The finest fiction of the year, according to BBC Culture, ranges from a retelling of George Orwell's 1984 to a biography of the Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi.
Cynthia Nixon's Julia
After the UK copyright for Orwell's 1984 expired in 2021, the daunting job of rewriting the dystopian classic from Julia's viewpoint was taken up by US writer and professor Newman. In her work, she addresses long-standing feminist critiques that Orwell ignored in 1984 by exploring the intricate lives and interactions of women under the dictatorship. Comparable to Jean Rhys's lauded 1966 prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Julia accomplishes more than just fan fiction. Julia is praised by The Guardian as "a complex and empathic vision that stands up well beside Orwell’s original," and by The Telegraph as "a masterpiece." Newman is said to have transformed Orwell’s characters into something really distinctive. (Real Life)
Mike McCormack's This Plague of Souls
In the opening scene of This Plague of Souls, our hero Nealon is making a long-awaited return to the farm in rural Ireland where he was born and raised. Even though his wife and kids are nowhere to be found, he continues to get calls from an unknown number. McCormack's latest work is just as critically lauded as his last one, Solar Bones, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. "The Irish master of tension returns," The Times' John Self says. "This Plague of Souls, a late entry for the most interesting novel of the year, is more straightforwardly expressed, but remains a fully-fledged tale of the unexpected." A solitary genius, McCormack's clear phrases fitting together to form an unsettling and memorable structure, as the Scotsman puts it. Both the physical and the metaphysical aspects are harsh. (LB)
Sam Harvey's Orbital
Six astronauts from different parts of the globe spend a single day on the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth, while the events of Harvey's little book unfold. Harvey takes note of their daily routines and channels the peculiarity of their life as they complete 16 orbits around the globe and see 16 sunrises. How would it feel to sleep while suspended in midair, vaguely aware that a chaotic Earth beneath you is spinning?" asks the New Yorker. There's an innate sense of precise magic in Harvey's writing. According to The FT: "In contrast to the bleak apocalyptic tone of much contemporary climate fiction, Orbital's luminous descriptions remind us of the beauty at stake when humanity plays fast and loose with our single, and singular, blue marble." (Real Life)
Lyrics by Paul Lynch for Prayer Song
The National Alliance, an ultra-right political party, takes power in a dystopian Ireland in this year's Booker Prize winner. The country is on the brink of authoritarianism. A civil war breaks out as soon as civil freedoms begin to dwindle. Booker judge Esi Edugyan has said that Lynch "flinches from nothing" and that the author has the "heart of a poet" who can generate an intense reading experience via the use of repetition and repeated themes. Bold and courageous, this is an emotional narrative accomplishment. Written in the syntax of terror, according to the Washington Post. Every statement flows into the next without pausing for thought. (LB)
Obeyance: A Sarah Bernstein Study
One of Granta's emerging British authors of 2023, Sarah Bernstein's Study for Obedience was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It depicts the story of a lady who leaves her hometown and moves to a northern nation to take a job as a maid for her brother, when his wife leaves him. The townspeople' animosity against her intensifies when a chain reaction of unfortunate occurrences occurs shortly after her arrival, including a potato blight and collective bovine hysteria. The work is described as "Beguiling and smart" by the Daily Telegraph, who also note that Bernstein's style has a practiced coldness, all concision and steady flow. However, the tone becomes unsettling as the narrator's interactions with the locals transform into a cruel comedy. With its "meticulous, measured" style, Study for Obedience is characterized as "masterful" by the Observer. (LB)
Teju Cole's "Tremor"
"To read Tremor," according to the newspaper, "is to… be greeted with a swathe of astonishing images, formal ingenuity and raw, metamorphic emotion." Like Cole, the protagonist of Tremor—a third book by the author of Open City and Every Day is for the Thief—Tunde is a gifted photographer and professor of photography originally from Nigeria. Tunde thinks on his life, art, literature, history, memory, and his marriage to Sadako as he journeys from Massachusetts via Maine to Lagos. "A masterclass in flash-fiction portraitures," The Guardian states, "this is a book that widens and unsettles the horizons of our 21st-Century experience, with a vivid sense of the Earth-shaking tremors under the surface of our shared lives and cultures." (Real Life)