Fiction
A Room Above a Shop opens in south Wales in the late 1980s, where a young man, B, is feeling excited, about to make a big decision. It will take him away from the sense of provisionality that’s embodied by his council house with its “doors with weightless cardboard interiors and hollow aluminium handles”. He’s going to meet an older man, M, to view the sun from a hill on New Year’s Eve.
The opening pages of Katie Kitamura’s fifth novel establish a nervy, fraught physicality. The narrator is meeting a man at a restaurant. She is anxious, hyper-vigilant.
You don’t think you need a novella about a folk-singing shrimp fisher living with his mother on a fictional stretch of isolated coast until you read Benjamin Wood’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel, Seascraper. Wood conjures wonders from this unlikely material in a tale so richly atmospheric you can almost taste the tang of brine and inhale the sea fog.
In 2019, the Brooklyn-based literary magazine n+1 published a short story that went viral. Titled The Feminist, it follows the life of a man who turns from a bell hooks-reading Supporter of Women into a bitter moderator in an online forum about how feminism is a cancer. Rejection has hardened him over the years.
In Hall’s new novel, weather and climate are not just potent settings but the main event. The central character in Helm is the Helm, Britain’s only named wind.
One day in 1484, strange men arrive at the Oxfordshire farm where 10-year-old John Collan lives. They’ve come to carry him away to a new life, for he is not, after all, the farmer’s son; in fact, he’s Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, spirited away in infancy to keep him safe ahead of the day he might return to claim the throne of England. That day is now in sight. He can’t call himself John any more, but he can’t yet be announced as Edward, Earl of Warwick. In the meantime he’ll be given a third name: Lambert Simnel.
In that dimple of European history between the French Revolution and the coronation of Queen Victoria, there lived a not inconsiderable number of men whose foremost ambition was to set sail for the Americas, and there, in their own parcels of conveniently cheap and plentiful wilderness, found utopian communes where society could be forged anew in accordance with the principles of enlightenment. It certainly didn’t hurt that these endeavours would enable – even necessitate – quite a lot of shagging. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his mates, Roberts Southey and Lovell, laid plans, between blasts of nitrous oxide and versification, for the foundation of a commune on the banks of Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, chosen for its “excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians”. Lack of funds quickly became an issue, and soon our intrepid Romantics had compromised on location, proposing to found their “Pantisocracy” in rural Wales instead of the New World. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the plan never came off.
Hewitt’s debut novel Open, Heaven takes its title from William Blake’s poem Milton, which speaks of wandering through “realms of terror and mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions of varied beauty” – a line that quite nicely describes the reader’s experience of this book.
Maybe I’m Amazed opens with John Harris’s 15-year-old son, James, ecstatically absorbed in a live performance by Paul McCartney, “so held in the moment that he is almost in an altered state”. Harris then loops back to before James’s birth, and tells the story of his son’s arrival, his preschool diagnosis of autism, and how his differences manifest as he grows up. James loves music – the Beatles chief among a rich buffet of bands and tracks he listens to, over and over – and so Harris divides the book into 10 chapters named after songs, each with a particular resonance.
