Well, at first glance, the long list of English-language Bookshops seems sluggish and boring. However, if you look more closely at the list, the logic of the judges becomes very clear. This time the list includes novels that need a kind of kick in life. These are quite interesting books, which can all be divided into three, say, rough categories. The first one is for live readers (books with blood and story). The second - strange books, where there is, however, such a powerful glimmer of talent that the book should be PRed as actively as possible, because the talent is talent, and the tangible strangeness - the product is still not the most popular. And the third is the novels (a couple of big writers, a few writers of color, everything is very tidy).
Now let's see what we have to study this year:
1. A.L. Kennedy (UK) - Serious Sweet (Jonathan Cape) - here, that unique thick novel. The author is a Scottish woman, her books are always a little gloomy, with the reality twisted in the wrong direction, the heroes of which are digging in themselves or in the world around them. The present novel, however, suddenly seems even interesting, probably, because of it about the accountant and the civil servant of not fashionable age 40 + + + +. They're not doing so well, but here they meet.
2. Deborah Levy (UK) - Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton) - a novel from the strange category. Anthropologist Sophia tries to understand what kind of mysterious illness her mother suffers from, and if it is not an aggravation of bad character. Together with her mother, she goes somewhere on the coast of Spain for advice to a specialist, where the symbolism and study of female sexuality begins.
3. Graeme Macrae Burnet (UK) - His Bloody Project (Contraband) - for living readers. It's just so you know, the detective is real. True crime, but still, the novel by Bernette - the only representative of directly entertaining fiction in the list. The teenager Roderick McRae in 1869 kills three people because he can. I take this opportunity to advise everyone on the beautiful nonfiction of Judith Flanders The Invention of Murder. In it, Flanders a little bit dry and mournful, but quite detailed and convincingly tells how the greedy public interest in such here bloody cases and subsequent trials actually formed the paradigm of the British detective. (It becomes clear why there was so much in the popular detective prose of murderers and suspicious wives, in general, terrible to recommend).
4. David Means (US) - Hystopia (Faber & Faber) - acidic Stephen King, so to speak. Kennedy was not killed, although tried many times, from Vietnam, come back veterans who are diligently treated by the brain, and those who are not treated in every way catch up with a special section of the FBI on mental hygiene. Like, deep, but like, square.
5. Ian McGuire (UK) - The North Water (Scribner UK) - that's what I was talking about. In Britain, meanwhile, there is a literary course on cold literature coming up everywhere. Here's what happens if we repeat for a long time that winter is close. Yorkshire whaling vessel, harpooners, Arctic, permafrost, many stinking men and terrible revenge. In other words, it's very exciting.
6. Wyl Menmuir (UK) - The Many (Salt) - see above about trends, but in general, it is good, if our publishers have already looked at Andrew Michael Hurley's book The Loney, which pulled from the bottom of this slightly stirred up interest in some wild in all senses of the English tradition. Not the one about tea sets, downtown Abbey and the fact that good manners are needed to hide the hatred for neighbors. And the one with a distinct sense of northerness, terrible fairy tales, abandoned fishing villages and superstitions that come to life when wai-fi goes missing.
7. Ottessa Moshfegh (US) - Eileen (Jonathan Cape) - a lot about this novel was talked about last year, in particular, because of how new for the recent course of literature the author had a heroine. Eileen is a rather lively and disgusting person, and about it about the whole novel, but they write that not to come off - apparently, as from squeezing out pimples.
8. David Szalay (Canada-UK) - All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape) - a novel of nine stories about Europe and the people who live in it and learn something there, but mostly, the life, then itself. Some kind of "Cloud Atlas", 2nd edition, extended and supplemented.
9. Madeleine Thien (Canada) - Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta Books) - something interesting. Firstly, about the big Chinese family, and secondly, against the background of political events in China of the twentieth century. The three generations of women in the Moscow commune will come out as a replacement for our realities, and here we are not tired yet. On the other hand, Chinese English-language prose is sometimes simply stunning, for example, there is such an American-Chinese writer as June Li, who naturally wrote the Chinese "Secret History" - and this book simply cannot be detached from at all.