‘Flashlight’ by Susan Choi
Choi followed up Trust Exercise, from 2019, with another novel that asks readers to grapple with duelling narratives of contested events, this time spanning generations and continents. “That may suggest a sprawling global drama, but in Flashlight, geopolitics are sharpened to a diamond point that crushes one little family,” The Washington Post’s Ron Charles wrote. He described the new novel as “severely allergic to summary” and “catholic in its genre, shifting deftly from domestic drama to international thriller, from academic satire to bildungsroman”.
‘Audition’ by Katie Kitamura
Kitamura’s latest novel is narrated by an unnamed actor, who has mysteriously fraught encounters with her husband, Tomas, and a young man named Xavier, who may or may not be her son. Which is it? “Any definitive ‘truth’ would only diminish the deeper and more mysterious truths of Kitamura’s resolute irresolution. The pleasure and the power inhere in the parallax view,” Justin Taylor wrote in his review for The Post.
‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ by Kiran Desai
Nearly 20 years ago, Desai won the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, and at the time became the youngest woman ever to do so. (She also happens to be the daughter of a three-time Booker nominee, Anita Desai.) Her follow-up, nearly 700 pages long – whittled down from 5000 pages of notes she had amassed by 2013 – has been 20 years in the making. It’s a family epic that follows two Indian writers, Sonia and Sunny, who move to the United States as students. “I feel relieved, as if I have averted some nebulous disaster, and very lucky,” Desai told the Guardian, about being longlisted for the award. And her next project won’t have the same scope, she added: “This feels like the big book of my life in that way. I don’t have time to do it again.”
‘The Land in Winter’ by Andrew Miller
Set in the early 1960s during an infamously cold winter in the English countryside, The Land in Winter follows the entanglement between neighbouring couples. “I want to write fiction that has no obvious message, that cannot be made smaller, that resists the single interpretation,” Miller recently wrote on his website, in a post tentatively titled “Manifesto?” “That views morality as one force among many. That does not overly privilege love or treat it as a form of magic. That has to be swallowed whole. That neither offers nor resists consolation.”
‘The Rest of Our Lives’ by Ben Markovits
Markovits’ novel begins with a middle-aged, middle-class couple dropping their youngest daughter off at college. The husband promised himself a dozen years ago, after his wife’s infidelity, that he would leave as soon as their children all left the nest; now he has to decide whether to fulfil his vow to himself. Described by the Guardian as a “male counterpart to Miranda July’s All Fours”, it will be available to American readers from Simon and Schuster in January.
‘Flesh’ by David Szalay
Crisscrossing from Hungary to Iraq to London, Szalay’s sixth book follows the life of Istvan, a teen growing up in a housing estate whose affair with an older woman changes his life. In a review of Szalay’s previous book, Turbulence, which started as a series on BBC’s Radio 4, Jake Cline described Szalay as “masterful at quickly establishing a mood and a character” and at creating “humid, uncomfortable tales, their air thick with worry and the threat of tragedy”.