The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams review / A glorious way with words

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams review – a glorious way with words

Williams’s debut novel, a tale of two lexicographers, is a playful delight

Anthony Cummins
Tue 14 July 2020

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don’t know if any of the newspaper fiction previews that appeared at the end of 2016 tipped Eley Williams’s first collection, Attrib. and Other Stories, published by independent press Influx, as a book to look out for. But 12 months later, it was all over the end-of-year roundups – a deserved sleeper hit that made sparks fly by dint of sheer wordplay, as Williams’s fretful, philosophically inclined narrators zero in on passed-over nuances of language.

Attrib. and other stories by Eley Williams review – life’s big microdrama moments

Domestic scenes misfire in these vividly imagined instants of mental disarray

Cal Revely-Calder
Sat 1 Apr 2017 11.00 BST

 

“What’s a sentence, really, if not time spent alone?” The kind of storyteller who says this won’t take an audience for granted; their phrase, in the pun on “sentence”, weaves expression and imprisonment into each other. The conflict between reaching out and curling up is what absorbs the characters of Attrib. and other stories, an elegant debut collection from the young writer Eley Williams and the independent Influx Press. Like Rivka Galchen or Camilla Grudova, Williams has crafted her fictions to be miniature and sparky, concentrating on the implacability of details, no matter how small or brief.

Paul Mendez

From Jehovah’s Witness to gay sex worker to novelist: the extraordinary life story of Paul Mendez

When truth is stranger than fiction

Katie Law

28 April 2020

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here can’t be many debut novelists with lives as unconventional as that of Paul Mendez. He was brought up in the West Midlands as a Jehovah’s Witness, “disfellowshipped” from the Christian denomination at the age of 17 and estranged from his family. He came out as gay and moved to London to study acting, doing sex work on the side to pay his fees. After suffering a traumatic internal injury and becoming suicidal, he temporarily gave that up. Various jobs followed, together with a surfeit of drink and drugs. Finally, he landed a book deal with a top publisher, and — surely the cherry on the cake — met and fell in love with a famous Man Booker Prize-winning novelist.

Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez review / A fearless debut

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez review – a fearless debut

A groundbreaking first novel shows how its young black protagonist tests the limits of sexual freedom

Colin Grant

Saturday 9 May 2020

The black male body has long been both feared and prized by white artists. Colin MacInnes’s 1957 novel City of Spades, with its depiction of the lead character’s “handsomely ugly face, animal and engaging”, was one example of veiled infatuation. In The Black Book, Robert Mapplethorpe’s lascivious delight in his naked African American models, photographing the body parts he considered “the most perfect”, was perhaps a more honest account of the white gaze. What path does a black writer take in navigating the perils of such fetishisation? It’s a question addressed by Paul Mendez’s erotic and fearlessly explicit debut, Rainbow Milk.

 

Paul Mendez
Photo by Amber Pinkerton

The debut novelist behind a powerful new story of race, religion and sex

Writer Paul Mendez tells us about 'Rainbow Milk', his vivid and agonising semi-autobiographical new novel.

By Ryan White
Photography Amber Pinkerton
17 April 2020, 3:00am

“I think when you come from a Jehovah's Witness family; you're a young, black man; a young, working-class black man, in fact, and you're queer and you've been a sex worker, there's already so much that people will just not be familiar with at all.”

Rainbow Milk -- the debut novel of Paul Mendez -- isn’t a story told a hundred times over. Opening in the 1950s from the perspective of a Jamaican ex-boxer named Norman, we peek behind the twitching net curtains of post-war Britain’s hidebound cul-de-sacs to find little more than hostility and violence. Leaving Jamaica for the Black Country and its promise of employment, the racism Norman faces submerges his world into darkness. The plumes of thick toxic smoke that billow from the region’s many factory chimneys become literal and metaphorical foils to his pursuit of happiness, beckoning the steep decline in his physical and mental health. “Like Bedasse did sing,” Norman thinks to himself, his son rested upon his chest, “depression gwine guh kill me dead.”Then, we’re in Brixton. It’s 2002, and Jesse, the story’s protagonist, is on his way to have sex with a client he’s met on Gaydar. Since leaving the West Midlands and his Jehovah’s Witness family, the gay desire that bubbled beneath the surface throughout his teens has boiled over into train station toilets, gay bars and the bedrooms of older men. Finding sex work as a way of keeping his head above water, Jesse -- starved of familial and romantic affection -- also looks to find moments of tenderness amongst these fraught sexual transactions. Instead, he mostly finds huge chasms that separate him from the wealthy white men he visits. The racism of Norman’s generation may have mutated in the 50 years that have passed, but it still remains constant and insidious.

Book review / The Young Team, by Graeme Armstrong

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Book review: The Young Team, by Graeme Armstrong

The French, of course, have a good phrase for the phenomenon – nostalgie de la boue. I’ve often wondered how I would translate this, and I suppose “hankering after the manky” might be the closest I have 
come.

It is a strange concept, since it cuts both ways. On one hand it is a form of “poverty tourism”, where the higher classes indulge, at a distance, in descriptions of the ways of the lower classes. But it is also a genuine kind of nostalgia, where those who have broken out of a cycle of their designated station still feel a tug back towards their ain kind. The Young Team seems to exemplify this paradox. It is a novel which I feel many people will make their minds up over on scanning the first page, and some will be enthralled and some will be nauseated.

 

‘My reading pile is turning into a Jenga tower’: Graeme Armstrong in Airdrie, where he grew up. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Interview

Graeme Armstrong: ‘When I stopped taking drugs, I felt a kind of loneliness’

The debut novelist on how to write violence, taking the same advice as Irvine Welsh, and his love of Goosebumps

Alex Preston

Saturday 22 February 2020

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raeme Armstrong, 28, grew up in Airdrie, east of Glasgow. He was involved with gang culture from a young age. Expelled from school in his mid-teens, he transferred to Coatbridge high school, and went on to study English literature at Stirling University. The Young Team, his first novel, is a raw and lyrical Bildungsroman that traces the life of Azzy Williams, a smart, secretly sensitive boy growing up in a rough Scottish town where he is drawn to gangs, drugs and crime. The book is written in a voice that recalls Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner – dialect that fizzes off the page.

The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi review / Coming of age in Uganda

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

BOOK OF THE DAY

The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi review – coming of age in Uganda

A girl longs for her absent mother in this frank, witty tale about power and gender roles from the author of Kintu

Alex Clark

Friday 30 October 2020

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irabo is an inquisitive child. She has even more unanswered questions than other girls in the run-up to puberty, the greatest and most mysterious of which is: “Who is my mother?” In the small Ugandan village of Nattetta, nobody seems to want to tell her, least of all the grandparents who have loved and protected her throughout her life; fleeting visits from her father, Tom, who is busy making his mark in Kampala, yield no further insight. So Kirabo, already unsettled by her ability to depart her body and soar above her neighbourhood, decides to consult the village witch, Nsuuta.

A Girl Is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi / Review

 

Set in Uganda, This Coming-of-Age Story Contains Universal Themes

A GIRL IS A BODY OF WATER
By Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

By Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
Sept. 1, 2020

Provided love in heartwarming excess by her family, Kirabo enjoys a happy rural childhood in the Ugandan village of Nattetta — yet she cannot shake her sense of longing for a mother she doesn’t know. Kirabo’s loneliness is further complicated by a new discovery; she possesses a rebellious “second self” that does “mad things” and flies out of her body in episodes of uncontrollable deviance.

 

Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi review – is this 'the great Ugandan novel'?

From a Commonwealth short story prizewinner comes a masterful epic that examines Uganda’s history through generations of a cursed family

Lesley Nneka Arimah
Fri 26 Jan 2018 12.00 GMT

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his Ugandan debut novel begins in 2004 with the death of a man who is killed by a mob after being mistaken for a thief. As three market sellers speculate about his bad fortune, one mentions “the curse”. We are then taken back to the 18th century and the eponymous Kintu. His name echoes the creation myth in which Kintu is the first person on Earth, but in Makumbi’s hands he is just a man: a powerful governor burdened with more wives than he would like, on a journey to pay homage to the new king. Tragedy strikes and Kintu’s son dies by Kintu’s own hand, an act that haunts his family down the generations.

 

Donal Ryan

Interview

Donal Ryan: ‘Writing is like being gloriously drunk, and it’s always followed by a hangover of guilt’

Justine Jordan

The award-winning author made headlines when he went back to his day job in the civil service. He talks about seeing ghosts and almost giving up writing

Justine Jordan
Friday 9 March 2018

D

onal Ryan made his name with his debut novel The Spinning Heart, a portrait of recession-hit rural Ireland in 21 voices, which won the Guardian first book award in 2013 and was longlisted for the Man Booker prize. Two other novels and a short story collection quickly followed, set around the same fictional village, a composite of various places in Limerick and Tipperary. Ranging from the boom years of the Celtic Tiger to the experience of Irish Travellers, they dug deep into the psyche of Irish communities, with marginal voices summoning the intensity of small-town loves and hates to uncover a complicated history and uncertain present.

Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan review / A compassionate tale of homecoming

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan review – a compassionate tale of homecoming

Five years after she went missing, a woman returns to rural Tipperary in a novel that explores all forms of love

Beejay Silcox
Wed 2 Sep 2020 09.00 BST

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hen a young woman vanishes from her parents’ home in rural Tipperary it can mean only one of two things: “Moll Gladney was either pregnant or dead, and it was hard to know which one of those was worse.” What other reason could there possibly be for a “good little girl” to forsake the Edenic comforts of these soft green hills? Strange Flowers, Donal Ryan’s sixth novel, opens in the early 1970s, in the wake of Moll’s disappearance: an empty bed, a missing suitcase, a one-way train ticket and a vast and terrible silence. It is a perfect lure of an opening. Perhaps too perfect.

 

Sebastian Barry

Sebastian Barry: ‘Family stories mean a whole different thing in your 60s’

As his sequel to the Costa-winning Days Without End is published, Barry talks about reinventing his ancestry and writing in the voice of a Native American

Alex Clark
Saturday 7 March 2020

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f someone tells you they have an idea for a book, says Sebastian Barry, advise them to “go home and drink for a few months, and then come back and have no ideas. Because you don’t have ideas for books.” Indeed, if one does happen to occur, then sadly, “that’s the end of that book. You have ideas for books when you finish them.” This is very much the counterintuitive, back-to-front and frankly confounding sort of thing Barry says when he’s talking about writing. I point out to him that during the course of our conversation about A Thousand Moons, his eighth work of long-form fiction and a continuation of the Costa-winning Days Without End, he has equated the process of creating a novel to being a train robber on the run; to elaborating Einstein’s theories of time; and to ensuring the safe return of Buzz Aldrin and his crew from the moon, in a scenario in which the novelist is at once ground control at Cape Canaveral and “also the fucking rocket”. I mean, what’s going on here?

A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry review / Compelling tale of identity and revenge

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry review – a compelling tale of identity and revenge

Sebastian Barry’s powerful, sweeping saga continues with this sequel to his Costa-winning Days Without End

Alex Preston

Monday 23 March 2020

A

t a time when questions of identity are fraught and thorny, there’s something daring in the set-up of Sebastian Barry’s A Thousand Moons. Continuing the sweepingly ambitious cycle of stories that draw on a fictionalised version of his own family history, Barry now turns to a minor figure from his previous novel, the Costa prize-winning Days Without End. Winona is a member of the Lakota tribe – “the saddest people that ever were on the earth” – rescued by Thomas McNulty (who narrated the last book) and his partner John Cole. That Barry knows he has strayed into tricksy territory is clear from the off. “I am Winona,” the novel begins, before immediately qualifying this seemingly simple statement of identity. It is Winona’s fate to be adopted and re-presented by men, appropriation that points to the author’s conflicted stance speaking with Winona’s voice. “In early times I was Ojinjintka, which means rose. Thomas McNulty tried very hard to say this name, but he failed, and so he gave me my dead cousin’s name because it was easier in his mouth. Winona means first-born. I was not first-born.”

The best books of 2020 / Literary fiction

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

The best books of 2020: Our critics select their picks of the year

Literary fiction

Estelle Birdy

This year's literary fiction offerings blasted a much-needed path to other worlds.

When you hit the last page of Anne Enright's Actress (Jonathan Cape, €19.60) you take a breath and dive straight back in again. Showcasing her mastery of the sentence and her extraordinary emotional intelligence as she explores the relationship between an actress and daughter, it's moving but never sentimental, funny but never pastiche.

In Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell (Tinder Press, €19.99), we're transported to Shakespeare's home -although the man himself is never named. The title refers to Shakespeare's ill-fated son who died at the age of 11, but it is Shakespeare's wife, known in the book as Agnes, who takes centre stage in this strangely modern story of life in a plague-worn Warwickshire village. Hamnet won this year's Women's Prize for Fiction.

Sebastian Barry

A Thousand Moons (Faber & Faber, €16.99) sees Sebastian Barry at his powerful, lyrical best. It's an ambitious sequel to the Costa-winning Days Without End but easily read as a standalone piece. Barry (inset)continues his multi-book exploration of the Irish diaspora through generations of the McNulty and Dunne clans. Identity, culture, gender and race are examined sensitively through the eyes of Winona, a Native American girl adopted by the cross-dressing Thomas McNulty and his partner John Cole during the American Indian Wars.

Another sequel, featuring a complicated young woman, Tsitsi Dangerengba's Booker shortlisted This Mournable Body (Faber, €17.99) is a gem. This follow-up to 1988's Nervous Conditions sees the central character Tambu all grown up. Set in 1990s' Harare, this is a powerful, magical novel that considers race and colonialism through Tambu's eyes as she turns her village into an ecotourism location.

There's a universality to Donal Ryan's stories, never more so than in the Eason Novel of the Year, Strange Flowers (Transworld, €11.99). Set in the 1960s in Tipperary, where we meet the Gladney family, whose village is rocked by the disappearance of their daughter and her reappearance some years later, with her unusual family in tow. Ryan's love of people pours from every page.

I needed more sun and more Africa and I got both in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's The First Woman (One World, €20.50). Growing up in Idi Amin's Uganda, Kirabo is a young girl searching for her maternal origins. This is a funny, funny book, filled with magic and ancestry. Transported indeed.

Estelle Birdy is a writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Ravelling, will be published by Lilliput Press in 2021

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