As the year draws to a tired and exhausted close its time to draw a line under what has gone (and, let’s be honest, this year is one which few of us would want to repeat) and turn our hopeful eyes to the new year. I’ll be pulling together my favourite things of this year shortly, but in the meantime, here is a short list of things which I am looking forward to in 2023:
August Blue – Deborah Levy
A writer I came late to with the wonderful ‘Hot Milk‘, Levy has since baffled me with ‘The Man Who Saw Everything, and excited me further with ‘Real Estate’ so what will her latest novel bring?
Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live? Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their preconceived conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.
Greek Lessons – Han Kang
Kang wrote one of my favourite novels of recent years, ‘The Vegetarian‘ and next year another of her novels has been freshly translated and will be published.
‘In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish—the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression.’
It does sound a little ‘worthy’ from this blurb. but Kang is a much more subtle and sharp writer than this indicates so I remain hopeful…
The Palm House – Gwendoline Riley
An absolute favourite of mine, Riley operates like a deranged pathologist picking at the corpses of relationships, her words a scalpel, unrelenting, witty and wise. ‘First Love‘ is, for me, her masterpiece – will surpass it?
‘The Palm House is the story of Edmund Putnam, whose professional and romantic life is about to change. The magazine to which he has dedicated decades is about to close. Over an unsettled weekend he reflects on his position in life.’
Shy – Max Porter
Another writer whose slender novels bely their power and uniqueness. Looking at the summary of any of Porter’s books and I wonder just how did these tomes appeal so much? And then I think of the strange, experimental, adventurous writing and the emotional impact and all is clear.
‘This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy. He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him. He is escaping Last Chance, a home for “very disturbed young men,” and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past, and the heavy question of his future.‘
To Battersea Park – Philip Hensher
A new Philip Hensher is always something to look forward. Some of his novels – The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, The Emperor Waltz – I have loved unreservedly, others – A Small Revolution in Germany – less so but his writing is never less than intriguing.
‘When a pandemic strikes, and a country’s whole population is told to close the doors and stay inside, the reality of a few streets in a capital city emerges. An underground river is discovered; an urban grove of trees emerges. There is time now to see the human dramas within a hundred yards (an abduction, a quiet breakdown, an outbreak of violence); to wait for the weather to change; to understand that what lies underneath this part of the city are seasonally wet pastures and woodlands.’
Other Women – Emma Flint
2017 brought us Emma Flint’s ‘Little Deaths’, a novel in which the deaths of two children sets in motion a series of events which their mother must endure. A gripping ‘noir’, it was a compulsive read and now comes Flint’s follow up, which also promises intrigue and thrills:
‘Six years after the end of the Great War, the country is still in mourning. Thousands of husbands, fathers, sons and sweethearts were lost forever, and the sea of women they left behind must carry on without them. But Beatrice Cade is not a wife, not a widow, not a mother. There are thousands of other women like her: nameless and invisible. Determined to carve out a richer and more fulfilling life for herself, Bea takes a job in the City and a room in a Bloomsbury ladies’ club. Then a fleeting encounter changes everything. Her emerging independence is destroyed when she falls in love for the first time. Kate Ryan is a wife, a mother, and an accomplished liar. She has managed to build an enviable life with her husband and young daughter. To anyone looking in from the outside, they seem like a normal, happy family. On the south coast of England, an anguished moment between lovers becomes a horrific murder. And two women who should never have met are connected forever.’
The Late Americans – Brandon Taylor
Taylor’s first novel, ‘Real Life’ was a hot house of a novel which carefully walked the line between straight and camp, navigating the pressures facing a young, black gay man on campus. Taylor introduced himself as a writer to watch and now comes his second novel…
‘In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.” These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.’
The Fraud – Zadie Smith
Of course, a new Zadie Smith is always cause for celebration – and her next novel (due September 2023) is her first historical novel which inches the excitement meter up a few notches more…
‘It is 1873. Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper – and cousin by marriage – of a once famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. Andrew Bogle meanwhile grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realise. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story. The ‘Tichborne Trial’ captivates Mrs Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task…’
The Diaries of Mr. Lucas – George Lucas, edited by Hugh Greenhalgh
George Lucas (1926 – 2014) was in many ways an unremarkable person, whose death went unremarked: He served briefly in the army before settling down to a career in the civil service. What makes him remarkable is that for much of his adult life he kept a diary which details his homosexuality and the gay life as it existed in the capital, a long lost world. In 1967 he wrote:
‘I look back 18 years to 1950. When I was 24, the London scene was not changed much; places, buildings, familiar to the homosexual world of 1950 had been familiar for a long time.And how many there were – the public rendezvous at Marble Arch and Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, the numerous gay bars: the Standard in Piccadilly Circus, the celebrated Fitzroy in Rathbone Place, the Bunch of Grapes on the south side of the Strand, with its stone canopy carved in form of a cornucopia over the door, Rainbow Corner by the Monico in Shaftesbury Avenue… and, of course, the lavatories of the “Grand Tour”; starting with Falconberg Court and ending at York Place.’
Luckily for us, Lucas bequeathed his diaries to the journalist Hugo Greenhalgh who has edited them into a volume which is to be published in May next year.
Nothing Special – Nicole Flattery
Like the great Louise Kennedy, this is Flattery’s first novel after making a name with short stories. Set in 1960s New York, it concerns the coming of age of two girls whose live their lives in the orbit of Andy Warhol’s Factory.
The Night-Side of the River – Jeanette Winterson
A new book by Jeanette Winterson is always cause for celebration and with this volume she promises spooky stories for Halloween and ‘real-life encounters with the occult’
The New Life – Tom Crewe
A book which might be available by the time you read this. Some great word-of-mouth regarding this historical tale of gay and lesbian outsiders trying to find their way in the world has left me gasping to get my hands on this tome. Using real characters from LGBT history – Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, whose work (‘Sexual Inversion’) aimed to present gay men in a positive light – it uses their circumstances (John is a gay man with a straight wife; Henry is a straight man with a gay wife) and hopes to produce a picture of a time and place which, according to The Times, ‘captures the idealism of the characters and their belief that history will bend in their direction. (following them) as they realise that bravery is not always enough to bring about change.’
And finally, a film for the dark days of January, suitably chilly, suitably chilling, beautifully shot…
…and the return of Everything But the Girl, after a 22 year hiatus during which Tracey Thorn released some wonderful and inspirational music. Now she’s back with her ebtg partner, Ben Watt. SO excited to hear this…
wordsandpictures 