Category Archives: Fiction

Marian Keyes: ‘Rehab was one of the happiest times of my life’

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As her beloved character Rachel returns, older and sober, the Irish author discusses her own journey from addiction to recovery - and the sexist snobbery that surrounds her work

Marian Keyes is in bed. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, but she has just got back from a funeral and was feeling chilly. “It was a beautiful send off,” she says in her southern Irish lilt, as reassurance that she’s OK to talk. She is wearing a lilac hoodie and flashes a pastel pink manicure (a Keyes heroine would know the shade) as she rearranges the pillows to get comfy. Within a few minutes it feels as if we are both having tea and biscuits under the duvet at her Dún Laoghaire home outside Dublin, as she gives me a virtual tour of her bedroom.

So far, so Marian Keyes. Loved by readers for her chatty style and satisfying storylines, she was for many years dubbed the queen of chick lit, a phrase now as passé as Daniel Cleaver’s chat-up lines in Bridget Jones’s Diary. In fact, her novels have tackled hefty issues such as addiction (Rachel’s Holiday), bereavement (Anybody Out There), domestic violence (This Charming Man) and depression (The Mystery of Mercy Close), always with her trademark lightness of touch. Yet despite selling more than 35m copies over the years, she is too often dismissed as a popular writer of books with pink covers (both of which are fine by her, thanks for asking).

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‘The outrage had been percolating…’ The winner of our graphic short story prize 2021

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A funeral in Germany provides the setting for our winning story in this year’s Cape/Observer/Comica award for emerging cartoonists. It was a year of fierce competition – and much pandemic-fuelled anxiety

There can’t be many things more cheering on a dark January night than having to tell someone they’ve won a prize, and when I telephone Astrid Goldsmith to give her just such a bit of good news, her reaction is everything I hoped it would be. For a while, Goldsmith, an animator who lives in Folkestone where she makes stop-motion films in her garage, struggles to speak in full sentences. She is just so thrilled. “That is the greatest compliment,” she says, when I tell her that her story, A Funeral in Freiburg, the winner of this year’s Observer/Jonathan Cape graphic short story prize, brings to mind the work of that genius Posy Simmonds. “I love her tone. I always have.”

Goldsmith’s entry is based on a real event: the funeral of her paternal grandmother in Germany in 2015. “The outrage had been percolating for a while,” she says, with a laugh. “But I only came to write it after my first baby was born, while I was breastfeeding: I drew it all on one of those trays with arms that invalids use in bed.” Her story revolves around the difficulties involved in organising a Jewish funeral service in a place – Freiburg, in the Black Forest – where the rabbi has been imprisoned for embezzlement, and the Jewish cemetery is full. The woman in charge is, very difficult, refusing even to believe that Gisela Goldschmidt was really Jewish (at the age of 18, Astrid’s grandmother fled Germany for Zimbabwe, only returning after the war was over). Her rules and regulations, not to mention her insistence on the performance of certain rituals, infuriate the Goldsmith family. But what choice do they have? It is a case of her way, or no proper funeral at all.

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Where to start with: Agatha Christie

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Kicking off our new monthly guides to an author’s work, crime novelist Janice Hallett puts the spotlight on the creator of Miss Marple and Poirot

What with the chart-topping success of Richard Osman’s novels, and a new series by the Rev Richard Coles due later this year, cosy crime fiction seems to be having its moment. If you’ve already raced your way through The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice, why not try picking up a novel by the original queen of crime herself? Janice Hallett, whose bestselling crime novels The Appeal and The Twyford Code have seen her dubbed “a modern Agatha Christie” has put together a handy list to help you choose which one to pick.

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Isabel Allende: ‘I still have the same rage’

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The renowned author on the unfinished task of replacing the patriarchy, swapping 24,000 letters with her mother, and why she gives all her books away

Isabel Allende’s books have been translated into more than 42 languages and sold some 75m copies globally. Her career spans fiction and nonfiction, and she’s also created the Isabel Allende Foundation in memory of her daughter (who died in 1992), working to empower women and girls around the world. Her new novel, Violeta, spans 100 years and recounts the turbulent life and times of its South American heroine. Allende, 79, who was born in Peru and raised in Chile, spoke from the study of her home in California, where she writes daily.

How did Violeta begin?
The idea started when my mother died, right before the current pandemic hit. She was born in 1920 when the influenza pandemic reached Latin America, so it was almost natural to have the two bookends of the novel be pandemics. When I write, I don’t have a plan and I don’t have a message – I just want people to come with me, to let me tell them a story.

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Hanya Yanagihara: ‘I have the right to write about whatever I want’

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To Paradise, the new novel from the writer of A Little Life, has been widely hailed as a masterpiece. But where did she get the unflinching eye she turns on America’s idea of itself?

Hanya Yanagihara’s debut novel taught her not to give up her day job as a travel writer and editor. The People in the Trees was the story of a scientist jailed for sexually abusing children he adopted during his Nobel-winning research on a Pacific island. It impressed reviewers with its exhaustive inventiveness and its refusal to offer redemption or solace, but sold only a few thousand copies when it was published in 2013.

Two years later, the Manhattan-based writer released a novel that was twice as long and even less forgiving. It was about the fallout, among four college friends, from the appalling childhood sexual abuse of one of their group, and it hit the jackpot, becoming one of those vanishingly rare literary break-outs. Victoria Beckham and Dua Lipa declared themselves fans, while an equally passionate group of readers condemned it as gratuitous, even “evil”. A Little Life sold a quarter of a million print copies in the UK alone, where it was shortlisted for the Booker and the Women’s prize for fiction. But far from giving up her day job, Yanagihara took on a bigger one, as editor-in-chief of T, the New York Times style magazine.

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Bambi: cute, lovable, vulnerable … or a dark parable of antisemitic terror?

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A new translation of Felix Salten’s 1923 novel reasserts its original message that warns of Jewish persecution

It’s a saccharine sweet story about a young deer who finds love and friendship in a forest. But the original tale of Bambi, adapted by Disney in 1942, has much darker beginnings as an existential novel about persecution and antisemitism in 1920s Austria.

Now, a new translation seeks to reassert the rightful place of Felix Salten’s 1923 masterpiece in adult literature and shine a light on how Salten was trying to warn the world that Jews would be terrorised, dehumanised and murdered in the years to come. Far from being a children’s story, Bambi was actually a parable about the inhumane treatment and dangerous precariousness of Jews and other minorities in what was then an increasingly fascist world, the new translation will show.

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Joan Didion, American journalist and author, dies at age 87

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Unsparing observer of national politics and her own life, she won enormous acclaim for her memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion, the eminent journalist, author and anthropologist of contemporary American politics and culture – a singularly clear, precise voice across a multitude of subjects for more than 60 years – has died at her home in Manhattan, New York. She was 87 years old.

The cause of death was Parkinson’s disease, according to Paul Bogaards, an executive at Didion’s publisher Knopf.

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On my radar: Adjoa Andoh’s cultural highlights

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The actor on her hopes for Brixton’s new theatre, an offbeat western and the sophistication of African art

Adjoa Andoh was born in Bristol in 1963 and grew up in Wickwar, Gloucestershire. A veteran stage actor, she starred in His Dark Materials at the National Theatre and in the title role of an all-women of colour production of Richard II at the Globe in 2019. On TV, Andoh plays Lady Danbury in Bridgerton, which returns next year, and she will appear in season two of The Witcher on Netflix from 17 December. She lives in south London with her husband, the novelist Howard Cunnell, and their three children.

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Too much bosom: why The Wheel of Time is far from ‘great for women’

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Rosamund Pike, who stars in Amazon Prime’s forthcoming take on Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, says his female characters are role models. Really?

What is going on with Amazon Prime’s characterisation of The Wheel of Time? I ask this as a fantasy fan, someone who not only adores the classy stuff (NK Jemisin, Guy Gavriel Kay etc) but has also devotedly ploughed her way through The Belgariad, most of Terry Goodkind (until it got too crazy even for me) and Simon R Green. And how many people involved with the forthcoming adaptation have actually marathoned their way through all of the books?

My eyebrows were first raised back when the deal to adapt Robert Jordan’s extremely long series was announced in 2018, when head of Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke praised its “timely narrative featuring powerful women at the core”. Now, I read these books in my late teens, but my resounding memory of them was not of “powerful women”. In fact, I remember thinking Jordan’s depiction of women was pretty dismal – he might have packed in far more female characters than Tolkien ever did, but they’re constantly objectified, forever hoisting their bosoms around, adjusting their skirts – even getting spanked as punishment.

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Damon Galgut wins Booker prize with ‘spectacular’ novel The Promise

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The novelist takes the £50,000 prize with a ‘strong, unambiguous commentary on the history of South Africa and of humanity itself’

• Damon Galgut is a clear and unsurprising Booker winner

Damon Galgut has won the Booker prize for his portrait of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid. The judges praised The Promise as “a spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh”, and compared it to the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.

This is is the first time Galgut will be walking away with the £50,000 prize, despite having been shortlisted twice before.. The Promise is his ninth novel, and his first in seven years. He becomes the third South African to win the prestigious fiction prize, after JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. Through the lens of four sequential funerals, each taking place in a different decade, The Promise follows the Swarts, a white South African family who live on a farm outside Pretoria. The promise of the title is one the Swarts make – and fail to keep over the years – to give a home and land to the black woman who worked for them her whole life.

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Senegal’s Mohamed Mbougar Sarr wins top French literary prize

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Prix Goncourt goes to 31-year-old’s novel The Most Secret Memory of Men, praised for its ‘stunning energy’

The Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr has become the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to be awarded France’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.

The award, announced on Wednesday at the Drouant restaurant near the Opéra Garnier in Paris, was hailed as “symbolic” by the French literary establishment, 100 years after the prize – presented since 1867 – was first won by a Black author.

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Elizabeth Strout: ‘I’ve thought about death every day since I was 10′

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The novelist took the slow road to success but is now a Pulitzer-winner and a bestseller. As she returns to her much-loved creation Lucy Barton, she discusses childhood, loneliness – and perseverance

Three years ago, Elizabeth Strout was in New York sitting in on rehearsals for the stage version of her novel My Name Is Lucy Barton (a show that came to the Bridge theatre in London, directed by Richard Eyre) and was watching Laura Linney, an actor for whom she has the fondest regard, inch her way into the part. Linney stepped into the rehearsal space, pushed her spectacles on to the top of her head and started to murmur something about her character’s ex-husband – William. Strout, overhearing, exclaimed: “Oh William!” It was as if Linney had given her permission: she would write another Lucy Barton novel because William deserved a story of his own. Oh William! became the title of her new book and it has all the familiar pleasures of her writing: the clean prose, the slow reveals, the wisdom – what Hilary Mantel once described as “an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue” – the qualities that led to Strout winning the Pulitzer for fiction. But did she ever find out what was in Linney’s mind? “Laura has no memory of the moment at all, she was in her zone, doing whatever she was doing,” she laughs.

She is talking on Zoom – and as women of more or less the same age (she is 65), we find ourselves bonding instantly, commenting on our lame reflexes with technology, marvelling that we are able to talk at what seems an arm’s stretch and with the Atlantic between us. We confess to a dislike at having to look at ourselves on screen and reassure each other we look fine. Strout is sitting in what I guess to be her study, with pale yellow walls, books and paintings – a calm, civilised room. It feels absurdly easy to talk to her, as if we were catching up after a long gap.

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Sally Rooney turns down Israeli translation on political grounds

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The writer has refused to sell Hebrew translation rights to her latest novel Beautiful World, Where Are You due to her stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict

Sally Rooney has turned down an offer from the Israeli publisher that translated her two previous novels into Hebrew, due to her stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Irish author’s second novel Normal People was translated into 46 languages, and it was expected that Beautiful World, Where Are You would reach a similar number. However, Hebrew translation rights have not yet been sold, despite the publisher Modan putting in a bid.

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‘Solved’: the mystery of the ‘slut’ scrawled on The Grapes of Wrath manuscript

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Swedish academics think they can explain why the derogatory term appears at the end of Steinbeck’s text

The word “slut” scrawled at the end of the manuscript for John Steinbeck’s seminal novel The Grapes of Wrath may have been explained, thanks to a handful of Swedish academics.

The Grapes of Wrath was written by Steinbeck in a frenzy of creativity in under 100 days, between May and October 1938. Independent press SP Books released the first ever facsimile of the handwritten manuscript last week, showing Steinbeck’s increasingly tiny handwriting, his swear words, which were excised from the final novel – and a faint “slut”, written in red, at its conclusion.

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Breakfast at Tiffany’s at 60: the sharp romcom that grows darker with age

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Audrey Hepburn’s star-making turn as Holly Golightly remains as luminous as ever in Blake Edwards’ sweetened yet still bittersweet adaptation of Truman Capote’s novel

Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a sacred film in my household growing up. My mother’s VHS tape, fuzzily recorded off TV, was plastered in “do not tape over” warning labels, a defence I might have to explain to someone born 10 years later than I was. The opening credits on this worn copy were briefly disrupted with footage from the 1988 Wimbledon men’s final – still overlaid, in an altogether lovely technological blip, with the wistful strains of Henry Mancini’s Moon River theme. The warning labels dated from shortly after this unfortunate, swiftly aborted overlap.

I thus grew up thinking of Breakfast at Tiffany’s as a film that belonged – via the tape, in a most literal and physical sense – specifically to one person. And then, by extension, to me, as a kind of inheritance. We watched it many times in my childhood, when I was rather too young to understand what exactly Manhattan socialite Holly Golightly did with her life – though, in my defence, the film rather sidesteps the issue too. No matter: it was probably one of my first encounters with pure movie star power, or at least one of the first times I recognised it as such. Audrey Hepburn, so perfectly doe-eyed and beehived and brightly funny and winsomely sad, seemed as much to me a force of magic as Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, even if the person she was playing made less sense to me. And not least of all – probably most of all, if I’m being honest – there was a cat. Cats were a cheap and easy way to my heart in a movie: the whiplash of panic and relief I felt over the rash disposal and cute retrieval of Holly’s ginger mog returns to me every time I watch it still.

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Wole Soyinka: ‘This book is my gift to Nigeria’

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The Nobel laureate has produced plays, poems, essays and even inspired a pop duo but he hasn’t written a novel for nearly half a century - until now

At 87, Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian icon. His plays have been performed around the world, his poems anthologised, his novels studied in schools and universities, while his nonfiction writing has been the scourge of many a Nigerian dictator. He was imprisoned for 22 months during the Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s for attempting to broker peace; his activism led him again into exile two decades later during the era of General Sani Abacha, military ruler of Nigeria, when the environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged.

In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel prize in literature and became the first African laureate, but his status in Nigerian letters was secured long before then. For a generation of young Nigerian writers, his work has been transformative. It has inspired artists, too – in Lagos, many display their skill by painting famous faces, his among them. There was even a musical duo called Soyinka’s Afro.

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New hustle: Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead on his heist novel

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The author talks about his book set among small time crooks in 1960s Harlem, the joy of switching it up - and why he looks up to Stanley Kubrick

Something strange happened the morning after Colson Whitehead finished his forthcoming novel. “I put the book to bed, and then I got up the next morning and Minneapolis was on fire,” he says. It was 26 May 2020, the first of three days of riots last year after the murder of George Floyd. Whitehead had chosen to conclude his latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, against the backdrop of the Harlem riot of 1964, which erupted after a 15-year-old black boy, James Powell, was shot dead by police lieutenant Thomas Gilligan. What were the odds that the day after he wrapped up a fictional contemplation of “how we pull ourselves together” in the aftermath of such an incident, there would be another one? As Whitehead himself observes, the coincidence was proof of a point he’s always making: “If you write about fucked up racial shit, wait five minutes and something else will happen.”

Long before our conversation, I’d resolved that I wouldn’t let the topic of race dominate it. For a start, it’s the subject (often the only one) that black writers are always asked to offer opinions about – an architecture of expectation that builds itself up around us. But also, it has never dominated Whitehead’s work, which has ranged in nine previous books over areas as diverse as elevator inspection, the World Series of poker and the zombie apocalypse. And there’s plenty else to talk about. Music: “I’ve done homework, college papers on Ice Cube’s first record and I’m still listening to it now. I’m brought back to other moments in my life when I’ve been writing really hard and Radiohead’s been there, Public Enemy’s been there.” Lockdowns: “I guess the cliche is that writers’ lives didn’t change that much, I’m pretty much sitting right here all day.” Whether he regrets chickening out of accepting Toni Morrison’s invitation to coffee several years ago: “When I’ve had the opportunity to meet some of my idols at conferences, I’m very reserved.”

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Women’s prize for fiction goes to Susanna Clarke’s ‘mind-bending’ Piranesi

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Clarke’s follow-up to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was praised by judges as ‘a truly original, unexpected flight of fancy’

Comment: Piranesi is a triumphantly unusual winner

Susanna Clarke, who published her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 17 years ago and then was struck down with chronic illness, has won the Women’s prize for fiction for her second, Piranesi.

Narrated by its eponymous hero as he explores the endless halls of a house that imprisons an ocean, Piranesi is “a truly original, unexpected flight of fancy which melds genres and challenges preconceptions about what books should be,” according to the Women’s prize chair of judges, Booker-winning novelist Bernardine Evaristo.

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