Brat by Gabriel Smith (Picador)
This is a haunted house story with a difference. The set-up might sound familiar—a young writer, currently blocked, recently dumped and back in his childhood home having just buried his father—but what happens next is anything but expected. His skin begins to peel off, the house starts falling down around him, a strange boy and girl keep turning up unexpectedly, a weird videotape featuring his mother and a different family he’s never seen before surfaces… and is that a man dressed as a deer hiding in the buses at the bottom of the garden? It’s a darkly comic piece of suburban gothic about the horrors of having a family.
The Echoes by Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape)
The formidably talented English-Australian novelist’s fourth novel might just be her best yet. It’s another ghost story, about literal phantoms and otherwise, psychic inheritances and generational trauma—all weighty topics, I know, but Wyld handles them with lightness and grace. She’s really one of the best; a writer who consistently circles ideas of home and belonging in her work, yet always from a new and interesting angle. This one’s also often really rather funny, which wasn’t something I was expecting.
Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs (FSG Originals)
This slim novella is a sumptuous, skittish portrait of interwar Austria—a world of madness, opulence, precarity, decay and danger. It’s set in 1919, when a mysterious young woman appears in the streets of Vienna, apparently mute. The doctor treating her appeals to the wider public for any information about her identity. He receives a single reply, from a patient at a distant sanatorium, claiming to be the girl’s father. In his absence, he begs the doctor to read her a series of bedtime stories—one for each letter in the alphabet. What follows is a carousel of increasingly uncanny fairy tales that resonate with echoes of Freud’s case studies and Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment.
Henry Henry by Allen Bratton (Jonathan Cape)
Nothing depresses me more than an uninspired and lazy retelling of some kind of classic story, myth or legend. It’s a genre that’s all the rage right now, but, in reality, so few of these offerings are actually any good. But this one is very much the real deal. A queer reimagining of Shakespeare’s Henry plays, set in London in 2014. If you know the originals, you’ll be enchanted by this clever adaptation. If you don’t, your enjoyment won’t be dampened at all, for the story Bratton tells is full of humour and poignancy, and his characters feel real and very much alive. A really promising debut by a writer I can’t wait to read more from.
James by Percival Everett (Picador)
I figure this one probably needs little explanation—an inspired retelling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, told from the point of view of the enslaved Jim, it was shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and has been included on what feels like pretty much everyone’s books of the year lists. It’s also been the novel that finally saw Everett make it big. (Something that’s been a long time coming given the quality of his back catalogue—if you haven’t had the pleasure already, do read The Trees, which made my books of the year list back in 2022!)
Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Deáki (Galley Beggar Press)
The Finnish author Noémi Kiss-Deáki (who writes in English) takes the real-life case of Mary Toft—a peasant woman living in Godalming in Surrey who became famous in 1726 when she supposedly starting giving birth to rabbits—and turns it into one of the most curious, inventive and delightful debuts of the year. This strange episode from history is transformed into a mischievous but smartly self-conscious tale that reanimates Mary and her story—yet also tells us about the broader contexts at play.
Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver (Faber Editions)
A rediscovered classic with a tragic twist, these stories—some of which originally appeared in various magazines, others previously unpublished—were penned by the precociously talented Diane Oliver before she was killed in a motorcycle accident aged only 22, back in 1966. Oliver wrote about the harsh realities of life for black Americans in the newly integrated but still deeply prejudiced and dangerous American South, using tropes from horror in a similar way to more recent cultural releases, such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador)
The great English author’s best work since his Booker-winning The Line of Beauty (2004), Our Evenings is the memoir of Dave Win, the trajectory of whose life Hollinghurst paints with exquisite brushstrokes. From his childhood in a small Berkshire town, with his single mother Avril (Dave never knew his Burmese father) and her partner Esme, through his years at the local prep school, then Oxford, then onto London, where he begins his career as an actor. It’s a story about a mother and her son. About their lives and loves. But it’s also about modern-day Britain, from the 1960s through the pandemic. There’s both beauty and ugliness in these pages, but the former unequivocally wins out.
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez (Virago)
Although I’m now a little bored by Covid novels, I gladly made an exception for Sigrid Nunez’s latest, which is set in Manhattan in early 2020 and is narrated by an older woman writer who finds herself in lockdown with two unlikely flatmates: an angry young college dropout to whom she assigns the moniker “Vetch,” and a quirky parrot named Eureka. Written in the same voice as Nunez’s equally brilliant previous two books—The Friend and What Are You Going Through—together they form a loose trilogy. Each combines minimal plot with musings on reading, writing, love and loss in ways that are profoundly moving, charming and surprisingly gripping.
Wife by Charlotte Mendelson (Mantle)
No one writes monstrous spouses better than Charlotte Mendelson. Her latest—the story of the messy implosion of a marriage between two academics: Zoe Stamper, an expert in Greek tragedy, and the formidable, older and very sexy Penny Cartwright—is a tour de force. It’s hilarious and chaotic, and I can honestly say that I have never hated a fictional character as much as the atrocious Penny. Read if you want to be wildly entertained while also feeling as though you want to crawl out of your own skin.
