Aurora del Valle is raised amid great wealth in Chile at the turn of the 19th century by her shrewd, commanding grandmother. Her earliest memories are of a brutal trauma, and she discovers a twisted saga of three generations. Isabel Allende‘s PORTRAIT IN SEPIA (Flamingo) explores the complexity of passion, the power of memory, and a woman’s emerging self.
With prose like this, who needs a plot? A man wanders around his house and thinks. That’s it. But in ECLIPSE (Picador), John Banville has created another important, challenging fiction. It consists of a monologue delivered by Alexander Cleave, a celebrated actor whose career came to an abrupt end. The book is ornately written, heartless in an honest fashion, profoundly interrogative of ideas of identity and, above all, spectacularly beautiful.
It took Peter Carey 35 years to write about Ned Kelly. TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG (Faber & Faber) — winner of this year’s Booker Prize — was worth the wait. The poor Irish bushranger who stole from banks and gave to the poor, who never harmed women and children, who made himself a suit of armour with a bucket on his head and shot a lot of policemen is an Australian folk hero whose violence has been sanctified — the Australian Robin Hood. Carey narrates his story chronologically in the first person, and it is Ned’s voice that makes the book wonderful. Simple, direct, colloquial, humorous, respectfully prudish, and shot through with poetry, free from the clutter of any punctuation other than full stops.
FALLING ANGELS (HarperCollins) is Tracy Chevalier‘s follow-up to Girl with a Pearl Earring. The Colemans and the Waterhouses are reluctant neighbours, yoked together by their daughters’ friendship. The girls’ penchant for visiting the cemetery to compare urns and angels brings new dangers, a pastime that leads in turn to Mrs Coleman’s sexual liberation and her later interest in suffragettes. The progress of Chevalier’s characters out of Victorian reticence and into the relative permissiveness of the early 1900s is neatly handled. She also does a good line in ghouls.
The new novel from Paulo Coehlo, author of The Alchemist, is a darker work than that bestseller. THE DEVIL AND MISS PRYM (HarperCollins) tells of a stranger who tries to persuade the inhabitants of a small town to murder one of their number. “I had to recognise,” says Coehlo, “that I have a dark side as well as a bright side.”
BITTER FRUIT (Kwela) is the powerful new novel by Achmat Dangor, dealing with issues of identity and justice in the new South Africa. Set at the close of the Mandela years and as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is delivering its report, it focuses its concern with the transition between a bloody history and an uncertain future through a coloured family — Silas, Lydia (his wife), and Mikey, their son, who is just beginning to discover himself and the trauma that lies in his parents’ past.
As we keep a wary, half-bored, half-fascinated eye on Big Brother, we should ask ourselves what we’d really like to see happen. Ben Elton, stand-up comic and scriptwriter of the hilarious historical comedy Blackadder, has taken that idea as far as it will go in his new novel, DEAD FAMOUS (Bantam). A bunch of total strangers are thrown together in a programme called House Arrest, submitting to round-the-clock surveillance. And then one of them is murdered …
Ivan Vladislavic‘s new novel, THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET (David Philip), is perhaps the most remarkable South African novel to have appeared within the past year. Its hero is Aubrey Tearle, a proofreader of telephone directories, a linguistic curmudgeon, fighting his lonely war against disordered language. The tale is set in the failing years of apartheid, the time of Codesa and Nelson Mandela’s release. Tearle’s meditations on the properties of error are witty, dry and sustained, often brilliant, but the novel really takes off in part two, as Tearle heads for the “generous elsewhere” of the imaginary Alibia.
Fans of novels about families, both loving and disfunctional, have a treat in store — three new ones, two of them bizarre indeed. The oddest is THE SECRET by Eva Hoffman (Secker & Warburg), which tweaks the mother-daughter theme in an interesting way. PEACE LIKE A RIVER by Leif Enger (Doubleday) drifts into the supernatural; it is distinguished by the funniest cover testimonial of the year: “So wondrous and wise you’ll want to claw yourself with pleasure,” writes Frank McCourt, whose place in the pantheon of Irish writers sharing their family secrets is under siege by playwright Peter Sheridan. His parents’ three-cornered relationship steps into the spotlight in the charming FORTY-SEVEN ROSES (Macmillan).
John Irving hit worldwide fame (except in South Africa, where it was banned) with The World According to Garp, and he has kept telling his idiosyncratic kind of stories ever since. THE FOURTH HAND (Bloomsbury) is his latest, the tale of a man who needs a new hand (the previous one having been eaten by a lion), exploring themes of love, loss, grief, redemption and destiny.
SACHS STREET by Rayda Jacobs (Kwela) is a story of the Bo-Kaap of the 1950s. Young Khadidja’s life changes when her great-grandmother comes to stay — and to share her room. “Little Granny” will share her memories of the past with Khadidja, and her tales will intertwine with the story of the life Khadidja now faces. Sachs Street offers a sensitive and insightful portrait of the inner workings of a special corner of Cape life.
In A DREAMER’S PARADISE (Kwela), David Karanja follows the hard life of Muthina, an inhabitant of the imaginary country of Bururi. The victim of poverty, familial disintegration, political intrigue and fate, Muthina is a top student who is hurled into the difficult world of adulthood when his family falls apart. Later he gets arrested and jailed on trumped-up charges. A bleak picture of post-colonial Africa.
It would be unfair to call DISTANT MUSIC by Lee Langley (Chatto & Windus) simply a love story, although it is that: two people who meet first in early 15th-century Madeira — she a peasant, he a Jewish sailor — and part, then meet again a century later, she the pampered child of a wealthy Portuguese family, he a mapmaker fleeing the Inquisition. They meet, and love, and part again and again — but this wonderfully written novel is not only about the lovers. It’s also about Portugal and Madeira, neither the usual stuff of historical novels and both more fascinating than one realises. Langley won the Commonwealth Writers’ prize for an earlier novel — judging from this one, a well-deserved honour.
C Louis Leipoldt is one of the most fascinating and multifaceted figures in South African literary history — a medical doctor and keen botanist, he was also a cook and collector of indigenous recipes, a poet in Afrikaans and a novelist in English. His novels about life in the Cape round the turn of the past century, however, were not published until long after his death, and the third volume of the trilogy now collected as THE VALLEY (Stormberg) has not appeared until now. The Valley contains Gallows Gecko, Stormwrack and The Mask, written in the 1930s, and is presented with the minumum of editing.
Instead of a third volume of autobiography, Doris Lessing chose to use fiction to discuss the bittersweet Sixties, and the result is THE SWEETEST DREAM (Flamingo). Frances, a lonely earth mother, takes care of a dozen or so youths, dreaming of being freed from her journalistic work. It’s a sweet dream, but it won’t come true, as Frances is about to discover. The ills committed in the name of dreams — and, of course, their consequences — is the central theme explored in The Sweetest Dream. Whether the dream is about communism or independence, the characters here do harm to themselves and to others when they use dreams to hide from what they know to be the truth.
Ian McEwan is the master of taut, tightly plotted and sharply written tales of human misdemeanour. His new novel, ATONEMENT (Jonathan Cape), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and hit the bestseller lists, is more expansive than his short novels usually are, but it is just as readable and engrossing. It is a layered exploration of what happened on a particularly sultry day in 1935, when a 13-year-old girl with a vivid imagination witnessed some strange events, and the long, complex aftermath of those events.
WELCOME TO OUR HILLBROW (University of Natal Press) is Phoswane Mpe‘s portrait of a visceral, chaotic Hillbrow, home to rural villagers seeking the bright lights. Mpe delights in the specifics of Hillbrow — the long walks his characters take are made concrete with a litany of street names that read like a prayer. Welcome to our Hillbrow is the story of Refentise, his lover from Alex, his ex-lover from back home and his best friend, under fire from Aids and struggling between the assumptions of higher education and rural beliefs, who fall in love and betray that love. Though his plot gets muddled, Mpe’s linguistic twists are brilliant, especially when writing on the sexual folly of black men.
HALF A LIFE (Picador) is the new novel by this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, VS Naipaul — and the first fiction in some years from a writer who was said to have given up on the novel as a contemporary form. It is the story of Willie Chandran, born in India, drawn to England, and finally led to an African colony at a moment of turmoil.
Jamie O’Neill‘s fine novel about two boys in 1915, At Swim, Two Boys (Scribner), audaciously revisits James Joyce’s Ulysses — yet the book makes an impact far beyond pastiche. There are massive satisfactions to be had from it, in terms of language, character and plot. It is a paean to love between men and a rousing version of the events leading up to the Easter Rising. Dublin speech is present in strength and depth, and historical personages are deftly mixed in with fictional ones.
The world of 16th-century Turkish illuminators is the unlikely backdrop for Orhan Pamuk‘s sparkling novel, MY NAME IS RED (Faber & Faber). Set in 16th-century Constantinople, it is essentially the story of Black, a failed illustrator who has spent 12 years in the provinces and returns to Constantinople to woo his beautiful cousin. Soon, though, he finds himself embroiled in a murder plot tied to a special project for the sultan.
Coy is a sailor without a ship, stuck in the port city of Barcelona. He meets a madly seductive beauty who is obsessed with one particular shipwreck and the treasure that may be discovered there, and Coy finds himself drawn into a perilous adventure — and caught in the coils of love. THE NAUTICAL CHART (Picador) is “a novel of adventure” by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, author of the historical thriller The Flanders Panel and the chiller The Ninth Gate.
If you’re looking for something a little different to read on the beach this holiday, perhaps you should try Mark Ramsden‘s novel THE SACRED BLOOD (Serpent’s Tail). Ramsden’s work has been described as “Harry Potter for Satanists”, and this comedy thriller, in which a pair of fetishist detectives take on the overlord of a neo-Nazi death-metal cult, is filled with black magic, kinky sex and crazy adventures.
With THE BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER (Flamingo), Amy Tan returns to the familiar territory of history, identity and cultural and familial relationships that she made her own in the phenomenally successful The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. Daughter of a Chinese mother, LuLing, and a dead American father, Ruth finds herself, at 46, unsure of her direction and desires, frustrated by her inability to be intimate with the people in her life. She is blind to the extent of her mother’s legacy until LuLing’s incipient dementia sends her scurrying back to her own — and her mother’s — past. Perceptive and moving, and achieved with a light touch in spite of the weight of tragedy that haunts the three generations of women at its centre.
Almost a decade since Griet Skryf ‘n Sprokie, she’s back. Marita van der Vyver resumes the story with GRIET KOM WEER (Tafelberg). Deftly interwoven with Greek mythology, it is an entertaining account of how Griet, now with a nine-year-old daughter, meets the love of her life, an Italian puppeteer. With equal parts of realism, humour, wisdom and humility Van der Vyver explores the continuing mystery of how we live our lives. A wonderful read.
Zoë Wicomb‘s novel DAVID’S STORY (Kwela) was the winner of this year’s M-Net Book Prize in the English-language category — and deservedly so. A subtle and exceptionally well-written novel, it tells the story of a former underground member of the struggle, as he relates it to an unnamed woman author. She has to invent aspects of the tale to fill it in, giving the narrative more layers — and adding to the historical material, incorporating a history of the Griqua people, giving it added depth. Wicomb manages a complex story with consummate skill.
Irish novelist Niall Williams‘s third novel, THE FALL OF LIGHT (Picador), follows the (mis)fortunes of the Foley family, whose members undergo a series of picaresque adventures that scatter them far and wide. Eldest son Tomas is destined for the Rocky mountains, Finbar traverses Europe with a group of gypsies, and his twin Finan undertakes a mission to Africa. This is not a novel in which to seek Chekhovian subtlety or psychological insight: its appeal lies in its sweep, its epic ambition and Williams’s storytelling gifts. Such is the energy and vitality with which he conjures up scenarios that it seems churlish to quibble about their essentially melodramatic natures.