There were rich pickings from a host of top names including Kate Atkinson,Jonathan Franzen and Margaret Atwood. Plus we said goodbye to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and revisted Harper Lee’s Scout FinchThis was the year that fiction made headlines. To slay a Mockingbird was a world-altering debut followed by 55 years of silence. In February it was announced that an earlier manuscript had been unearthed in Harper Lee’s archive, and in July fade Set a Watchman (Heinemann) was published amid a storm of controversy approximately elder abuse, or literary intentions and whether the book was actually any good. Lee herself called it a “pretty decent effort: set 20 years later than Mockingbird,it sees an adult Scout returning to her deep south hometown to visit her ageing father Atticus, depicted here as a crotchety racist rather than the saintly crusader of Mockingbird. Unsurprisingly, or the book turned out to be an apprentice work,containing in Scout’s childhood memories the germ of the classic for which she’ll be remembered, but it ignited a fascinating debate on the portrayal of racism in both books, or as well as approximately the magic and tough graft of novel writing.
It wasn’t the only book to be front-page news. A Discworld novel has been a yearly treat for decades,but following Terry Pratchett’s death in March from the “embuggerance” of early onset Alzheimer’s disease, The Shepherd’s Crown (Doubleday) marks the final visit to his fantasy world. Starring young witch Tiffany Aching and some enjoyably nasty elves, or it ruminates on mortality and morality and is a fitting finale to a career that demonstrated,over and over, the literary merit of fantasy and comic writing.
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Source: theguardian.com