From the pages that lured us into their gripping dramas to those which offered escapism from our lockdown lives and the ones that opened a window onto real lives elsewhere, books played a vital role in getting us through this rocky year.
Culture Whisper's resident bookworm Madeleine Feeny rounds up her best new books of 2021.
Gwendoline Riley writes economical, sharply focused novels narrated in the first-person. First Love, a portrait of a toxic relationship, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2017. My Phantoms applies the same minute observation and unsparing ear for dialogue to a parent-child dynamic in which the roles are often reversed. To her daughter Bridget, an academic in her 40s, Helen Grant is a source of mystery and frustration: her strange intransigence, her fruitless attempts at happiness, her disastrous marriages – not least to Bridget’s bullish narcissist of a father. Bridget sees her mother once a year, but when Helen seeks to penetrate the barriers her daughter has erected, Bridget must balance their painful history with filial duty. This study of mother-daughter tensions is at once brutally funny and quietly devastating.
(Granta, 1 April)
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Are we inhabiting a digital dystopia of our own making? Judging from this American poet and memoirist’s first novel, it would seem so. Jia Tolentino nailed it when she said, ‘reading Patricia Lockwood feels like looking through a kaleidoscope built by a mischievous sorcerer.’ This funny, existential portrait of a life lived online uses a fragmented form to reflect how we interact in the digital space. The narrator spends her days transfixed by the infinite scroll, digesting the melange of facts, misinformation, speculation and trivia that’s fed to her. But as her sense of reality, and self, dissolve, she starts questioning who’s in charge: us or the internet. Satirising its distortions and absurdities – the desensitisation, the mutation of language, the collective experience – this novel is smart, experimental and surprising.
(Bloomsbury, Tuesday 16 February)
When Tabitha Lasley’s London home was robbed and she ended a toxic relationship, she quit her job at a women’s magazine. Wanting ‘to see what men were like, with no women around,’ she rented a flat in Aberdeen to research and write a book about life on oil rigs, one of the last remaining well-paid jobs open to working-class men. The offshore workers she’d met previously lived hard, spent fast. Among them in Aberdeen, Tabitha relives her youth in Merseyside, partying with abandon. But retaining journalistic impartiality becomes difficult when she falls headlong into a precipitous relationship with one of her subjects, a married rig worker. Illuminating the subculture of an industry often overlooked, this memoir interrogates class, masculinity and female desire.
(4th Estate, Thursday 4 February)
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Set in Dublin, this booze-soaked portrait of a relationship explores the traps laid by deifying love. Yet another Irish debut minted in the Sally Rooney mould, we hear you sigh. Well, not so much, as this one’s all heady first-person prose, rather than the cool, spare variety. Having dropped out of university, the narrator – aspiring writer, established drinker – is working restaurant shifts while haunting Dublin’s literary scene, where she falls for beautiful Ciaran. She’s so stunned by his interest that she’s happy to accept the power imbalance; happy, too, to ignore his sudden silences and petty rages. Love is a drug, its withdrawal agony, but can she learn to live and value herself without it? Acts of Desperation captures what it means to be young, alone and suffused with longing.
(Jonathan Cape, Thursday 4 March)
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Inspired by his family history, Booker Prize-shortlisted author Sunjeev Sahota’s multigenerational third novel interweaves a story of an alienated youth with that of his great-grandmother. In 1929, Mehar is a 16-year-old bride confined to the ‘china room’, a farm building in rural Punjab, along with two other newlywed women. All three have been married to three brothers; all three submit to conjugal intercourse under veil of darkness. In 1999, the narrator – fleeing an adolescence of racist exclusion and addiction in northern England – travels to that same farm, where his estrangement echoes his ancestor’s. China Room is a finely crafted tale of repeating trauma, oppression and the quest for freedom.
(Harvill Secker, 6 May)
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A new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day is this spring’s standout literary event. Like Never Let Me Go, which was adapted into an acclaimed film starring Keira Knightley, Klara and the Sun imagines a speculative reality that probes the boundaries of science and what it means to be human. It tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend, who, from her position in the store, observes the behaviour of browsing customers and passers-by. She remains optimistic that she will be chosen, but when it becomes clear that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to stake too much on the promises of humans. Contemplating the uncharted possibilities of AI to human relationships, Ishiguro poses the eternal question: what does it mean to love?
(Faber, Tuesday 2 March)
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Music impresario. Northern broadcaster. Manchester legend. Cultural commentator. Founder of Factory Records and The Haçienda. Manager of Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays. Tony Wilson was all these things and more. He was memorably acted by Steve Coogan in 24 Hour Party People but there hasn’t been an official biography, until now. Paul Morley, bestselling author of books on David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson and the North, knew Wilson – ‘who always lived his life with his biography in mind’ and selected Morley to write this book. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Wilson’s visionary knack for bringing people together drove the transformation of his beloved Manchester into a cultural epicentre. Here, Morley examines that life and legacy with such wisdom, humour and vividness that Wilson leaps off the page. Not just the biography of a man, but of a city and cultural moment.
(October, 19 October)
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Following on from Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living, the third memoir in Levy’s tripartite ‘living autobiography’ investigates property and possession. It finds the thrice-Booker-longlisted author nearing sixty, her daughters about to leave home, considering what constitutes her real estate, her legacy. As work takes her from London to Mumbai, Paris to Hydra, she wonders how to transform her fantasy property portfolio into reality. Wittily scrutinising the patriarchal narratives that restrict women, from Greek mythologies to Hollywood scripts, and the connections between art and life, Real Estate is an invigorating celebration of female autonomy and an imaginative meditation on home.
(Hamish Hamilton, 13 May)
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The second novel from the author of Sympathy is a taut, disquieting story of a relationship that comes under strain when a young woman confronts her traumatic childhood. Anya and Luke are on holiday in coastal Provence when he proposes, but the coveted ring doesn’t confer the sense of security she’d imagined. Her anxiety is heightened when they travel to Sarajevo, the city she escaped as a child refugee. As Anya’s life fragments, so does her sense of self, and the tension builds to an electrifying climax. In precise, elliptical prose, Sudjic paints a powerful portrait of a psyche damaged by war and family schisms. A meditation on identity and belonging, Asylum Road speaks to our unsettled times.
(Bloomsbury, Thursday 21 January)
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Yaa Gyasi’s epic debut, Homegoing, traced the legacy of the slave trade in Ghana across three continents and seven generations. Now she’s back with her second novel, the story of a Ghanaian immigrant family in America. After Gifty’s teenage brother dies from an opiate addiction, her mother succumbs to a depression she refuses to name or treat, convinced only God can save her. High-achieving Gifty looks to science for answers, embarking on a neuroscience PhD. But when her mother comes to stay in California, Gifty discovers that their traumas have deeper roots. Unravelling her family’s past will take Gifty across continents and into the dark heart of the modern US. This scalding tale examines the tensions between religion and medicine in the context of America’s charged racial climate.
(Viking, Thursday 4 March)
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