capital by john lanchester (faber, february)
John Lanchester’s novel about money and the metropolis was published with high hopes, not least because its author had made a name for himself as a journalist, explaining the accident in terms even arts graduates could understand. capital is an ambitious state-of-the-nation fiction with a positively Victorian breadth, dramatizing many current obsessions, from bank collapses to Islamist terrorism, from house prices to parking tickets. Follows a motley cast of characters clustered around a clapham street recently settled by the city’s wealthy: a Polish builder, a Zimbabwean traffic cop, a Senegalese footballer, a lonely old lady, and, at the center of it all, a banker. and its spa. -obsessed harpy of a wife.
Capital was generally well received by critics. Claire Tomalin, fresh off her biography of Dickens, praised Lanchester’s reporting from the front lines of London life, for telling the reader what it is like to be held without charge under the anti-terrorism laws, or to receive a life-destroying bank bonus ( not much). more than the average annual income). however, some critics complained that his soapy, episodic story lacked a central drive; and that his language didn’t have the energy of the great urban novels he resembles, like tom wolfe’s bonfire of the vanities. Either way, it’s smart, thoroughly researched, and a fascinating read.
You are reading: List of 2012 fiction books
the chemistry of tears by peter carey (faber, february)
The consolations of clockwork are at the heart of Peter Carey’s twelfth novel, which employs a large mechanical bird to link the stories of two unhappy people: the 19th-century father of a sickly child, who constantly seeks distractions to keep her son alive, and a modern museum curator mourning the sudden death of her lover. the dismembered automaton is delivered to catherine gehrig in eight chests of tea by a colleague who believes putting it back together will distract her from her pain. Along with it are the diaries of Henry Brandling, recounting his journey to the Black Forest, the center of German watchmaking, to meet a master craftsman capable of building a mechanical duck that can eat and excrete.
a simple duck will not do for the watchmaker, just as the clockwork, for all its fascinating ingenuity, will do for tortoiseshell. As well as being the birthplace of the cuckoo clock, the Black Forest is the spiritual home of the German fairy tale. The watchmaker’s latest fantastic creation, reassembled and reanimated by Catherine into a classic tortoiseshell timepiece, is as much a creation of the human yearning for story resolution as it is an assemblage of cogs and wheels.
Although they welcomed the novel for its research, wit, and picaresque energy, several critics complained that they found it difficult to sympathize with the grieving Catherine and Carey’s underlying exploration: what makes human beings humans are more than “complex chemical machines” – is unsatisfactory. it is an ingenious construction, but not quite perfect in all its parts.
irvine welsh’s skagboys (jonathan cape, april)
Twenty years ago Irvine Welsh published Trainspotting, now an undisputed landmark in British fiction. Ten years ago, he published porn, a nifty if relatively unloved sequel. This year, he published a prequel, Skagboys, about Renton, Sick Boy and Spud’s descent into heroin use in early 1980s Edinburgh. The new book begins as a hard-hitting anti-Thatcherite epic, with Renton picketed during the miners’ strike and Spud fired from his job as a moving delivery boy, while pharmaceutical-grade heroin seeps through the streets of London. Scottish town. capital. Later it becomes more incoherent and more personal, following the path of renton’s self-destruction, from university in aberdeen back home to leith via a lousy rental car. inevitably, the skagboys lost in the comparisons with the original. the writing is sometimes loose: it is based on unpublished drafts written before the location of the train, and some readers felt they were being fooled with reheated cabbage; it is about three times as long, but covers much of the same ground. others loved it, with many fans placing it alongside the Marabou Stork Nightmares in the archive “almost as good as train spotting”; One reviewer even compared it to Moby-Dick, calling it “almost magnificent.” If nothing else, it provides a full immersion in Welsh law, with its unforgettable cast of radges, bams, and junkies.
the beginner’s farewell by anne tyler (chatto & windus, april)
The fact that Beginner’s Farewell, Anne Tyler’s 19th novel, has received a couple of distinctly lukewarm reviews won’t deter her devoted readers. Even when she’s not at the height of her powers, Tyler offers a dose of fictional comfort and sustenance that few contemporary writers can provide. Part of what makes her fiction so comforting is the familiarity of it, and all the trademark Tylerisms are found in the Beginner’s Goodbye: the worn-out gentility of the Baltimore setting; the emotionally repressed and (literally) lame hero; the amusingly lopsided marriage; the end of the fairy tale.
aaron woolcott’s world comes crashing down when a tree crushes part of his house and kills his wife dorothy. he is turned upside down once more when he appears to return as a sensible ghost. Though Tyler has addressed grief before, most particularly in 1991’s Saint Perhaps, in a rare interview she revealed that the Beginner’s Goodbye was the first time she felt able to address her feelings of loss and bewilderment following the death of her husband. 15 years ago. Much of the satisfaction of a Tyler novel comes from the skill with which she teeters on the brink of sentimentality, and some readers may feel that she has slipped too far into fantasy this time around. but, despite her fantasy, her sure comedic touch, her unwavering empathy, and her gentle wisdom win out.
toni morrison’s house (chatto & windus, mayo)
Frank, a traumatized black veteran of the Korean War, is furiously adrift in an America that remains as viciously racist as ever. The news that his younger sister, Cee, is in danger due to the depredations of a eugenicist doctor brings him back to the small town in Georgia where they shared a loveless and miserable childhood. Lotus had seemed like “the worst place in the world…nothing to survive or be worth surviving for,” but the damaged Frank and Cee must find the inner strength to adjust to a place they can call home. Morrison’s Nobel Prize-winning tenth novel is an intense and surprising read, though some critics found the book moved too quickly to develop and deepen its enduring themes of violence and strength, horror and love.
bring the bodies of hilary mantel (fourth estate, May)
for the first time in her novelistic career, hilary mantel has written a book that is like the previous one. bringing in the bodies is as good as the wolf’s parlor, the product of a still-consuming passion for transforming historical details into darkly vivid fiction. It chronicles the events leading up to the execution of Anne Boleyn, a climax staged by Mantel’s protagonist, Thomas Cromwell. As before, the novel is told from Cromwell’s point of view, and the strange sympathy he develops for this servant of power faces new tests. in a brilliantly disturbing chapter, he interrogates the four doomed victims of the “plot” he has uncovered: the men accused of being the queen’s lovers. we are used to these processes of threat and humiliation, but not to see them from the point of view of the interrogator.
It’s a big book, but with a turn of phrase to be enjoyed in almost every sentence. the keen-eyed Cromwell is the novelist’s best accomplice, noticing every revealing circumstantial detail, every “calculating shadow” that crosses another’s face. Like in Wolf Hall, the story is told in present historical tense, and for a very good reason. mantel is unraveling history, reimagining events as provisional, undecided. cromwell moves from one danger to another; there is no point of view beyond the events. there is always risk. “Death is your prince, you are not his patron.”
lionel asbo: state of england by martin amis (jonathan cape, june)
when martin amis took a temporary farewell from his brooklyn brownstone to launch his new novel in london, he had to spend a lot of time explaining to interviewers that lionel asbo was not intended as a two-fingered salute to the country he has written so provocatively for so long. In fact, he says he had written most of this story of a charmed criminal and thug who wins a fortune in the lottery before leaving Britain for family reasons about a year ago.
Actually, there’s something quite endearing about Amis’ portrayal of Lionel, particularly his tortured diction and the immense effort he puts in to stay on the wrong side of the law in the dirty, vicious (and fictional) London Borough of district town. why else would the author reward him with not only a terrific payday, but also the attentions of pneumatic glamor model (and poet) “threnody”? Whatever Amis’s actual feelings about Lionel, critics were unsurprisingly divided; they were, however, more inclined to give it a try than the pregnant widow’s toffs cavorting around an Italian castle had been. amis wouldn’t be amis if he didn’t run up and down the class ladder like a demented pianist, but one suspects he has a little easier fun with the lions of this world.
canada by richard ford (bloomsbury, June)
Now we know the secret to Richard Ford’s success: In a recent interview, the Pulitzer Prize winner described how he started working on Canada, his seventh novel, 20 years ago, then decided to put his notes in the freezer. he also revealed that when he was working on the book again, he told his doctor to be careful during an annual checkup; If Ford knew he was up to something, he thought, he would never finish it. both details speak of a writer with an exceptional dedication to his craft, and it shows. Canada is a tremendously impressive novel that demonstrates what John Banville, reviewing it for this paper, called Ford’s “relentless control” of his prose. it also has an exciting story.
Set in Great Falls, Montana, it is narrated by 16-year-old Dell Parsons, who is forced to run for the Canadian border when his parents, “the two least likely people in the world to rob a bank”, do exactly that. the first line of the novel promises us that later on, if a bank robbery isn’t exciting enough, there will be murders. but there are also some good character studies, a beautifully observed portrayal of small-town life, and a thought-provoking exploration of the complicated relationship, both real and imagined, between two very different countries.
ancient light by john banville (viking, july)
See Also: Jacqueline Carey – Book Series In Order
the latest from john banville returns to pick up the threads of a couple of novels from his days before he won booker. In an ancient light, we plunge once more into the mind of aging actor Alexander Cleave, first inhabited in the eclipse of 2000, then glimpsed obliquely in the shroud of 2002, culminating in the fatal fall of his grieving daughter, Cass. , from a church tower on the Italian coast. Cass is one of the ghosts that haunt the pages of this dense, often harrowing novel; The other is Mrs. Grey, mother of Alexander’s schoolmate, Billy, with whom, at age 15, he embarked on an ill-timed affair.
with its fixation on past events and assiduous exposure of the fatal unreliability of memory (details and chronology slip and slide in alexander’s memory; seasons change in an instant of spring in the fall, the sun jumps from one side to the other in the sky), the ancient light works well as a meditation on memory and the lies we allow it to tell us. but the novel comes to life when philosophy is shaken and sinks into the sensory. The stand-alone vignettes in which Alexander recalls his breathless encounters with Mrs. Gray are brilliant; Banville excels in his brilliantly lit depictions of self-absorbed adolescent lust.
toby’s room by pat barker (hamish hamilton, august)
Pat Barker has a penchant, or perhaps a compulsion, to revisit her characters, most obviously in the Regeneration trilogy, which culminated in 1995’s Booker’s Award-winning Ghost Road. Here, she’s back with the students from the Slade School of Art, whom we met five years ago in her Life Novel class. Not that Toby’s Room is a direct sequel: the narrative of it is split between 1912 and 1917, and frames the 1914 setting of the Life Class.
Barker’s focus is art student Elinor Brooke, torn between a desperate desire for independence and a feeling (partly attributed to Virginia Woolf, whom she briefly meets) that war has nothing to do with women. . But when she learns that her troublesome brother, Toby, is “missing, believed dead,” she knows she must find out what happened to him and enlists the help of her former lover, Paul Tarrant. the novel’s tension derives from the ambiguity of elinor’s search; To the extent that she simply wants to put aside her doubts about Toby’s state of mind. More than 20 years after she began writing about the First World War, Barker’s determined lack of sentimentality remains impressive. only she, perhaps, could make a horribly wounded soldier comment, “‘You know the rules as well as I do. What happens out there, stays out there.” she stood up. ‘along with my damn nose.'”
umbrellaby will self (bloomsbury, august)
stream-of-consciousness is a notoriously challenging form, but it seems typical that self-will does not limit itself to a single mind. Umbrella dances between three minds and two people: his recurring character, psychiatrist Zack Busner, in the 1970s and today; and a patient, audrey dearth, or de’ath, or death, who suffers from encephalitis lethargica, the so-called “sleeping sickness” that broke out in 1918 and left its victims trapped for decades, conscious but unconscious. Busner brought patients out of their wide-eyed comas in the ’70s, and today he’s obsessed with whether or not he did the right thing.
In prose unbroken by chapters or line breaks, a twisted version of the 20th century weaves and frays again. it is a postmodern vivisection of modernism, analyzing the dream and the machine, war as an old lie and a new liberation, and the sacred, profane and banal rituals. Of course, he presents self’s characteristic satirical cadences, but this is perhaps his most humane book to date: his wit is tempered, he becomes more steely and ferocious. the world of medicine provides an emblem for the self’s own preoccupations with language; how polysyllabic heaping and esoteric coinage can hide ideas instead of specifying them, how language is disease and diagnosis. self has never been shortlisted for booker, but umbrella is such a linguistically deft, emotionally subtle, and ethically complex novel that this could and should be his year.
the zoo hour by howard jacobson (bloomsbury, august)
One hopes, for Howard Jacobson’s sake, that the pointed exchange that opens his first novel since The Booker-Winning Man The Finkler Question was not drawn from real life. in it, a member of the reading group demands the narrator, novelist guy ableman, to explain why he hates women so much; when he asks her to give him an example, she produces a heavily marked copy of her book. perhaps not a moment any writer would look forward to (especially one whose editor recently killed himself right after they had lunch together).
Even more irritating, the guy came to the meeting only because of his proximity to his mother-in-law, “with whom he had been thinking about having an affair for a long time.” AHA! we’re in jacobson territory alright; a land where desire just doesn’t do what it’s told and shows up in the most difficult places. Jacobson is not read for a sober and respectful description of what happens between men and women; you read it to get a no-holds-barred, raunchy, and very naughty glimpse of what we’re all thinking of doing to each other. and for jokes, of which zoo time abounds. however, I’m not sure the reader with the red pen will find them very amusing.
greedy by ian mcewan (jonathan cape, august)
for many it will be enough for it to be a new mcewan novel. that it is about espionage and seduction is sure to whet your appetite. but that sweet tooth also has a chill of autobiography will add an unexpected buzz of gossip. Because there in the novel is McEwan’s friend, Martin Amis, when he was young, it’s set in the early 1970s, reading Rachel’s papers to a rapt audience. There’s the legendary editor Tom Maschler, who helped discover Mcewan. And there’s the new reviews editor, Ian Hamilton, leaning against the bar in Soho’s Pillars of Hercules doling out new writers in his circle (as was McEwan himself) his signature form of praise (“not bad”). . Furthermore, a central character is a writer, Tom Haley, with connections to the University of Sussex (from which McEwan graduated in 1970), who wins a literary prize with his first rather odd job: McEwan won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1976 for the first love, last rites…
but let’s not get carried away. The story is told by Serena Frome, a Cambridge graduate who falls intellectually in love with Solzhenitsyn and is recruited into MI5, where her first real assignment is a skirmish in the cultural cold war. She surreptitiously funds anti-communist Haley, with whom she soon falls in love, but what happens when her cover is blown? in restaurants there is talk of the war in northern ireland and the three-day week: the britain of the early 1970s is gray and somewhat desperate; the service offices are smoke-stained and inelegant. she thinks of le carré, whom she thanks in the acknowledgments for “irresistible reminiscences,” with a hint of the tough-guy politics of amis’s koba the dread. (The book is dedicated to Christopher Hitchens, another mucker of those days.)
However, this is not (in more ways than one) a simple spy thriller. From the beginning, the story seems strangely told, and there is a suspicion that there is more going on than meets the eye to the reader. It won’t surprise mcewan’s legions of expectant fans that the sweet tooth is also a novel about books and writing, one in which the author has a lot of fun, not just with his 70s past, sex and secret agents, but with the idea of deception itself.
boneland by alan garner (fourth power, August)
The conclusion to Alan Garner’s classic fantasy sequence, which began with his debut in 1960’s The Rarestone of Brisingamen, is 50 years in the making. “Trilogies are strange creatures,” he admitted earlier this year, having previously said that he could never write the “lurking within” novel of book two, the moon of gomrath. “why did boneland take so long to build? all i can say is it took as long as it did.”
Like all of Garner’s work, the early books are based on both universal and local myths and legends; They describe the magical adventures of siblings Colin and Susan around Alderley Edge in Cheshire as they collide with and are changed by ancient forces beyond their control. In Boneland, time has passed and Colin has grown up to be an astronomer, searching for his missing sister among the stars and on the edge; he can’t remember anything from his childhood. in another dimension, an observer looks for a woman. both must find what they seek, and quickly, or “the skies will fall and there will be only winter, wanderers, and the moon.”
philip pullman describes garner’s work as a place “where human emotion and mythic resonance, sexuality and geology, modernity, memory and craft meet and interbreed”. From Harry Potter to The Hunger Games, adults have been enthusiastically reading children’s books in recent years. Garner predates the crossover phenomenon by decades, but he’s never just been a children’s writer: he’s much richer, stranger, and deeper than that.
the casual vacancy by jk rowling (little, brown, september)
As with his world-conquering Harry Potter books, the contents of JK Rowling’s first adult novel will be a closely guarded secret until the day of publication. all we know so far is that, in true pottery fashion, it is 512 pages long; a “big book about a small town” in which horcruxes and golden snitches are replaced by council meetings and feuds in the town park. Pagford appears to be an English idyll, but feuds and passions boil below the surface and erupt into all-out war when Barry Fairbrother’s sudden death leaves an empty seat on the parish council. It’s classic society territory in microcosm: Little Brown Promise is a thought-provoking black comedy.
merivel: a man of his timeby rose tremain (chatto & windus, september)
After winning the Orange Prize in 2008 for her contemporary novel The Way Home, Rose Tremain returns to historical fiction and the narrator of the 1989 restoration, in Merivel: A Man of His Times. it is 15 years since sir robert merivel returned to bidnold manor in norfolk; At the urging of his beloved daughter, Margaret, he decides to address his middle-aged melancholy and, armed with a letter from his patron Charles II, heads to Louis XIV’s resplendent Palace of Versailles. Andrew Motion said of Tremain’s historical fiction that “he manages to make good stories, tearing threads apart… but when we read them we realize he’s up to something more ingenious than that, more modern, self-reflective and complicated… We’re having a good time in an old-fashioned sense, but also making you think about things.” Tremain’s twelfth adult novel reflects its scope, luminous style, and emotional resonance.
nw by zadie smith (hamish hamilton, september)
It’s been seven years since Zadie Smith’s last novel, the orange beauty prize winner, during which time the literary world’s fascination with her hasn’t diminished. Fortunately, his new one is a triumph: the intertwined stories of a group of Londoners, united by the council estate they grew up on, trying to negotiate adult life in an era of arrested development. impulsive natalie, who reinvented herself as the worldwide idea of a hit, is going off the rails; uncertain leah balks at the prospect of motherhood; For Nathan, she’s been downhill since elementary school. The complex topography of modern London is explored in a stunning portrait of aspiration and apathy, change and continuity, the social and personal barriers between people and how they can be broken down. As Smith bridges the inner and outer worlds of her characters, each phrase sings.
the testament of mary by colm tóibín (Viking, October)
Given that he wrote a collection of short stories titled Mothers and Children, it should probably come as no surprise that Colm Tóibín has dedicated an entire novel to the most famous couple in Western history. But her mother of god is far from the afflicted and yet he accepts figure familiar to most of us: instead, tóibín evokes a woman who continues to suffer in anger many years after the crucifixion of Jesus. her son. Furious with the disciples of Jesus and reluctant to participate in the version of history that the Gospel writers are putting together, María de Tóibín is a powerful and implacable figure, very typical of the singular imagination of her creator. p>
back to the blood by tom wolfe (jonathan cape, october)
A quarter century after the Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s fourth novel promises to be yet another sweeping panorama of American life. this time he trains his reporter’s eye and swaggering prose on “class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition” in miami, where immigration passions run high, with a cast of characters that includes a Cuban mayor, a black police chief, an Anglo sex addict psychiatrist and his Latina nurse, plus numerous conceptual artists, crack dealers, and dubious Russians. The book has been in the pipeline for years, following a change of publisher (and a breakthrough) after the critical and commercial disappointment of 2004’s I Am Charlotte Simmons: Years in which the society Wolfe seeks to anatomize has been in flux.
dear life: stories by alice munro (chatto & windus, november)
See Also: 26 Steamy Books like Fifty Shades of Grey – She Reads
As the only writer to crack Booker’s shortlist for a short story collection (with The Beggar Maid in 1980), Alice Munro easily deserves to finish our list of best fiction of the year. If 2012 has been a strong year for novels, it has been especially so for short stories, culminating in a new collection by the doyen of form. dear life, her 13th collection, not only returns to munro country, the small towns and open spaces around lake huron, canada, where the author has lived for many years, but several of the stories are candidly based on unusual in his own life. and childhood memories. It has become a cliché to say that her work spans lifetimes in the space of a few pages, and while this is certainly part of the quiet miracle of her talent, the stories are often ambitiously long. here, however, many are shorter and sharper than we expected. Critics and writers, including Byatt, Margaret Atwood, and Jonathan Franzen, have found different ways to say that she is one of the greatest writers, of any kind and from any country, at work today. Fourteen new pieces by this peerless author, now in her 80th, are cause for celebration.
and a dozen more…
waiting for the dawn of william boyd (bloomsbury, february): spies, sex and psychoanalysis in the first world war.
scenes from early lifeby philip hensher (fourth estate, april): semi-fictional account of hensher’s husband’s childhood in dhaka during the birth of bangladesh.
Stonemouth by Iain Banks (Little, Brown, April): Banks returns to a small Scottish town to tell a tale of teenage mysteries and difficult homecomings.
Michael Frayn’s Skios (Faber, May): Frayn’s attempt to transfer theatrical farce into the novel, a comedy of mistaken identity set on a Greek island, makes for a stylish beachside read.
in a person by john irving (doubleday, may): a bisexual writer reviews his life in a tragicomedy about love, difference and AIDS.
nicola barker’s the yips (fourth estate, july): the great eccentric of english fiction delivers a typically riotous saga starring a failed golfer, an agoraphobic tattoo artist, a muslim sex therapist, and many other lutonian luminaries.
> p>
mo said it was peculiar to james kelman (hamish hamilton, august): his last dramatic monologue is the first written with the voice of a woman.
the door of daylight by jeanette winterson (hammer, august): inspired by the infamous witch trials in pendle, lancashire, in 1612.
the heart break in by james meek (canongate, september): a contemporary family drama of love and scandal, morals and fame.
the feast of john saturnall, by lawrence norfolk (bloomsbury, september): witchcraft, cooking and warfare in seventeenth-century england; the first in 12 years of the master of the historical giant.
a possible life of sebastian faulks (hutchinson, september): different storytellers in different times, all looking for human connections.
pardon us am homes (granta, october): sibling rivalry and self-invention in the dark heart of contemporary america.
See Also: Chapter Summary