Tag: novel
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‘Clear’ by Carys Davies: winning the language-game
Nothing much happens in Clear (2024), Carys Davies’s second novel to have won Wales Book of the Year.1 Ivar lives on a remote Scottish island, perhaps closer to Norway than mainland Scotland, and tends to his cow, his horse, and to the land. In nineteenth century Scotland, John Ferguson is sent to invite him to…
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Linguicide and freedom: Percival Everett’s ‘James’
It was ‘my language,’ says our hero James, that ‘had so disturbed and frightened’ Judge Thatcher, the White slaver.1 But it was neither James’s profanity (which is non-existent), nor his angry delivery, that shocks the Judge. Instead, it’s James’s ability to speak conventional American-English. Up to this point the Judge, like all other White characters…
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A new atrocity: C.D. Rose’s ‘We Live Here Now’
This blog post is more ‘thought experiment’ than ‘thought through’. Let’s see whether it works. C.D. Rose’s We Live Here Now (Melville House, 2024) won the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction. It comprises fifteen chapters, the stories of which are not told strictly chronologically—’They could we think later, be seen in any sequence.’—that all…
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A new Beckett? Yasmin Zaher’s ‘The Coin’ and dispossession
Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin (Footnote Press, 2024) was praised by the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize jury for ‘dissect[ing] nature and civilisation, beauty and justice, class and belonging in a vivid exploration of identity and heritage’.1 It was the jury’s unanimous choice. In its depiction of the narrator’s life in New York, the city…
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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…