Autism

As a poet, Ocean Vuong has won every prize going. Now here’s The Emperor of Gladness, his second novel. His first, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a coming-of-age story, is currently being filmed. This latest oneis wild, unwieldy and too long. It is fiction/autofiction mixed with 19th- and 20th-century warfare, plus contemporary angst and craziness. It has one preposterous scene that you wish were true, and never has a title been so misleading. It’s a book of moral, imaginative ideas with gripping stories, wonderful characters and writing that’s poetic and witty. I loved it. It opens with an introduction to the rural town of East Gladness, Connecticut, its citizens ‘not

When her brother Lionel was born in 1949, ‘the concept of neurodiversity didn’t exist’, writes Caroline Elton. The subtitle of her profoundly moving memoir, ‘A Portrait of My Autistic Brother’, is misleading. The book is really about the experience of being the sibling of a person who is not like you. Lionel was nine years Elton’s senior, so she draws on their mother’s testimony to relate his infancy and childhood, turning to her own recollections for the later years. He learnt to read before he could speak, played the piano faultlessly by ear (his mother taught him), and could tell you what day of the week a date would fall

Shortly before Bill Gates’s seventh birthday in 1962, his parents stuffed their son into a button-down shirt and blazer for a visit to Century 21, a bold showcase of scientific prowess in their home town of Seattle. This futuristic fair was intended as the nation’s rebuff to Soviet Russia following the Sputnik satellite launch, which sparked the space race. The family enjoyed the new 600ft Space Needle. They also saw the Mercury capsule that carried the first American into space; Ford’s concept of a six-wheeled nuclear-powered car; and IBM’s idea of a cheap computer, costing $100,000. Best of all in the boy’s view was rattling around on the Wild Mouse

Dara McAnulty is a teenage naturalist from Northern Ireland. He has autism; so do his brother, sister and mother — his father, a conservation scientist, is the odd one out. This book records a year in the life of a gifted boy in an unusual family. Minutely detailed observations of birds, insects, trees and weather are woven into an ecstatic description of the unrolling of the seasons. It is also an impassioned and original plea for protection for ‘our delicate and changing biosphere’. The diary is valuable in several ways. The writing of it is necessary to Dara himself, his means of processing his experiences. When he’s outside, absorbed in

‘We lived in a country that rewarded its worst people. We lived in a society where the villains were favoured to win.’ So says Seema, the 29-year-old wife of hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen in Gary Shteyngart’s fourth novel, Lake Success. The relationship between fiction and the world of high finance has a complicated history. Having largely ignored Wall Street — Tom Wolfe, Bret Easton Ellis and F. Scott Fitzgerald aside — novelists found in the crash of 2008 a galvanic moment. Suddenly bankers were everywhere, from Sebastian Faulks to John Lanchester to Anne Enright, while younger writers such as Adam Haslett and Zia Haider Rahman wrote memorable novels that made

The Reason I Jump, by the autistic Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida, was a surprise bestseller in 2013. Rendered as a series of answers to the questions that puzzled those around him, Higashida’s lyrical explanations of his compulsions and unusual behaviours were revelatory and uplifting. Readers felt they understood the condition better as a result. Higashida was described as non-verbal; he composed his earlier book by touching letters on a card with an alphabet grid or tracing them on the palm of a hand. The spelled-out words were transcribed and the text edited by his mother. This sequel, Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight, has been edited together from Higashida’s

This 600-page, single-paragraph novel shuttles back and forth across time between the perspectives of an elderly and confused psychiatrist, a tank commander in Iraq, an autistic computer genius, the autistic computer genius’s mother and a closeted MI6 spy who thinks his cock is talking to him — which, for this stage in Will Self’s writing career, is pretty much situation normal. Readers of Umbrella (2012) and Shark (2014) will know the score already, as this is the third instalment in a loose trilogy following Self’s recurring psychotherapist Zack Busner as well as several generations of a family called Death (De’Ath for the posh ones). They will also know that these