Fiction

The first novel in more than 20 years from the essayist and cultural analyst Pankaj Mishra is as sharp, provocative and engagé as you’d expect. An exploration of Narendra Modi’s autocratic, Hindu-nationalist New India seen through the progress of three graduates from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, it’s also reassuringly rich in characterisation and the sheer sensory overload of modern life. Narrated by Arun Dwivedi to an initially unnamed interlocutor, the book follows his journey from poverty to modest success as a translator in Delhi, while his feckless friends Aseem and Virendra make it big in America. A desire to escape ‘the material deprivations and the moral shabbiness… determined

‘The drawer beside Roberta’s bed contained remnants of other people’s fun’: so begins ‘Mathematics’, one of 11 stories in this outstanding collection by the Belfast author Wendy Erskine. The opening is Erskine in miniature: the wry, unostentatious prose; the sad interiors with their charged objects (‘a small mother-of-pearl box inlaid with gold, a lipstick that was a stripe of fuchsia, a lucky charm in the shape of a dollar sign’); a character’s casual curiosity about the intimate affairs of others. A bereaved mother scours Belfast with a paint scraper, removing the ‘missing’ posters of her dead son Dance Move might also have been titled Other People’s Fun. As in Erskine’s

To write a first novel of 800 pages is either supremely confident or crazy. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and the author of five poetry collections, now gives us The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, a multigenerational saga set over two centuries. It opens in the 18th, with a young black American in search of the Seminole tribe in Florida. Instead, he finds another Native American community in an area of Georgia fabulously named The-Place-in-the-Middle-of-the-Tall-Trees. He calls himself Coromantee, and is embraced by the Creeks. This part of the novel is narrated like a chorus by the collective voice of the community.

The atmospheric medieval town of Rye on the south coast still celebrates being a former haunt of smugglers, and on foggy nights it’s not hard to imagine stealthy figures in the shadows rolling barrels of illicit rum down its cobbled streets. Alex Preston has relocated to nearby Winchelsea, making it the setting for this maritime yarn. But any residual glamour attaching to these tax-averse citizens of Sussex is largely dispelled in a tale with as many moral qualms as thrilling exploits. Goody Brown recounts the cross-dressing adventures of her youth as the sole female member of the infamous Hawkhurst gang in the 1740s. Rescued from the sea as a baby

For Jean-Paul Dubois, as for Emily Dickinson, ‘March is the month of expectation’. A prolific writer, he limits his literary endeavours to that one month each year. Whatever his reasoning, it has produced results. His 2004 novel A French Life won the prestigious Prix Femina and, in 2019, Not Everybody Lives the Same Way was awarded France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. The premise of the novel is simple. Paul Hansen, a middle-aged building super-intendent, is confined to a Montreal jail for a crime which is not revealed until the end. Life is reduced to its bare essentials when he is forced to ‘share a toilet seat’ with a

When Zorrie Underwood, the titular character in Laird Hunt’s deeply touching novel about an Indiana farm woman, is pregnant, a little girl asks how her baby breathes. ‘Like a fish,’ says Zorrie, which is how Hunt treats his readers, luring them with a snapshot of Zorrie’s diminishing days before reeling them in as her life unspools. Grief stamps an early and enduring presence on Zorrie when diphtheria takes her parents, leaving her to be raised by a harsh elderly aunt who had ‘drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness after a badly failed marriage’. Zorrie takes solace in nature and nuggets of kindness from her schoolteacher, but finds herself

Tessa Hadley is the queen of the portentous evening, the pregnant light and the carefully composed life unwittingly waiting to be unravelled. Free Love, like its predecessor Late in the Day, begins on one such evening. The year is 1967 and Phyllis, a suburban housewife, is applying her make-up. She and her husband, a ‘respected Arabist’, are expecting the son of a family friend for dinner. Nicholas arrives, and broods angrily over his resentment of the staid old guard his hosts represent while plotting half-heartedly to seduce Phyllis as vengeance. Hadley is wonderfully wry at undermining the novel’s own urge towards solemnity: He wondered, if he pulled at that ribbon

James Courage is one of those fine writers who, though he enjoyed considerable success in his lifetime, has now more or less slipped from view. None of the eight novels he published between 1933 and 1961 is in print and most of them are impossible to find secondhand. The same goes for a collection of his short stories published in 1973. He is chiefly remembered for A Way of Love, a bold novel about a homosexual relationship that was published in 1959 and became a minor cause célèbre in New Zealand when it was banned there. Courage was born in New Zealand in 1903, but came to Oxford University in

Novelists are leery about letting the buzzwords of recent history into their books. The immediate past threatens to upstage the imagined world with its reality, and at the same time diminish it with the cardboard tang of everyday life. Sarah Moss, by contrast, has never been embarrassed to lend her prose the texture of contemporary conversation. As a celebrated author of novels in which catastrophe shatters middle-class English lives, she was always a likely candidate to be quick off the mark with a lockdown novel. In her latest, it’s November 2020, as night falls in the Peak District. Kate, a single mum, is half way through a 14-day period of