When the first confinement arrived in March, the sales of a diary of the year of the plague of defoe and the plague of camus increased. they shot, but there were strange echoes of covid-19 will also be found in this year’s novels.
maggie o’farrell’s tender and heartbreaking hamnet (tinder), which won the women’s award, illuminates life and love in the shadow of death four centuries ago. Centered on Anne Hathaway rather than her playwright husband, she channels the family’s grief for Son Hamnet, lost to the plague, with timeless power. from public information slogans to individual fears, emma donoghue’s the pull of the stars (picador), set in a dublin maternity hospital during the 1918 flu pandemic, shows how little has changed Our answers. don delillo completed the silence (picador) just before the coronavirus arrived; But this thin, austere vision of what it’s like to be in a room while the screens go dark and disaster unfolds outside resonates with current fears.
You are reading: Best books of 2020 fiction
The unfolding disaster was the subject of novels that also spoke explicitly of the present moment: jenny offill’s time (granta) brings together fragments of anecdote and aphorism in a brilliant mosaic pitting the trump’s united states and climate collapse with wit, heart, and moments of sheer terror. Naomi Booth’s exit management expertly dramatizes the crisis in housing, employment and community. sarah moss’s menacing summerwater is set on a rainy day in a scottish holiday park: catastrophe looms in the near future as we delve into the minds of several dissatisfied daydreaming tourists, in an acute investigation on the meaning of community and otherness. Also deeply attuned to the anxieties of both Brexit and our long, slow post-industrial collapse is M John Harrison’s masterful The Sunken Earth Begins to Rise Again (Gollancz). A haunting, multi-layered narrative that brings to the fore two lost souls in a haunted, unheimlich England who don’t know how lost they are, took the Goldsmiths Award for Breakthrough Fiction.
summer (hamish hamilton) rounded out ali smith’s quick response seasonal quartet: four novels written over four years that have spanned brexit, climate change, corporate takeover and the crisis of refugees along with the invigorating consolations of art and nature. Bringing together characters from previous volumes and juxtaposing World War II internment with modern-day immigration detention centers, Summer brought a much-needed note of hope and resilience to the end of a landmark series that explores how we live inside and outside of the world. time.
This year also saw the final volume of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, which has conjured a bygone era into such extraordinarily vivid life and thrown profound insights into power, ambition and destiny into the present. the mirror & the light (4th state) should have ended on the executioner’s gallows, but the reader remains suspended in the present moment that unfolds until the ax falls.
another trilogy was completed in this body of mourning (faber) by tsitsi dangarembga; written three decades after his classic nervous conditions, it is a brutal and intimate reckoning with the psychological trauma of colonialism. also shortlisted by the booker, maaza mengiste’s the shadow king (canongate) is a beautifully crafted tale of the female soldiers who resisted mussolini’s 1935 invasion of ethiopia and their own oppression in society Ethiopian. Lyrical, furious, and meticulously researched, it’s a necessary act of historical recovery.
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marilynne robinson turned her gilead trilogy into a foursome with jack (virago), a romance across racial divide in segregated mid-century america that explores the redemptive and transcendent power of the love and faith. Brit Bennett also explored racism in The Fading Half (dialogue), a stunning family saga about passing as white and the emptiness of the American dream that caused her to compare herself to Toni Morrison.
There were historic escapades from david mitchell, in the 1960s muso epic utopia avenue(sceptre), and jonathan coe, with a bittersweet visit to one of billy wilder’s last movie sets in mr wilder and me (viking). curtis sittenfeld’s rodham (doubleday) wove a nostalgic alternate history, imagining what the world would have been like if hillary hadn’t married bill, while martin amis drew on his own story for a inside story (layer), a loose but fascinating autofiction that combines cameos from saul bellow and christopher hitchens with tips on prose writing.
andrew o’hagan’s poignant mayflies (faber) explores the way all of our lives go back in history too quickly, with a joyful nostalgia-fest of young Scotsmen chasing music and girls in a wild weekend in the 80s below. in sober middle-aged realizations and tough decisions decades later. A brilliant depiction of friendship between men, it’s also the perfect gift for middle-aged alternative music fans.
The year began with an impressively secured debut from American author Kiley Reid; Such a Funny Era (Bloomsbury) is a razor-sharp vision of white fragility and millennial uncertainty, beginning when a black nanny is accused of kidnapping her white caretaker. Also witty and fresh, Naoise Dolan’s delightfully dry exciting times (w&n) sees a cynical twenty-something Irish woman Ava unsettled by genuine emotion while teaching in Hong Kong.
Picador’s two semi-autobiographical Scottish debuts showcased essential new voices: Douglas Stuart took the Booker Award for his poignant and devastating shuggie bain, the story of a boy’s desperate love for his alcoholic mother in the post-industrial and disadvantaged 1980s; while Graeme Armstrong’s Young Crew, set among teenage gangs in Lanarkshire, updated Trainspotting for a new generation.
Other notable early novels included paul mendez’s rainbow milk (dialogue), a fearless coming-of-age story of racial and sexual identity and masculinity centered on a young black gay man on the run from her the jehovah witness community to become a sex worker. Avni Doshi’s (hamish hamilton) burnt sugar coolly explores a toxic relationship between mother and daughter in middle-class India, while brandon taylor’s real life (daunt) Weighing contradictory impulses toward solitude and intimacy The Liar’s Dictionary by eley williams (william heinemann), continuing the lexicographical joy of his tales, is a singularly charming jeu d’esprit about two people with a century of difference who do the difficult and essential work of defining words and defining themselves.
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in translated fiction, elena ferrante returns to her emotional heart, the adolescent psyche, in the lying life of adults (europe, translated by ann goldstein). As Giovanna tackles her parents’ hypocrisy, self-disgust, and the disconnect between the upper class and lower class of Naples, the novel becomes what she feels is a portrait of the artist when she was young. . Originally conceived as a true crime story, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season is a wild and unstoppable chronicle of misogyny and murder in a small Mexican town. another starkly compelling novel won the international booker: young dutch writer marieke lucas rijneveld the discomfort of the night (faber, translated by michele hutchison) centers on a girl in a deeply religious family that is falling apart in the wake of his brother’s death.
tyll (riverrun, translated by ross benjamin), by daniel kehlmann, a picaresque journey through early 17th century europe, follows the progress of a village jester folk figure to court against a bloody backdrop. of the Thirty Years’ War. in the devilishly readable little eyes of samanta schweblin (oneworld, translated by megan mcdowell), the must-have new tech gadget lets users step into the lives of strangers, a sharp idea just made even more pertinent with the isolation and atomization of the confinement. when we stop understanding the world by benjamín labatut (pushkin, translated by adrian nathan west), a “nonfiction novel” focused on the exceptional minds that investigate the dark heart of mathematics and science in the 20th century, draws revealing connections between discovery and destruction.
Some of the most exciting short stories of the year were found in kathryn scanlan’s dominant animal (daunt), with its fiercely sculpted lines and eerily out of place settings. modern times (w&n) by cathy sweeney has a comically surreal energy and enthusiasm, while in reality and other stories (faber) john lanchester structures a collection of ghost stories about the most dangerous, intrusive and unknowable force in our lives: technology.
two shocking books developed in the fertile space between the collection of short stories and the novel. in french poet leviston’s voice in my ear (cape), 10 different protagonists, all named claire, struggle with the demands of the world and their difficult mothers; the stories intersect to build a cubist portrait of contemporary femininity. Good Citizens Have No Fear (virago) by Maria Reva, meanwhile, uses intertwined stories centered on a dilapidated apartment block in Ukraine to convey the absurdity of post-Soviet life.
Finally, two novels that took a long time to arrive. From the 18th to the 21st century, Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock (Layer) explores violence against women in three subtly linked time periods: a terrifyingly angry and darkly witty tour de force, the third wyld’s novel is somber but invigorating and, as always, beautifully written.
sixteen years after her successful debut jonathan strange and mr norrell, susanna clarke returned with piranesi (bloomsbury), the story of a man trapped in a house with many corridors with an ocean that stirs inside him, his only companion, a mysterious other. Written after a long illness, but published in a world in which all readers struggled against confinement and turned to their inner resources, Clarke’s fantastic parable of loneliness, imagination, ambition and contentment is a work of art. of spectacular fiction, and the perfect reading complement for a year like no other.
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