It’s taken over half a century, but the Booker longlisting of Alan Garner is recognition at last for an under-sung national treasure too often pigeonholed as “just” a children’s writer. Over the decades his writing has deepened and clarified and Treacle Walker, a flinty little fable about a convalescent boy visited by a rag-and-bone man, reads like a perfect distillation of his long-worked themes: mythology, archaeology, childhood, the transient rhythms of vernacular speech, deep time and inner visions.
This is a thoughtfully curated list which spotlights small presses and ignores some of the biggest names (Hanya Yanagihara and Jennnifer Egan, Ian McEwan with his strongest novel in years, the forthcoming Lessons) for quieter pleasures and rewarding surprises. Like Treacle Walker, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is another miracle of concision, compressing the usually capacious novel form into diamond. This story of an Irish coal merchant in the 1980s who is forced to confront what the whole town ignores – the church’s institutional abuse of young women – wastes not a word, implications rippling out from the brief text. Another Irish novel, The Colony by Audrey Magee, about an English painter visiting a tiny Irish island, is set in the era of the Troubles, but shades into broader allegory about power, colonialism, marginalised languages and even Brexit.
