Fiction

For those of us who consider ourselves fans there is no sport quite so pure, so outright poetic as boxing, because this simple art of consensual combat offers no place to hide. Unlike other working-class sports such as football, with its amateur dramatics and petty squabbles, or American football and its endless ad breaks, boxing boils it down to the basics: hit and be hit, and in the best fighters we get to see the perfect symbiosis of artistry, strategy and brutality. Humans like to watch violence as much as we like to…

Cranked out to accommodate the recent boom in demand for fresh content to binge, too many celebrity-profile documentaries are defaulting to the formulaic sameness of assembly-line product: open with some candid talking-head soundbites, a walk down memory lane through their early years, deeper dives into the major bullet points of their career, and tie it up with a bit of summarizing introspection looking back on it all.Conversely, Alexandre O Philippe’s new William Shatner portrait You Can Call Me Bill spends a goodly…

‘Our People. Scattered to your four winds … They land, but do they grow where they fall?” This “half-dreamy, half-sad” question, addressed by a Ghanaian father to his son Kwame, haunts Michael Donkor’s second novel. It casts doubt on the promised land of dream and opportunity that drives so many diasporic narratives: one where first-generation immigrants sweat and save, so that the second generation enjoys a better education and life.Education is key here, as Kwame is an out gay English teacher in a London state school,…

How has your idea of home changed over the years? Author Manav Kaul (Kunal Patil/ Hindustan Times) The memory of home is so interesting. I live in a fictional world because I write fiction. I am more excited by memories of home and its people than the physical place itself. When I visit the places where I grew up or the places from where I started a career in theatre, I am often disappointed because the memory of those places is so much bigger. In that sense, I carry my home with me. Hindustan Times - your…

It’s sometimes said that all war movies, whatever their stance, end up being propaganda for war. In The Kellerby Code, a version of the argument is made about PG Wodehouse. “Propaganda for poshos,” one character says briskly when she sees the protagonist reading The Code of the Woosters. “Every book set in an English country house is an advert for a system that fucks everyone apart from the chinny cunts who live in them.”Jonny Sweet’s debut novel, then, is very conscious of the tradition in which it stands. It’s a lurid…

The Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange’s astonishing 2018 debut novel, There There, offered a kaleido­scopic portrait of urban Native American identity. Composed of an all-Native cast, it ruminated on power, storytelling, dispossession, erasure and historical memory. The novel’s off-the-wall structure placed its central event – a mass shooting at an Oakland powwow – at the book’s end, leaving its aftermath largely unattended.Now comes an emotionally incandescent and structurally riveting second novel, Wandering…

“I write about families,” Natalia Ginzburg said, “because that is where everything starts, where the germs grow.” The French-born writer and musician Alba Arikha clearly agrees, and has set her brilliant third novel firmly within the crucible of two families: the one her narrator is born into and the one she makes herself as an adult. The narrator is Clara, who, at the start, is a 16-year-old living in Paris and shares some biographical details with her author. (But not the fact her godfather was Samuel Beckett and she…

Andrey Kurkov’s latest novel to be translated into English, The Silver Bone, has begins in dramatic fashion. Its hero, Samson Kolechko, is walking in the streets of revolutionary Kyiv. It is the spring of 1919. Suddenly, two Russian Cossacks appear. They chop off his ear with a sabre before riding off. “Hot blood poured down his cheek and seeped under his collar,” Kurkov writes. Samson’s unfortunate father is cut down and killed.The severed right ear – recovered and placed in a tin – plays a central role in Kurkov’s…

A decade ago, Armistead Maupin boldly declared that it was over. The Days of Anna Madrigal, the ninth in his illustrious queer novel cycle Tales of the City, was, he claimed, the last outing for the residents of 28 Barbary Lane. But ever since the first of the Tales was published in 1978, the lure of the “logical family” has proved irresistible. Maupin is back with a tenth instalment. How tuneful is this unexpected encore?This iteration of the Tales is set in the early 1990s, and helmed by Anna Madrigal’s daughter Mona…

The post-1945 American novel was usually in some deep way about anxiety: the anxiety of living in America, with its enormous postwar wealth and its correspondingly enormous social pressures and opportunities. The great hope of its characters, like the great hope of America generally, used to lie in social mobility: up, up, and away! But in the 21st century, to hear young writers tell it, the social pressures have won. Anxiety, in the contemporary American novel, has given way to defeatism and pointillist satire: finely…