This gorgeous novel is knotty with bitter nuance: for instance, Sonia recalls her grandparents had Jewish friends, “but during the summers of heightened violence these friends always disappeared”. She plans to lick her wounds in seclusion, but is instead drawn by a charismatic director, Mariam, to take part in a subversive production of Hamlet, to be performed in classical Arabic and staged in the West Bank. Enter Ghost, her second novel, follows Sonia, a successful actor, from her London home and a failed affair to visit her sister in her family’s homeland, in Haifa. And lines like: “I felt ancient, from some elderly generation that didn’t understand the basics of the twenty-first century.” Enter Ghost, by Isabella Hammad (Jonathan Cape)īritish-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad is on this year’s Granta Best British Young Novelists list. There were so many lines and moments that felt resonant to this reader, who grew up in the ’90s – from the Kurt Cobain shrine and ironic fashion statement of wearing “Chucks” with dresses, to the horrified reassessment of learned norms of gender and consent. And of course, the true-crime podcast that frames much of the plot and our assumptions about crime and criminals (and who they are) is also under Makkai’s very canny microscope. And when her sort-of-estranged husband contacts her to confess an artist ex-girlfriend has gone viral with a claim of sexual coercion, she’s also forced to reckon with her ideas of sex and power – and the culture. Her reckoning with the case, in this place from her past, also becomes a reckoning with who she is and how this place shaped her. But she’s soon drawn to the flaws in the case and the possibility the school athletic trainer jailed for Thalia’s murder might be innocent. When Bodie Kane returns to the elite boarding school where she remembers being miserable, to teach a course on podcasting, she doesn’t expect to find herself investigating the case of her murdered former roommate Thalia, alongside her students. (How could you not love a novel that does all these things?) I thoroughly enjoyed this very clever, intricately characterised blend of ’90s campus novel, dark academia, murder mystery and meta commentary on true crime. I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Hachette) Lynch’s central question is less “how might this happen?” than “how would it feel if this happens?” – and especially, heartrendingly, “would you know when to leave?” I will not stop thinking about this novel for a long time. While Prophet Song has been compared to 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, its systems of oppression are less inventive and therefore, in a time when Donald Trump looks like he may be re-elected in the US and the Israel-Gaza war is raging, more terrifying.įor me, it felt more like The Road (which Lynch has cited as an influence), Philip Roth’s excellent The Plot Against America (which imagines a fascist-leaning America during World War II) and, in places, Children of Men – particularly with its emotional heft. Eilish describes a “creeping sense of double time as though her life were unfolding twice along parallel paths”. As societal collapse escalates – in a way recognisable from real-life authoritarian regimes worldwide – so does the tension between ordinary family life and the previously unimaginable. Politics infiltrates her workplace, young men are drafted into army service and the population begins to monitor itself. In the opening pages, Eilish Stack, a scientist and mother of four, opens the door to the secret police looking for her trade unionist husband, who will soon be disappeared. The winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize is a claustrophobic, relentless, yet often darkly beautiful dystopic novel, set in a parallel version of Ireland with a recently elected authoritarian government. FICTION Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch (Oneworld) And, of course, they’re all simply excellent reads, beautifully executed. I can see that the books that stayed with me have something in common, too: they all helped me make sense of the strange, fast-changing world we’re living in right now. But looking back to decide my favourite books of 2023, I realised that’s not even remotely true – it was tough to whittle my picks down to eight. Hanging out in Imprints recently, I moaned that I’d had a bad reading year.
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