Fiction

They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading south in search of hill country music that could make the record company (and, relatively, the recorder) rich. The singer would get a flat fee of $30. Among themselves, over a beer, the catchers called it panning for gold, diving for pearls, trapping fireflies in a jar. Their territory was the far beyond, where ‘people played banjos and fiddles, washboards and dulcimers… Songs poured through the hills like migrating salmon.’ Dogs scramble into treetops; bears grab at driftwood; hundreds of thousands are left homeless Xan Brooks’s second novel focuses on

Garth Greenwell has made a name for himself as a chronicler of touch. In his previous novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), the intimacy of a lover’s hand or the frisson of something much darker – the spit, the slap of a BDSM session – could expand to fill whole paragraphs: stories in themselves of layered sensation and reminiscence. Early in the opening sequence of Small Rain, the unnamed narrator spends close to two pages musing on the ‘shock’ of when a nurse ‘softly stroked or rubbed my ankle’. But now the touch is different. This is not a novel of sexual escapades, but pain – like

An earworm from the time of Covid: the sound of Connell and Marianne having breathless sex, bedsprings squeaking. I’m talking not about 2020’s hit TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestselling second novel, Normal People but about the relentless piss-take featured on BBC Radio 4’s Dead Ringers. After every few skits the show would cut to an audio clip of the two undergraduates going hard at it. The joke was in the repetition – an exaggeration of the extraordinary density of earnest sex scenes in Rooney’s writing. It was crude, cruel and very funny. There is a wider than usual gulf between the writer Rooney wants to be and the writer

Nothing is ever quite as it seems in the world of Olga Tokarczuk. Her latest novel starts with an epigraph taken from Fernando Pessoa: ‘The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.’ Wild deer were murder suspects in her surreal and beautiful 2018 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. This time nature itself plays a significant role. A daily glass or three of schwarmerei restores good cheer, sometimes generating hallucinogenic euphoria Though the novel describes itself as ‘a horror story’, it’s more a salutation to the power of the natural world and a celebration of difference. Tokarczuk

Creation Lake, by the American author Rachel Kushner, is a dazzling, genre-defying novel, satirical yet profound. In her 2018 novel The Mars Room, Kushner took us inside the US prison system and eviscerated it. Here she goes back a decade, as well as 40,000 years, interweaving into the main plot notes on the extinction of the Neanderthals. The book is a spy thriller which also interrogates the human condition, our origins, and the conundrum of mankind’s future.   The year is presumably 2013 (the song ‘Get Lucky’ blasts from every radio) and a 34-year-old American spy named Sadie Smith has landed in France, nursing a bruised ego after a failed FBI

When was the last time you described – or indeed thought of – someone’s face as ‘even-featured’, ‘angular’ or ‘refined’? If the answer is never, I suspect you’re not a novelist, and definitely not one of the William Boyd, old-school kind. In 1983 Boyd was among the 20 writers on Granta’s famously influential list of Best Young British Novelists, along with the generation-defining likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. In the decades since, however, he’s increasingly moved away from more obviously literary fiction towards the sort that’s earned him the routine (and accurate) label of ‘master storyteller’. As in his earlier work, there’s still plenty

Mark Haddon’s latest collection of short stories, Dogs and Monsters, uses myth and history as springboards into mesmerising accounts of isolation, tragedy and, of course, dogs, which are a motif throughout, from the hounds who mistakenly tear apart their owner Actaeon, to one who befriends St Antony at his lowest point. Haddon monitors the borderlines between man and beast, divine and mortal, and what’s real and what isn’t. In ‘The Mother’s Story’, a reimagining of the Minotaur myth, the action is transported to quasi-medieval England. The first-person narrator is Pasiphae (though unnamed), whose ruthless husband has locked up her son Paul, born ‘a moon calf’. Horribly abused, Paul is transformed

Lee Child has sold more than 200 million books. He reckons his royalties at about a dollar per book. He doesn’t write short stories to make money. He contributes to anthologies, largely pro bono. ‘Fabergé eggs they ain’t,’ he says, in the introduction to this collection of 20 stories, but they are real gems nonetheless. With no global readership to worry about and no commercial interests involved, Child was free to have fun. And fun he has with the short story form, shooting from the hip – ‘no need’, as he says, ‘to save anything for Chapter 17’. The trademark economy of style is faultless, each cop, hitman, fixer or

Last year, the Proms had a ‘Northern Soul’ special concert; and Benjamin Myers won the Goldsmith’s Prize for Cuddy, his polyphonic novel about St Cuthbert’s afterlife. I do not think he will win the prize again this year for Rare Singles, his novel about Northern Soul. I am glad about the Prom though, since I knew very little about the music; and listening to it did not appreciably deepen my enjoyment of this novel. Sentimentality is not a bad thing per se, but it is a difficult genre to do well, and Myers doesn’t do it half badly. The central figure is Earlon ‘Bucky’ Bronco, an elderly American widower wracked