underlying experience of being poised between two places and feeling not 100% at home in either of them. I no longer really feel like a native of London, but nor do I feel entirely Hungarian. Even for the decades I lived in London, just by virtue of the name that I have, there was always a sense of being... outsider is too strong a word; I was more of an outsider in Hungary, certainly, but a kind of insider-outsider, because I come from a Hungarian background but don’t speak Hungarian very well. That sort of grey zone interests me.The novel implies that all the tumult of the protagonist’s life begins with the shock of puberty. What made you want to dramatise that idea? My aim was to try to be as honest as possible about what it’s actually like to be a male body in the world – to be a body that has its own demands, and how you manage, accommodate, satisfy and fail to satisfy those demands, and what experiences that leads you into.Money is pivotal to the story, as it tends to be in your work. It structures our society in a deep way. I say that as someone who’s not Marxist or anything like that; anyone can see that money exists as a way of distributing power. The need for money, or wanting more money, or just sort of having to have money, is central in all our lives. Often it’s underplayed in the same way as physical experience – a bigger part of our existence than you’d think from reading fiction.In form and style, Flesh resembles Turbulence [2018] and All That Man Is, which seemed to mark a break from your first three novels. With my earlier books, I was doing something completely different after each one. Looking back, that was born out of not yet having found what really works for me. I enjoy books made of free-standing units of writing that are somehow in dialogue with one another, where what happens in the gaps is as important as the chapters themselves. The way that the reader has to do their own imaginative work means they might come away with a sense of having read a book that covers a large amount of human experience, without having to plough through a 1,000-page 19th-century novel. I don’t think anyone’s seriously going to deny that we live in an era of short attention spans, which probably isn’t good, but we’re going to have to work with it the best we can.Flesh is published on 6 March by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Continue reading...

A wide-ranging and thoroughly entertaining portrait not just of Queen Elizabeth II but of the psyche of her subjectsThe funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 was watched by around 28 million people in the UK alone. In her lifetime, she was one of the most photographed and scrutinised figures in the world. Yet few could say they knew the late monarch since, says biographer Craig Brown, she kept “her interior world screened from public view” and was “a human looking-glass: the light cast by fame bounced off her, and back on to those she faced”.Little wonder, then, that A Voyage Around the Queen does not follow the usual conventions of a biography. Instead of a chronological account of its subject, it is a patchwork of news reports, letters, diary entries, secondhand anecdotes, tweets and even dreams. The result is a wide-ranging and thoroughly entertaining portrait not just of the woman but the psyche of her subjects. You don’t have to be a royalist to enjoy such titbits as Kingsley Amis anxiously loading up on Imodium prior to meeting the queen lest he fart in her orbit, or the list of wedding gifts given to the royal couple in 1947 which includes bibles, tea cosies, bookends, paperweights, 500 cases of tinned pineapple from the state of Queensland and 148 pairs of nylon stockings “from Americans sensitive to Britain’s postwar shortage”. Continue reading...

The poet and novelist on having his heart broken by Animal Farm, imagining Ibsen and Chekhov characters as Nigerian, and ditching physics for PlatoMy earliest reading memory In London, reading my dad’s copy of the Times at four. It embarrassed my mum, who hurried me out of the room when visitors came.My favourite book growing up In Lagos, in my teens, I discovered Ibsen’s plays and Chekhov’s stories. I transplanted the characters, imagining them as Nigerian. That’s the magic of reading. Continue reading...

From sparkling dialogue to surprise character traits, wit, humour and tragedy, this is the year to appreciate AustenThis year marks what would have been Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, and getting stuck into the great Regency writer’s brilliant work is the best way to celebrate. Perhaps you’ve seen the film adaptations, or dipped into Pride and Prejudice, but what about the more obscure Lady Susan? Writer and professor John Mullan has come up with a handy guide to Austen’s writing.*** Continue reading...

A slice-of-life portrait of a community suffering the after-effects of the second world warAustrian novelist Robert Seethaler is known for his restrained and sensitive novels that illuminate the struggles and joys of peripheral lives. His debut, A Whole Life, centres on a man who barely leaves his mountain home. The Tobacconist is a coming-of-age novel set against the rise of fascism in Vienna. The Field introduces a chorus of the dead who tell the story of their village.Like The Field, The Café With No Name uses a narrow lens to tell the story of a whole community. At the centre is 31-year-old Robert Simon, an itinerant worker who assists the stall holders of the Karmelitermarkt in Vienna. In the late summer of 1966, Simon notices that the cafe on the corner of the market has closed. He decides to take on the lease in order “to do something which would give his life a positive affirmation. To one day stand behind the bar of his own establishment.” Continue reading...

A dogged account of how the quest for a treatment may have been set back years by fraudulent evidenceLiving to old age is quite literally the best thing that any of us could hope for, given the alternative. It’s a cruel irony, then, that many of us who make it that far will begin to lose our sense of who we are due to dementia. If you’re 65, you’ve got about a one in 20 chance of developing the most common form, Alzheimer’s disease, in the next decade. At 75, it’s about one in seven, while those fortunate enough to reach 85 face a one in three chance.Given the toll this illness takes on sufferers and those around them, hundreds of millions of families around the world are desperate for a medical breakthrough – and for years, headlines have suggested that it might be imminent. Scientists had identified the cause of Alzheimer’s, they promised, and potential cures were already being tested. Continue reading...