#booker prize winner

[wordshaveteeth]

Why I picked this: Whenever I’m in a forced social situation, as an ice breaker I often say to people that I’m looking to broaden my book reading, and are there any books they’d recommend? This was one of those recommendations. A work colleague said his wife loves this author and in particular, this series, so I’m giving it a go. [side note: why do people recommend such massively long books?]

[weinberl]

Shehan Karunatilaka ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’

Shehan Karunatilaka ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’

When did you last see him?Weeks ago at a press gathering, said he was quitting the war zone, I thought fair enough.Johnny should have played poker, he could lie with his eyes, his nose and his teethWhat do you know about Center?Heard the name, think it’s some aid organisation, which could mean a number of things.So you know them?Not really, CNTR could be raising funds for political groups or…

[brian-in-finance]

Caitríona in conversation at the 2023 Booker Prize presentation

Caitríona’s conversation starts at 21:41

Video 📹 clip from YouTube (link above clip)

Remember… ever since I remember, my mum brought us to the library; that was our weekly thing. We went in and picked four or five books. I grew up in a very small village and it was just having this window into so many places in in the world. — Caitríona Balfe

Brian’s Post from Sunday

[artoodeeblue]

*reading a book that has multiple highly prestigious prizes* why is nobody talking about this book

[desdasiwrites]

– Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

[zvaigzdelasas]

Booker Prize-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy could be prosecuted for allegedly seditious comments made over a decade ago, after a top official in Delhi said there was enough evidence to lay charges.

Roy rose to international prominence for her novels, including 1997 Booker Prize winner “The God of Small Things,” but has also published two collections of political writing andlongbeen an outspoken critic of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.[...]

Earlier this month, police in New Delhi raided the homes of prominent journalists linked to a left-leaning news organization known for its scrutiny of the Indian government. Police said they had arrested the outlet’s editor and a colleague as part of an ongoing investigation in connection with India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, or UAPA, an anti-terror law that critics describe as “draconian.”[...]

The case was filed in 2010 over comments Roy made at a conference on Kashmir called “Azadi – the Only Way Ahead” – “azadi” means freedom or liberation and is often used as a slogan for the Kashmiri independence movement.[...]

In her 2010 speech,posted online, Roy spoke about Kashmiri efforts to seek justice, in part for the mass exodus of Hindus from Muslim-majority Kashmir in the early 1990s amid increasing violence.

12 Oct 23

[macrolit]

NYT's Notable Books of 2023

Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Inspired by Sappho’s work, Schwartz’s debut novel offers an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries.

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children — he’s written a crackling good police procedural.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

In Murray’s boisterous tragicomic novel, a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons.

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

Lacey rewrites 20th-century U.S. history through the audacious fictional life story of X, a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene.

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes.

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This lyrical, genre-defying novel — winner of the 2023 National Book Award — explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away.

BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

In her third and most assured novel, Knoll shifts readers’ attention away from a notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy, and onto the lives — and deaths — of the women he killed. Perhaps for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead.

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This satire — in which prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom — makes readers complicit with the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside. The fight scenes are so well written they demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

Verghese’s first novel since “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery made by the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor.

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead again uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point — here, Harlem in the 1970s.

THE DELUGE by Stephen Markley

Markley’s second novel confronts the scale and gravity of climate change, tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades. Immersive and ambitious, the book shows the range of its author’s gifts: polyphonic narration, silken sentences and elaborate world-building.

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

In de Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, translated by Jessica Moore, a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help.

EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett

The world-building in this tale of a woman documenting a new kind of faerie is exquisite, and the characters are just as textured and richly drawn. This is the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children, but adds a modern gloss.

ENTER GHOST by Isabella Hammad

In Hammad’s second novel, a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family. Instead, she’s talked into joining a staging of “Hamlet” in the West Bank, where she has a political awakening.

FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

A best-selling novelist and prominent anti-Fascist in her native Italy, de Céspedes has lately fallen into unjust obscurity. Translated by Ann Goldstein, this elegant novel from the 1950s tells the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary.

THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

FROM FROM by Monica Youn

In her fourth book of verse, a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism, Youn turns a knowing eye on society’s love-hate relationship with what it sees as the “other.”

A GUEST IN THE HOUSE by Emily Carroll

After a lonely young woman marries a mild-mannered widower and moves into his home, she begins to wonder how his first wife actually died. This graphic novel alternates between black-and-white and overwhelming colors as it explores the mundane and the horrific.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

McBride’s latest, an intimate, big-hearted tale of community, opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.

HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

In her radiant fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago, add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly original story.

A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza

This remarkable debut novel tells the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again.

HOLLY by Stephen King

The scrappy private detective Holly Gibney (who appeared in “The Outsider” and several other novels) returns, this time taking on a missing-persons case that — in typical King fashion — unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions.

A HOUSE FOR ALICE by Diana Evans

This polyphonic novel traces one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives.

THE ILIAD by Homer

Emily Wilson’s propulsive new translation of the “Iliad” is buoyant and expressive; she wants this version to be read aloud, and it would certainly be fun to perform.

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Törzs

The sisters in Törzs's delightful debut have been raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things. Their story accelerates like a fugue, ably conducted to a tender conclusion.

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck

This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man — translated from the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and moving.

KANTIKA by Elizabeth Graver

Inspired by the life of Graver’s maternal grandmother, this exquisitely imagined family saga spans cultures and continents as it traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C Pam Zhang

Zhang’s lush, keenly intelligent novel follows a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps, in a not-so-distant future where industrial-agricultural experiments in America’s heartland have blanketed the globe in a crop-smothering smog.

LONE WOMEN by Victor LaValle

The year is 1915, and the narrator of LaValle’s horror-tinged western has arrived in Montana to cultivate an unforgiving homestead. She’s looking for a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state, but the locked trunk she has in stow holds a terrifying secret.

MONICA by Daniel Clowes

In Clowes’s luminous new work, the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins and track down her parents.

THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Based on a true story and translated by Lara Vergnaud, Sarr’s novel — about a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal — asks sharp questions about the state of African literature in the West.

THE NEW NATURALS by Gabriel Bump

In Bump’s engrossing new novel, a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams.

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

Mason’s novel looks at the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries, from colonial times to present day. An apple farmer, an abolitionist, a wealthy manufacturer: The book follows these lives and many others, with detours into natural history and crime reportage.

NOT EVEN THE DEAD by Juan Gómez Bárcena

An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet in this novel by a leading writer in Spain, splendidly translated by Katie Whittemore. The epic search stretches across much of the continent and, as the author bends time and history, lasts centuries.

THE NURSERY by Szilvia Molnar

“I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” So begins Molnar’s brilliant novel about a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

This dazzling, epic narrative, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a bewitching brew of mystery and myth, peopled by mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death.

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems. Does money buy happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does it buy honesty?

THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due

Due’s latest — about a Black boy, Robert, who is wrongfully sentenced to a fictionalized version of Florida’s infamous and brutal Dozier School — is both an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel. “The novel’s extended, layered denouement is so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work,” Randy Boyagoda wrote in his review. “I couldn’t stop reading.”

THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera

Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons, the protagonist of Chandrasekera’s stunning and lyrical novel flees his destiny as an assassin and winds up in a politically volatile metropolis.

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS by Ed Park

Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s — Park’s long-awaited second novel is packed to the gills with creative elements that enliven his acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia.

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey

This elegant novel resonates with implication beyond the taut contours of its central story line. In Novey’s deft hands, the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother hints at the manifold divisions within America itself.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

In his latest novel, inspired by the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community, Harding turns that history into a lyrical tale about the fictional Apple Island on the cusp of destruction.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Locked down on the family’s northern Michigan cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother, a former actress whose long-ago summer fling went on to become a movie star, reflect on love and regret in Patchett’s quiet and reassuring Chekhovian novel.

THE UNSETTLED by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations across time and place: a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land.

VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals.

WE COULD BE SO GOOD by Cat Sebastian

This queer midcentury romance — about reporters who meet at work, become friends, move in together and fall in love — lingers on small, everyday acts like bringing home flowers with the groceries, things that loom large because they’re how we connect with others.

WESTERN LANE by Chetna Maroo

In this polished and disciplined debut novel, an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash — which in Maroo’s graceful telling becomes a way into the girl’s grief.

WITNESS by Jamel Brinkley

Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers, Brinkley’s new collection meditates on what it means to see and be seen.

Y/N by Esther Yi

In this weird and wondrous novel, a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.

YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is a breezy and propulsive tale about a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own.

[bullet-prooflove]

Pictures of You - Roy Kent x Reader

Tagging: @elizabeththebat @proceduralpassion @crazy4chickennuggets @callsignartemis @kmc1989 @@anyamcdonald @taytaylala12 @daydreamgoddess14 @amieinghigh @littleesilvia @blackleatherjacketz @xphantomphanphanaticx @its-a-show-stoppin-number @st4rgirliesstuff @secretsquirrelinc @meg-ro @xoxabs88xox @midnightmagpiemama

Roy’s in the locker room when Trent approaches him. He’s listening to a conversation between Issac and Colin with his arms crossed over his chest, when he catches the expression on the other man’s face.  He knows that somethings wrong, he can feel it in the pit of his stomach. When Trent tilts his head towards the empty manager’s office, Roy follows without hesitation.

At first, he thinks it’s something to do with one of the lads, a story that’s about to break, a leak about Colin’s private life. A surge of protectiveness rushes through him, if that’s the case, he’s going to hunt down the piece of shit that told the press and strangle them with his bare hands.

It’s only when Trent shows him the image on his phone that Roy understands the magnitude of the situation. His mouth goes dry, he rubs his palm across his stubble as he surveys the headline.

Kent’s Kinky Caster.

The picture that accompanies it is one that he’s never seen before. Your hair is longer, it falls across your shoulders as you bite your lower lip. Your thumb is drawing down the strap of the midnight-blue corset that you’re wearing. It accentuates your curves, pushing up your breasts.

You look fucking fantastic but it’s not you, he knows that you prefer lace and silk. Materials that cling or drape, that don’t dig in or contort your shape. He prefers you comfortable when you’re with him, not trussed up in something that’s going to leave marks across your skin.

“They must have hacked your phone.” Trent summarises as he takes back the device and slips it into his pocket.

“Not mine.” Roy says gruffly as he drops into Beard’s vacant seat. “I’ve never seen that picture before, the shit she sends me…” Roy trails off before he meets Trent’s gaze. “It’s classy, nothing like that.”

Trent bows his head in understanding. The picture that’s been delivered to the papers is one of a woman who’s trying so hard to be something else, for someone else. You’ve come a long way since then. He should know, he’s been your friend and confident for a few of years by now. The two of you had worked together for The Independent once upon a time. You’d been an investigative reporter before moving onto the podcasting world, and a damn good one at that.

The two of you still caught up every couple of weeks for drinks. He was one of the first people to know about your blossoming relationship with Roy Kent. You had no idea who he was initially, and Trent had found that endearing.

He suspects that the photograph has come from your ex-Martin. Trent knows that he will claim that his phone had been hacked but realistically no one hacks the phone of a Booker Prize Winner. Nobody cares who they’re sleeping with.

Trent recalls he’d made a nuisance of himself in the aftermath of the breakup. Turning up at your house all hours of the day and night until you’d sought a restraining order. After that he would bad mouth you to anyone that would listen, which is why Roy had headbutted him last month at a Save the Polar Bears event. Trent had gifted him an expensive bottle of Scotch  with a card that read “Because you did what I’ve wanted to do for a very long time.”

“I’ve put a few messages out to my contacts.” Trent informs Roy, crossing his arms over his chest as he leans against Beard’s desk. “I should hear back from them soon.”

“I did this.” Roy tells the other man as he rubs his hands over his face in exasperation. “It’s because I headbutted him at the fucking Panda thing isn’t it?”

“Polar bears.” Trent corrects before sighing. “I think you give yourself too much credit. Martin’s had a bee in his bonnet because SHE left him.”

“Yea.” Roy snarls, his dark eyes practically glowing with rage. “Because she walked in on him fucking a Page Three model in her bed, if it was me, I would have painted the room with his innards.”

It’s a vivid image, Trent has to give him that.

“He doesn’t like that she’s happier than him, more successful. The fact she’s with someone who actually cares about her, who gives her what he couldn’t.” Trent says taking off his glasses and gesturing with them as he speaks. “Being the type of man that he is, it probably sent him off the deep end.”

“That doesn’t excuse this type of shit.” Roy snaps, sagging back into the chair in frustration. He’s helpless right now, utterly fucking helpless and he hates it. The story is already out there. Every fucking pervert on the internet is probably wanking off to that picture of you and you have no fucking idea because you’re on a flight home from Ireland. He knows this is going to devastate you and he can’t stand the thought of it.

He looks up at Trent, his expression one of anguish.

“This is going to kill her.”

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Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

[wordshaveteeth]

Why I picked this: Another translated novel, this time from a Bulgarian author. I liked the premise of this book; having had an older relative suffer from Alzheimer’s, the idea of having a memory clinic set up to resemble specific periods of time interested me.

[qqueenofhades]

Hello! I would love to hear about your favourite historical fictions - I've been looking recently for some nice historical mysteries specifically (I grew up on Brother Cadfael and I've been indulging in some nostalgic re-reading), and I am always looking for new ones if you have any in your wheelhouse. Thank you so much in advance, and I've also been enjoying everyone's recs for you - so thanks to them vicariously too :)

Not all these are historical MYSTERIES per se, but for historical fiction, this is what I can think of that I have read semi-recently and which comes to mind when I am away from my bookshelves:

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Longtime favorite, still love it; literary mystery! Dracula! Eastern European history! I also picked up her most recent one, The Shadow Land, and devoured it in about three days. There is both a historical and a contemporary plot line and I snarfed it all down.

The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh. This is not historical mystery, but it is gorgeously written and very evocative historical fiction/family saga, set in Burma around the turn of the twentieth century and exploring the changes of war, colonialism, family, destiny, and more.

Babel by R.F. Kuang. This is historical fantasy, but she is an ungodly brilliant writer, it's set in an alternate magical Oxford in the 19th century, it deals with history, translation, empire, culture, racism, language, power, and so much more, and the ending made me BAWL. One of my favorite books ever, read it.

Trust by Hernan Diaz. Booker Prize winner; multiple narratives; explores Gilded Age New York and different perspectives on history and truth; there's a mystery element to it but it's highly sophisticated yet easily readable literary fiction.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. This is more contemporary-sci fi, though its main plot is about time travel, history, how power uses that history, and more. I include it here because it's one of my favorite recently published books; it's funny, moving, and one of those books that sneaks up on you with unexpected depth, so I am adding it here.

Edited to add: If you love Brother Cadfael, I'm SURE you've read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, but if not, yes, Posthaste.

[brian-in-finance]

PaulLynchWriter

Video 📹 from Instagram

Remember her congratulating Paul Lynch, 2023 Booker Prize winner?

Brian’s related posts 1 2 3 4

[mortalityplays]

Only tangentially related to today's ask discourse but I was thinking about this- do you have advice on pushing more out of your comfort zone ie media? I feel like its really easy to say you like or want stuff thats making you uncomfortable or is less palatable to wide audiences etc etc but I have trouble going out of my way to actually experience things like that over more popcorn you know

a good way to start if you're intimidated is to look for curated recommendations close to your cultural comfort zone (I'm focusing on US/UK lists here but you can look for recommendations from museums, libraries, and national award bodies just about anywhere in the world). e.g. the BFI Sight & Sound list or the National Film Registry (for movies), Booker Prize or National Book Award winners for literature

Don't feel like you have to watch/read everything all at once, it's fine to skim for something that sounds particularly up your street and start there. It's also fine to jump right into something intimidating and find out what all the fuss is about! the absolute worst case scenario is that you're bored or underwhelmed and can pick something else next time.

a lot of my film knowledge comes from when I was at university. I discovered that there was an A/V library and viewing room on campus that I could use for free l, so I just looked through the catalogue and started picking out things I'd never seen that sounded interesting. every day between classes I'd go, pick a title, and spend a couple of hours giving it a try. I watched Blade Runner for the first time in a darkened basement booth with headphones on, and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and Wild Strawberries, and Persepolis, and countless other weird and wonderful things. sometimes I picked something incredibly boring or something that annoyed me, but I always came away feeling good that I'd expanded my knowledge of what was out there.

once you do start finding new things you like, a whole other path opens up to you. you can dig deeper into the work of one writer or director or actor, look up interviews and find out who inspired them. if you loved a specific book, see if the author mentioned any direct influences, or if critics compared it to something else you might enjoy. you get to start building these maps in your head and getting a sense for where different things fit, and it becomes easier and easier to hunt for hidden treasures.

finally! if you can find a group of friends (or even just one person) who is interested in taking this journey with you, start a club. take turns to pick something you want to explore, share the journey, and discuss it as you go along. keep sight of your purpose, whether that's to broaden your horizons beyond your home culture, take on more challenging works, or just be better informed. take it a step at a time, and learn to enjoy the experience of exploration even when you don't like something. figuring out why we hated Lady Chatterley's Lover is some of the most fun I've had with our book club yet. introducing friends to The Left Hand of Darkness and getting hype about it with them was just as good. love the process and you'll change your life.

[justforbooks]

In her Reith lecture of 2017, recently published for the first time in a posthumous collection of nonfiction, A Memoir of My Former Self, Hilary Mantel recalled the beginnings of her career as a novelist. It was the 1970s. “In those days historical fiction wasn’t respectable or respected,” she recalled. “It meant historical romance. If you read a brilliant novel like I, Claudius, you didn’t taint it with the genre label, you just thought of it as literature. So, I was shy about naming what I was doing. All the same, I began. I wanted to find a novel I liked, about the French Revolution. I couldn’t, so I started making one.”

She made A Place of Greater Safety, an exceptional ensemble portrayal of the revolutionaries Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins, but although the novel was completed in 1979, it wasn’t published until 1992 – widely rejected, as she later explained, because although she thought the French Revolution was the most interesting thing in the world, the reading public didn’t agree, or publishers had concluded they didn’t. She decided to write a contemporary novel – Every Day Is Mother’s Day – purely to get published; A Place of Greater Safety emerged only when she contributed to a Guardian piece about writers’ unpublished first novels.

Genre is a confining madness; it says nothing about how writers write or readers read, and everything about how publishers, retailers and commentators would like them to. This is not to criticise the many talented personnel in those areas, who valiantly swim against the labels their industry has alighted on to shift units as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Consider the worst offender: not crime, horror, thriller, science fiction, espionage or romance, but “literary fiction”. It can and does contain many of the elements of the others, but is ultimately meaningless except as a confused shorthand: for what is thought clever or ambitious or beyond the comprehension of readers more suited to “mass market” or “commercial” fiction. What would happen if we dispensed with this non-category category altogether? Very little, except that we might meet a book on its own terms.

Is last year’s Booker prize winner, Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a ghost story because its central character is dead, or a thriller because he has to work out who has murdered him? A historical novel because it is set during the Sri Lankan civil war, or speculative fiction because it contains scenes of the afterlife? And where do we place previous winners such as Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders or A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James?

Finding ways to describe narratives is not itself the problem, and nor is genre in the wider sense. An understanding of literary traditions that have formed over centuries and across cultures is not essential to the enjoyment of an individual book, but helpful to a broader appreciation of how texts interact with one another through recurring styles and motifs. The urge to categorise has had a deadening effect, reinforcing hierarchies that rely on an idea of what is “serious” and what is not, and by the genuinely liberating understanding of literature, in all its forms, as a playful, thoughtful, experimental tussle with words and ideas.

None of that means one mightn’t enjoy wandering down the forking paths of the literary woods. During the lockdowns, I found great comfort in psychological thrillers of a particular cast: a form of domestic noir in which the usually female protagonist’s apparently enviable life was undermined by a combination of unresolved dissatisfactions (a distant or otherwise problematic husband, a house renovation gone wrong, bills piling up, recalcitrant or troubled children) and an interloper, often in the form of a glamorous new neighbour. I was fascinated by the way these novels articulated a set of contemporary bourgeois anxieties – property values, long-term monogamy, school places, stalled careers – and then imagined how they might be alleviated by the arrival of a disruptor, only to discover that the status quo isn’t all that bad. Often set in smartish London suburbs, these books occasionally packed their casts off on holiday to a rented villa that not every participant could comfortably afford, and in which a body would quickly turn up amid the abandoned plates of tzatziki and glasses of retsina. I began to imagine that if I had the wit and skill to write a parodic mashup, I might call it Kitchen Island. But I don’t, because these efficient entertainments were also, at their most successful, impressively executed feats of plotting and atmosphere.

That I might feel these novels were, in that grimly joyless phrase, “guilty pleasures” because I read them more quickly than I might read the work of Jon Fosse or James Baldwin or Isabel Waidner is to misunderstand the potential of variousness. They were simply another facet of my reading life, speaking to a different impulse, yielding a different reward. I might eat a boiled egg for lunch and immerse myself in a complicated recipe of unfamiliar ingredients at dinner time; finish a cheerful romcom and then turn to a painstakingly detailed documentary. These are not perceived as contradictions, but as perfectly reasonable options available to those of us lucky enough to have them.

I’m returning now to a new novel, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, one of my favourite contemporary novelists. It is set in space, on board a craft circling the Earth, filled with astronauts from different countries and cultures, undergoing physical, mental and emotional changes. Her last novel, The Western Wind, was set in 1491, and she has also written about Alzheimer’s disease, Socrates, infidelity and insomnia. Categorise that.

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[cbk1000]

Hi! I would like to know your thoughts on the same-gender pronoun problem when writing gay fanfic, especially smut. (Which *he* put his what in *his own* or the *other's* where?) After reading a lot of your work, I can definitely say you are one of the better writers when it comes to dealing with this problem in a non-clunky way, and you must have some advice or anecdotes. :) And Happy Birthday also! <3 I got you a penis-tree sapling (consists of only a little wood).

Lmfao Thank you, anon.

Yeah, this is really kind of a pain in the ass (buh dum chh). I personally do not like epithets except in a scenario when you're dealing with someone who is a stranger to the POV you're working in (i.e. referring to someone as 'the brunette man' is fine if the character has no other way to identify them, but using it for someone they're intimate with sounds clunky and impersonal). But if you take epithets out of the running, then you've only got their names left, and you also don't want to overuse those. You just have to kind of assess each sentence (sexy, I know) for clarity and determine if you can reword it in such a way that it's clear who's doing what to do, or if the smoother, better-sounding option is to use someone's name in place of the pronoun.

This is actually something I look for when I'm going back through and editing. I wouldn't do it while actually writing the sex scenes, because if you have to stop constantly to go, "Wait, whose dick is where??" I feel that kind of ruins the momentum, but it definitely needs to be checked during the proofreading stage, because it's very easy for things to get muddled.

Here's an example of a sentence from a current WIP:

'He sucked on Arthur’s earlobe, and a little hot ripple went through his stomach, and down a bit lower than that.'

Arthur's not sucking on his own earlobe (if he can do that, good for him), so I don't need to clarify that the first 'he' is Merlin. Arthur is the one having his ear sucked on, so the physical sensations deriving from that are going to be happening to his stomach (also, this sentence has been plucked out in isolation, but the rest of the section makes it clear we're in Arthur's POV). I use Arthur's name here because if I said, 'He sucked on his earlobe' that would be confusing, and I only use it once because 'He sucked on Arthur's earlobe, and a little hot ripple went through Arthur's stomach, and down a bit lower than that' is a bit redundant, to my ear. It's not terrible sounding, but I do feel the second Arthur should be unnecessary, because readers should be able to work out that, since we're in Arthur's POV, the sensations in 'his' stomach have to belong to Arthur. I could do, 'Merlin sucked on his earlobe, and a little hot ripple went through his stomach, and down a bit lower than that', but opted not to use Merlin in this specific sentence because I had just used it in previous sentences, and I didn't want his name to feel too unnecessarily repetitive.

This is an issue in more than just sex scenes, though. It can be difficult to distinguish between characters sometimes when they have the same pronouns, and even professional authors cause confusion, so try your best to makes things clear to your readers, but don't get in knots about it. One of the most common complaints I saw about Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy (two of which are Booker Prize winners) was that readers struggled to sort out which 'he' she was referring to in any scene with multiple male characters.

Ultimately, personally, I prefer to use pronouns as much as possible, and supplement with a name here and there if I think there might be confusion over who's doing what. I feel like using names or epithets too much can sometimes make things feel a bit colder or impersonal, so wherever I feel I can get away with it, I use pronouns.

[pinkfloyd-musicartnaturelove]

Polly Samson and David Gilmour attends a drinks reception at the Man Booker Prize Winner Ceremony at The Guildhall on October 16, 2012, in London, England. (Photo by Dave M. Benett).

[supernova3space]

God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. (1997 Booker Prize Winner)

My heart is feeling stuff. So much stuff. So much.