Tag: novel
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Historical fiction, intersectionality, and secrecy: Yael van der Wouden’s ‘The Safekeep’
There’s a moment, just one page, in Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep (Penguin, 2024)—winner of last year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction—that gathers its narrative threads and holds them together. The queer, the racial, the Jewish threads. Thin threads and thick, stronger and weaker threads. One page where they intersect and where the reader can…
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Quotidian narrative in David Szalay’s ‘Flesh’
David Szalay’s ‘Flesh’ won the 2025 Booker Prize. It was praised by the judges for its spare style. In this blog post, I argue that there is a contest taking place in the story between the narrative style, resistant to emotion, and the protagonist’s steady attempt to become fully emotional, fully alive. Ultimately, the narrative…
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Past it? Speed, simulacra, and celebrity in Rebecca F. Kuang’s ‘Yellowface’
Rebecca F. Kuang’s ‘Yellowface’ captivated readers, spending 12 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and winning the British Book Awards’ fiction prize. A sharp satire on celebrity, publishing, and cultural appropriation, it explores themes of fleeting fame and postmodern identity. Is Yellowface timely—or already dated?
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The careful book in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s ‘Brotherless Night’
V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night (Penguin, 2023) won the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction, highlighting its powerful storytelling. Set during Sri Lanka’s civil war, the novel follows Sashi, a Tamil medical student, as she navigates care, ethics, and history in a time of violence. A masterpiece of careful, compassionate writing.
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Learning to read Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’
Samantha Harvey‘s delicate 136-page novel Orbital won 2024’s Booker Prize. It marks a notable shift of the difficulty of the last few Booker winners—Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023), Karunatilaka’s Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022), Galgut’s The Promise (2021), and Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (2020)—to an easier style, even if not a typical plot of a novel.…
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The true reality of dreams in Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’
In 2024, South Korea’s Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a 54-year-old author of eleven novels—only five of which have been translated into English—Han was viewed by some as an unexpected choice. The Swedish Academy—awarders of the Nobel Prize—praised Han ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the…