Philip Hensher

Spectator Books of the Year: Philip Hensher on a good year for novels

A good year for novels. Rachel Cusk’s Transit (Cape, £16.99) is a brilliant and original enterprise, as well as a hymn to the joys of the good story. Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton (Viking, £12.99) shouldn’t work, but its frail texture was a triumph of tenderness, and sent me back to her excellent Olive Kitteridge. And I loved David Szalay’s scabrous, intelligent and hugely engaging All That Man Is (Cape, £14.99). My major discovery, though, was Joy Williams, whose collected stories, The Visiting Privilege (Tuskar Rock, £16.99), proved an electric and dangerously human volume. Not making sense, and making too much sense, is Williams’s alarming territory. You will probably do what I did afterwards, and order her old novels from America — I don’t think they were ever published here. Cheever would have liked her Breaking and Entering in particular.

In non-fiction, Edmund Gordon did a splendid job with the first Angela Carter biography (The Invention of Angela Carter, Chatto, £25). The responsibility of the research and the just sobriety of his writing have produced a book which will always have a special place on the Carter shelf. Stanley Price’s James Joyce and Italo Svevo: The Story of a Friendship (Somerville Press, £14) was lovely, even joyous. Srinath Raghavan’s India’s War (Allen Lane, £30) is a book that has unearthed a lot of interesting and generally unfamiliar material. Unusually for this subject, it had no particular axe to grind or point to prove.

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