My Book of the Year has to be Kaliane Bradley’s debut The Ministry of Time. It’s the kind of book that ruins reading for you for months afterwards, because you know no other book will be as fun, as hot, as clever. If you haven’t read it yet, treat yourself this Christmas.
Honourable mentions also go to: the Faber Editions re-issue of Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife; Rosalind Brown’s brilliant debut Practice; Allen Bratton’s contemporary take on Shakespeare’s Henriad, Henry Henry; Rita Bullwinkel’s Booker-nominated story of girl boxers, Headshot; Heather McCalden’s exploration of the internet, AIDS and virality, The Observable Universe; and this year’s Goldsmiths Prize winner, Parade by Rachel Cusk.
From the publisher:
'Holy smokes this novel is an absolute cut above! Exciting, surprising, intellectually provocative, weird, radical, tender and moving. I missed it when I was away from it. I will hurry to re-read it. Make room on your bookshelves for a new…
Recommended by Gayle
‘Another absolute banger in the excellent Faber Editions series of rediscoveries. Ex-Wife follows Patricia, a New Yorker who unexpectedly finds herself divorced at 24, as she works out how to live and who to be in her new role of ‘ex-wife’. It’s full of dead-pan humour, and so modern I refuse to believe it was first published in 1929. A Heartburn for the Jazz Age!’
Recommended by John
‘Raunchy 21st century Virginia Woolf with an unforgettable narrator, finding the numinous in small quotidian rituals. My favourite debut novel for ages and ages.’
From the publisher:
They knew each other because their families knew each other: had known each other, for a long time.An elegant, audacious and blisteringly funny portrait of inheritance, defiance and love - from a major new talent'Carnal and…
From the publisher:
Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls’ pasts and futures collide, the specific…
From the publisher:
Are we ever truly lost in the internet age? The Observable Universe is a moving, genre-defying memoir of a woman reckoning with the loss of her parents, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a…
Recommended by Victoria
‘This is philosophical fiction at its peak. Parade contains four long chapters that interweave the lives of four different artists – all called G, two men, two women – with the life of the first-person narrator and her husband. Like the characteristic covers, Cusk’s prose is clean and deceptively simple while asking some of the most difficult existential questions: what does it mean to create (produce?) art? Is it anything like creating (producing?) a child? Do the answers to those questions differ depending on whether you are a man or a woman? (Parade’s answer is surely ‘yes’, but in interesting ways.) If we are creations (products?) of our own parents, what do we owe them? In true Cusk fashion, Parade is a novel in which the action is pared down to moments that could be life-changing, if only we recognised them as such.’
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