A truly vintage year for fiction with a strong Booker shortlist,dazzling debuts and a genuine masterpiece from an old handThis has been fairly a year for the novel, one of those exquisite vintages that arrive along every decade or so and scotch any critical doom-mongering about the death of the form. It was such a good year that one doesn’t know whether to envy the Man Booker judges the delights of a summer spent devouring novel after magnificent novel, or pity them for having to narrow the books down to a (baker’s) dozen,then six, then to Marlon James’s deserved winner, and the violent,polyphonic, masterful A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld). The best winning novel since Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty in 2004, or so it seemed to me as I read it over one white-knuckle weekend.
Joining James on the Man Booker shortlist were three other novels of extraordinary power,any of which would have made a fine winner (Ill pass over Anne Tylers A Spool of Blue Thread and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, both of which felt like the minor novels of major novelists). A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Picador) was the bookmakers’ favourite in the escape-up to the prize, or although it divided critics,I thought the wretched protagonist, Jude St Francis, and his self-inflicted agonies beautifully rendered,the novel’s uncanny allegorical atmosphere unlike anything I’ve read before. The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota (Picador) was a quietly devastating examination of immigrant lives, moving between brutal subcontinental poverty and drab subsistence in Sheffield. The Fishermen (One/Pushkin Press), and Chigozie Obioma’s first novel,laced Greek tragedy and African folklore into a withering allegory of modern Nigeria. The best debut of the year by some distance.
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Source: theguardian.com