Category Archives: Fiction

Elena Ferrante names her 40 favourite books by female authors

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List by pseudonymous author of beloved Neapolitan novels includes Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney and several Italian classics

Elena Ferrante, the bestselling pseudonymous Italian author behind My Brilliant Friend, has named her favourite 40 books by female authors around the world, with Toni Morrison, Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith all making the cut.

The author, whose quartet of Neapolitan novels has sold 13m copies worldwide, has published her list on Bookshop.org, the online store that recently launched in the UK and gives a proportion of sales to independent booksellers. Ferrante’s UK publisher, Europa Editions, is returning their 10% sales commission from Ferrante’s list to Bookshop.org so it can be shared among the 300 independent bookshops that have signed up to the site so far.

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Douglas Stuart wins Booker prize for debut Shuggie Bain

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Scottish-American wins £50,000 for autobiographical novel about a boy growing up in 80s Glasgow, which is ‘destined to be a classic’

The Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart has won the Booker prize for his first novel, Shuggie Bain, a story based on his own life that follows a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with a mother who is battling addiction.

Stuart, 44, has described himself as “a working-class kid who had a different career and came to writing late”. He is the second Scot to win the £50,000 award after James Kelman took the prize in 1994 with How Late It Was, How Late, a book Stuart said “changed his life” because it was the first time he saw “my people, my dialect, on the page”.

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When it comes to a family trauma, who gets to tell the story?

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When Fariha Róisín started writing Like a Bird, she thought the traumatic event at its heart was just a dream. She explores the weight of a family secret

In her 1861 account Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs exposed her sexual abuse by her master with lucidity and truth. Yet for more than 100 years, it was accepted academic opinion that Incidents was a novel, written by white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. It was not until the 1980s that critic Jean Fagan Yellin proved Jacobs to be the true author; Incidents had been autobiographical all along.

In Hollywood, rape narratives are largely penned by men and seen as a motif, because the tension (and tragedy) of the experience creates sympathy, compassion; it formalises emotion. When we see a woman raped and abused on film we absolve ourselves for watching, because we want to understand the ugliness of human atrocity, or so that’s what we say. And when women write about rape, often in literature, its seen as melodramatic, overemotional, too impossible to be true. “Primarily, rape is considered a women’s issue, though this is, of course, hardly the case,” writes poet Moniza Alvi, in the introduction to Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives, “and perhaps this is partly why it is considered a literary taboo, particularly when conveyed from a female viewpoint.”

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Stacey Abrams: Georgia’s political heroine … and romance author

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Writing under the name Selena Montgomery, Abrams has penned eight romantic thrillers, often while also fighting for voters’ rights

Stacey Abrams is the former Georgia state house minority leader, whose fierce fight for Georgians’ right to vote has been credited for potentially handing the state to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years. But Abrams has another identity: the novelist Selena Montgomery, a romance and thriller writer who has sold more than 100,000 copies of her eight novels.

Abrams wrote her first novel during her third year at Yale Law School, inspired after reading her ex-boyfriend’s PhD dissertation in chemical physics. She had wanted to write a spy novel: “For me, for other young black girls, I wanted to write books that showed them to be as adventurous and attractive as any white woman,” she wrote in her memoir Minority Leader. But after being told repeatedly by editors that women don’t read spy novels, and that men don’t read spy novels by women, she made her spies fall in love. Rules of Engagement, her debut, was published in 2001, and sees temperatures flare as covert operative Raleigh partners with the handsome Adam Grayson to infiltrate a terrorist group that has stolen deadly environmental technology.

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Wole Soyinka to publish first novel in almost 50 years

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Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth will be released this year, with the 86-year-old author also planning fresh theatre work after ‘continuous writing’ in lockdown

Wole Soyinka has used his time in lockdown to write his first novel in almost 50 years.

The Nigerian playwright and poet, who became the first African to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1986, published his widely celebrated debut novel, The Interpreters, in 1965. His second and most recent novel, Season of Anomy, was released in 1973.

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Sayaka Murata: ‘I acted how I thought a cute woman should act – it was horrible’

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The author of Convenience Store Woman talks about working behind the counter, rejecting marriage and children, and her dark new tale of murder and cannibalism

Until recently, Sayaka Murata, who won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa prize, worked in a convenience store. She had toiled in them for half her life, writing most of her 11 novels and two nonfiction books in her time off. Even after becoming a bestselling author (Konbini Ningen, or Convenience Store Woman, sold 1.4m copies and has been translated into 30 languages), she continued to work behind the counter until the attentions of an obsessive fan forced her to stop. “I was so used to the rhythm of working that I found it hard to hang around all day writing,” she explains.

The novel’s oddball title character, Keiko Furukura, also relishes the predictable rhythms of her workplace. Japan’s 55,000 nearly identical convenience stores are considered stop-gap employers for job-hoppers, students, housewives and immigrants, “all losers”, says one of the characters in her book contemptuously. But Keiko, who is 36, a virgin and uninterested in the bourgeois lives of her married peers, excels at the pliant, robotic service demanded by the industry’s manuals. So unsettled is she by invasive questions about her lack of a husband and children that she takes in a lazy, abusive lodger just to deflect them.

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Charges against Tsitsi Dangarembga must be dropped, argue writers

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The Zimbabwean novelist, shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize for This Mournable Body, is accused of intending to incite public violence in Harare

Authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Carol Ann Duffy and Philippe Sands have called for charges against the Booker prize-shortlisted writer Tsitsi Dangarembga to be dropped ahead of her latest appearance in a Zimbabwe court this week, saying that any other conclusion would be “an outrage”.

The Zimbabwean novelist was arrested during anti-corruption protests in Harare and charged last month with intention to incite public violence. She was freed on bail and required to appear before the court on 18 September. The hearing has been delayed twice, after prosecutors failed to appear on both occasions, with a new date set for 7 October.

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Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi: ‘Life is about making myth’

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The Ugandan-born writer, whose new book deals with her country’s origin stories, on feminism and the importance of home

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1967, and now lives in Manchester. Her first novel, Kintu, was longlisted for the Etisalat prize in 2014 and she won the Commonwealth Short Story prize in the same year. Her first short story collection, Manchester Happened, was published in 2019. She was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell prize for fiction in 2018. Her new book, The First Woman, is a powerful feminist rendition of Ugandan origin tales, charting the young girl Kirabo’s journey to find her place in the world.

“How does it feel to have a mother?” is one of the questions at the core of the book.
I didn’t meet my mother until I was perhaps 10 and used to have to think about that question. As a child, I lived with my dad, but he was brutalised during Idi Amin’s regime and lost his mind, so I went to live with my aunt aged about 10. I wanted to explore the idea that if you don’t have a mother you create the idea of one yourself and turn her into a perfect goddess. When Kirabo meets her mother, she mourns the loss of the mother she had created. Those kind of losses I wanted to deal with.

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Hilary Mantel: I am ‘disappointed but freed’ by Booker decision

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Two-time winner, previously a favourite to win with the third novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, says books ‘surf on the tide of the times’

Two-time Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel has said that she is “disappointed” but “freed” after not making this year’s shortlist, congratulating the six authors now in competition for the £50,000 prize.

Mantel, who won the prize for the first two novels in her historical trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, had been tipped to win a third time for the final volume, The Mirror and the Light. But judges for this year’s prize instead selected four debuts, by Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor alongside new novels from Tsitsi Dangarembga and Maaza Mengiste. After announcing the lineup, judge and novelist Lee Child said The Mirror and the Light was “an absolutely wonderful novel, there’s no question about it”, but “as good as it was, there were some books which were better”.

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‘The great African novel of the 21st century’: Namwali Serpell wins Arthur C Clarke award

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The Old Drift takes prestigious science fiction award with what judges called ‘an extraordinary saga that spans eras from Cecil Rhodes to Rhodes Must Fall’

Namwali Serpell has won the UK’s top prize for science fiction, the Arthur C Clarke award, for her first novel The Old Drift, which judges described as “stealth sci-fi”.

The Zambian author’s debut tells the stories of three families over three generations, moving from a colonial settlement by Victoria Falls at the turn of the 20th century, to the 1960s as Zambia attempts to send a woman to the moon, and into the near future. A mix of historical fiction, magical realism and sci-fi, Serpell saw off competition from authors including previous winner Adrian Tchaikovsky and Hugo best novel winner Arkady Martine to take the prize. Originally established by the author Arthur C Clarke with the aim of promoting science fiction in Britain, the award goes to the best sci-fi novel of the year.

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Most diverse Booker prize shortlist ever as Hilary Mantel misses out

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With no room for Mantel’s conclusion to her Wolf Hall trilogy, the six finalists also include four debuts

Hilary Mantel will not win a third Booker prize with the final novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, after American writers made a near clean sweep of this year’s shortlist.

With four writers of colour among its six authors, the shortlist, announced on Tuesday, is the most diverse line-up in the prize’s history. Four debut novelists – Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor – are up against the acclaimed Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Ethiopian-American Maaza Mengiste for the £50,000 award.

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Booker-longlisted author Tsitsi Dangarembga freed on bail in Zimbabwe

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The novelist, whose book This Mournable Body was named as a finalist last week, had been arrested while taking part in anti-corruption protests

The Booker-longlisted author Tsitsi Dangarembga has been freed on bail after her arrest during anti-corruption protests in Zimbabwe last week.

The acclaimed writer, who was longlisted for the 2020 Booker prize for her novel This Mournable Body, documented her arrest on Friday with another protester, Julie Barnes, in the Harare suburb of Borrowdale. The author was carrying placards calling for reform in Zimbabwe president Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government, and for the release of Hopewell Chin’ono, a journalist arrested recently during a nationwide crackdown on protesters.

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Booker prize-longlisted author Tsitsi Dangarembga arrested in Zimbabwe

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Author of This Mournable Body detained as part of sweeping crackdown by security agencies

Tsitsi Dangarembga, the award-winning Zimbabwean novelist who was nominated for the Booker prize longlist earlier this week, was arrested on Friday amid a sweeping crackdown by security agencies ahead of planned anti-corruption demonstrations.

Hundreds of police and soldiers remained on the streets of Harare, the capital, and others cities late into the evening, ordering inhabitants to go home and stay indoors.

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Authors call for removal of Booker prize vice-president over ‘homophobic’ views

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Emma Nicholson’s views on same-sex marriage raised as concern by writers and one former Booker winner

Damian Barr is leading a charge of writers, including one former Booker prize winner, who are calling on the Booker Foundation to remove the allegedly “homophobic” peer Emma Nicholson from her position as vice-president.

Lady Nicholson of Winterbourne, who voted against the same-sex marriage bill in 2013, is the widow of the late former chairman of Booker, Sir Michael Caine, who helped establish the prize. She is currently a vice-president of the Booker Foundation, and a former trustee of the prize.

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Tashi: 25 years on and more than 1 million copies sold but still an ‘enchanted’ delight

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Author Anna Fienberg tells the stories behind her bestselling children’s books, from her mother’s working-class childhood to the character’s origin story

People roll their eyes when Anna Fienberg starts a story with: “Well, it was like this.” The phrase has become unmistakable to readers of her Tashi series for children – a device preceding the telling of an adventure story – and Fienberg can’t help but use it when she’s asked how she came to write, with her mother Barbara, about a magical boy who flees on a swan from his home country to Australia.

“Well, it was like this,” Fienberg says, as she tells Guardian Australia of how only recently, 25 years after the stories were first published, she learned of Tashi’s true origins.

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JK Rowling announces new children’s book, The Ickabog, to be published free online

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Harry Potter author announces she will serialise the fairy tale from Tuesday afternoon, so children in lockdown can read it for free before it is published in November

JK Rowling is to publish a new children’s book, a fairy tale “about truth and the abuse of power” that she has kept in her attic for years, for free online for children in lockdown.

The Ickabog, which is set in an imaginary land unrelated to any of Rowling’s other works, will be serialised online from Tuesday afternoon, in 34 daily, free instalments. It will then be published as a book, ebook and audiobook in November, with Rowling’s royalties to go to projects assisting groups impacted by the pandemic.

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Lionel Shriver: ‘Some people think I’m evil incarnate’

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The author on publishing when bookshops are closed, being an ‘exercise nut’ and the dangers posed to writers by mob rule

Lionel Shriver is a US-born writer whose novels include Big Brother, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 and the bestselling We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the 2005 Orange prize and was turned into a film by Lynne Ramsay starring Tilda Swinton. In 2014, she won the BBC national short story award. Her new novel, The Motion of the Body Through Space, is about a long-married couple whose relationship is almost destroyed when one of them becomes obsessed with exercise.

What kind of lockdown are you having?
One of the most horrifying things about this experience is that it’s having so little effect on my life. I live in lockdown all the time! I don’t think this reflects well on me, but either I don’t have a very keen social appetite or I’m under-aware of when I’m starting to get lonely.

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NK Jemisin: ‘It’s easier to get a book set in black Africa published if you’re white’

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The three-time Hugo award winner is one of the biggest names in modern scifi. She talks about overcoming racism to rewrite the future

In 2018, NK Jemisin became the first writer ever to win three consecutive Hugo best novel awards for science fiction and fantasy. Her first award had been in 2016, for her novel The Fifth Season, and its two sequels, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, won in the following years. Yet speaking on the phone from her home in coronavirus-hit Brooklyn, Jemisin says she never thought she’d be published. “I honestly didn’t think I had a chance. You just didn’t see characters like me in fiction,” she says.

Growing up in Mobile, Alabama and New York, Jemisin was an avid reader, making up her own stories from the age of eight, but the lack of black women writing science fiction and fantasy, the genre she loved, made her believe it wasn’t for her. “We were all exposed to nothing but white dude fiction, occasionally young white women fiction, and if that’s how you’ve grown up, then that is what is normal.”

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Per Olov Enquist, celebrated Swedish author, dies aged 85

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Much garlanded novelist, playwright, poet and Oscar-winning screenwriter hailed as ‘a giant among European writers’

Swedish author Per Olov Enquist, described as “a giant among European writers” by his publisher, has died at the age of 85.

The author’s family told Swedish media that he died on Saturday night after a long illness. The much-celebrated novelist, playwright and poet, known by his initials PO, was winner of the Nordic Council’s literary prize and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic prize. His historical novel The Visit of the Royal Physician – set in the adulterous, backstabbing world of the 18th-century Danish courts, where the mad king Christian VII’s queen, the English princess Caroline Mathilde, falls in love with the court physician – won him the August prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award after the Nobel. It also made him the only Swedish author to take the Independent foreign fiction prize, the precursor to the International Booker, in 2001.

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