China Miéville, author
I was sideswiped by Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child. A brilliant, strange book that challenged me in the most exhilarating way, with its fractured language and dream-cinema visions, the sense it bestowed of walking through a corridor full of echoes. Echoes of a less elliptical but no-less political kind haunt Jordy Rosenberg’s astounding Night Night Fawn. I guess you could call it a family novel? But it’s at least as much about fascism as it is about the family – as well as about unsettling linkages between the two. And for horrors and rage in a nonfiction register, Jonas Marvin’s The Breaking of the English Working Class is an indispensable – and beautifully written – essay on decades of structural, economic and psychic violence. The feeling it provoked in me brought to mind John Berger’s phrase “undefeated despair”.
