Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column. Each month, we'll present a shortlist of new releases read and recommended by The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and The Book Show's Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange — alongside freelance writers and book reviewers. This month, we're thrilled to present recommendations from Declan Fry.
All four read voraciously and widely, and the only guidelines we gave them were: make it a new release; make it something you think is great.
The resulting list features new novels from both a Booker Prize winner and a Pulitzer Prize winner; the latest boundary-pushing book from Canadian writer Sheila Heti; a “luminous” collection from an Australian poet; and a surprising and poetic novel set on a small island off the west coast of Ireland, against the backdrop of the Troubles.
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
Corsair (Hachette)
Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad was revelatory – a multi-voiced, multi-styled collection of linked stories that explored the randomness and wonder of human connection. The Candy House is being marketed as a "sibling novel" to Goon Squad, though I'd describe it as a continuation.
Egan picks up where she left off, delivering a new set of stories, linked by characters and incidents that keen readers will recognise from the last book. There's the immediate temptation to grab pens and a huge piece of butcher's paper to map out the world of connection that Egan has created. That said, you don't need to have read Goon Squad to enjoy this new book — it does work as a standalone piece.
Last time, the overarching theme was music; this time it's the internet, and memory. The first character we meet (or: re-meet) is Bix Bouton, a Zuckerberg-like "tech demigod", who in 2010 is on the hunt for his next big idea. Within a decade his company has created Own Your Unconscious, where you can download your memories to the cloud and access them any time you like – and look at everyone else's too. It's a deliciously dangerous idea.
Fans of Goon Squad will love this follow-up, which takes a sci-fi turn as it explores the implications of this technology. Egan's skill at creating fully rounded, empathetic characters in just a handful of pages is once again on show; you won't forget Lulu, the former spy reeling from a mission-gone-wrong, or Alfred, the man with a habit of screaming in public in the hope of eliciting an authentic response from the people around him.
The Candy House is a marvel of imagination, and a pleasure to read. CN
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
Picador (Pan Macmillan)
Douglas Stuart's debut novel Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize and was lauded for its grim story of a boy's coming of age in a family afflicted by addiction and poverty in 80s Glasgow. Surely, the pressure to create a worthy follow-up to such a triumph would give anyone writer's block, but luckily Stuart had already written his second novel by the time he won. Really, Stuart doesn't need luck as a writer; he is a gifted storyteller.
As in Shuggie Bain, the setting is the Glasgow tenements; again, there's an alcoholic mother and her sensitive son, and wildly evocative character names (Mo-Maw, Tattie-bogle, Ha-Ha and St Christopher). This story, though, is set in the 90s, when street wars between Protestants and Catholics are occupying restless teens who, with no hope of secure employment in this post-Thatcher world, are ready to enact "cheerful violence".
Mungo is 15 and struggles to live up to the hypermasculine ideals of his community. When he meets an equally sensitive James, his stirring sexuality is finally given a focus — and together they delight in their small oasis of exploration and acceptance, despite the danger of being discovered. As we're told, "there's nothing more shameful than being a poofter; powerless, soft as a woman".
When Mungo learns James is Catholic he's not just worried about being outed as gay, he's worried about his brother Hamish's reaction to Mungo's friendship with a "Fenian"; after all, Hamish (or Ha-Ha) is the "stone-washed emperor" of the local Protestant gang.
Mungo is constantly under pressure to prove his manhood, and his mother's solution is to send him on a fishing weekend with two men of dubious character. Surely, this can't end well.
Young Mungo is not just a worthy successor to Shuggie Bain, it's an astonishingly accomplished novel in its own right. SL
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Harvill Secker (Penguin)
Sheila Heti's latest novel reads like a fable: a fable about mortality, a fable about meaning. It is an adventurous, kaleidoscopic journey that recalls, in its concern with theology and the nature of our existence on earth, authors like Clarice Lispector and Simone Weil.
Mira, the novel's protagonist, studies at the prestigious American Academy of American Critics, pre-internet (perhaps explaining the novel's whimsical, early 00s tone, when film posters for Amélie felt more inescapable than bad tweets). Mira's father dies; she enters a leaf; she returns to earth. Forget plot synopses: this book doesn't need one. Neither will you.
Heti aims – as we all should – to discover enchantment in a disenchanted world, to see beneath the surface of things, dispensing, for the most part, with potted biographies and scene-setting. She writes in a mode that can turn from earnestness to eyebrow-raising drollery in a trick (academia, as ever, comes in for a beating). It's endearing and it's brave and it's something we might hope to see more of in fiction.
Documenting the relationship between life and art, Pure Colour depicts a world in which our existence is one of first drafts and workings out, sans the privilege of godlike indulgences: here, "the earth is heating up in advance of its destruction by God, who has decided that the first draft of existence contained too many flaws".
The idea of creation as life-affirming – a burgeoning, pantheist eruption – informs Pure Colour's fairytale rhythm. It is a rhythm that may raise eyebrows, but remember: it's like those jazz songs about smoke getting in your eyes. A way of smiling through the pain.
It's tempting, in that respect, to read the passing of Heti's father into the book. But even if there were no intrusion of the biographical here, the hum of sadness would remain audible.
No doubt Pure Colour, like Heti's previous books, will torment the literal-minded, the prescriptive, the wilfully bored and boring. The rest of us can safely rejoice. DF
Ideas of Travel by Peter Boyle
Vagabond Press
One of the joys of writing in Australia right now is the ability to do so at the same time as poet Peter Boyle. Late in his career, Boyle has embarked on one of the most sustained flights of inspiration of any writer currently working. The results are luminous.
As in his previous books, Boyle is deeply concerned with metaphysics. The poet Michael Dransfield once wrote: "Day is so deep already with involvement" – a line which feels apposite to Boyle's work to date. His poet-narrators travel through dreamscapes, places both remembered and imagined, their journeys inviting as many questions as answers.
The passage of time has brought a new, plain-spoken quality to Boyle's verse. An accomplished translator, he sometimes writes lines that feel influenced by Spanish: at one point the poet narrator imagines "living / for several years after my death, / thinned down a little, quietly happy, / in Caracas".
It's a mode particularly well-suited to the prose poem, in which dream logic, metaphysical questions and the nature of existence are always liable to become – as in the work of Philip Hammial, or Bella Li – humorous or absurd ("If we could open / even the way an unused / book of blank lined pages / will open, // not even to be filled / but simply for the openness, / held towards the world.").
In this, Heti's and Boyle's books form a kind of dialogue, each a meditation on how infinity is, as Boyle writes, always "waiting to come in". DF
The Colony by Audrey Magee
Faber (Allen and Unwin)
The language in this Irish novel keeps moving, flowing, shifting. I'm reaching for words like "astonishing" and "exquisite" to describe the surprise and the poetry in The Colony, but they aren't enough; don't do justice to its humour, menace, dialogue, and the pulse of political violence that shapes it.
The story takes place on a small island off the west coast of Ireland in 1979. It has only 92 people living on it, in 12 families, and is 9 or 10 miles from the mainland. Not far on a motor launch, but it feels a lot longer in a currach — a type of boat rowed with straight oars that look like sticks, by a pair of boatmen who roll their eyes at their ridiculous cargo: English artist Mr Lloyd. The sea is wild, but the artist is a paying passenger, demanding authenticity with no idea of what that means.
"You'll be grand, Mr Lloyd," these Irishmen say, again and again.
The artist wants a summer of grey-blue cliffs and a mysterious sea. He wants to be fed and looked after. He may even want an acolyte. But what he doesn't want is competition. Accordingly, he is outraged to discover that a charming Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Masson, will also be spending summer on the island, studying remnant Irish speakers for an academic treatise.
The islanders are ready to sit back and be entertained: Mairéad, Bean Uí Néill, Bean Uí Fhloinn and Aine in particular, the women of the piece. But they also know this competition is going to be dangerous, disruptive.
As we read the book's stories of longing and anger, loss and poverty, conflict and hope, the style shifts, page by page. Some characters require fragments and self-conscious inner dialogue; others have diatribes; yet another has lyrical descriptions.
Meanwhile, the whole story is interspersed with harsh, half-page accounts of killings from all sides of politics that set up a beat throughout the novel. And this violence drums closer and closer to the island as the pages keep turning. KE
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