April's literary fiction: the best-written recent releases
Read the opening pages from our picks below
In today’s issue
— Our picks of the best-written recent releases in literary fiction, plus the opening pages from each.
— A brief extract from The Demon Inside David Lynch, which we’ll be serialising later this month.
We’ve now organised the site so you easily access our archives of author masterclasses, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
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BOOKS CONSIDERED
Fruit of the Dead Rachel Lyon
Help Wanted Adelle Waldman
Anita de Monte Laughs Last Xochitl Gonzalez
Say Hello to My Little Friend Jennine Capó Crucet
American Spirits Russell Banks
Great Expectations Vinson Cunningham
Change Édouard Louis, trans. John Lambert
All Our Yesterdays Joel H. Morris
The Understory Saneh Sangsuk, trans. Mui Poopoksakul
Flight of the Wild Swan Melissa Pritchard
Fervour Toby Lloyd
Rainbow Black Maggie Thrash
The Morningside Téa Obreht
The Tree Doctor Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Worry Alexandra Tanner
Glorious Exploits Ferdia Lennon
The Extinction of Irena Rey Jennifer Croft
The Most Secret Memory of Men Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, trans. Lara Vergnaud
Clear Carys Davies
Mona of the Manor Armistead Maupin
Stone Yard Devotional Charlotte Wood
The best-written of these are the two books below.
Part One
THE SPIDER-MOTHER’S WEB
August 27, 2018
Of a writer and their work, we can at least know this: together, they make their way through the most perfect labyrinth imaginable, the path long and circular, and their destination the same as their starting point: solitude.
I’m leaving Amsterdam. Despite everything I’ve learned in this city, I still can’t decide if I know Elimane any better or if his mystique has merely grown. It would be appropriate here to evoke the paradox of any quest for knowledge: the more you discover about a little piece of the world, the clearer the vastness of the unknown and of your ignorance becomes; except that equation would only partially convey my feelings toward this man. His case demands a more radical formula, meaning more pessimistic about the very possibility of comprehending a human soul. His resembles an occluded star; it mesmerizes and devours everything that comes near. You examine his life for a time and, pulling back, serious and resigned and old, perhaps desperate even, you whisper: The human soul can’t be understood, it won’t be understood.
Elimane sank into the depths of his Night. The ease of his farewell to the sun fascinates me. The willing embrace of his shadow fascinates me. The mystery of his destination haunts me. I don’t know why he stopped speaking when he had so much left to say. But mainly, it pains me that I can’t do the same. Encountering someone who’s gone silent, truly silent, invariably prompts reflection about the meaning—the necessity—of your own words, as you suddenly wonder whether it’s all just worthless babbling, linguistic sludge. Time to shut my mouth and pause this diary. The Spider-Mother’s stories tired me out. Amsterdam emptied me. The path of solitude awaits.
A Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times and The New Yorker and Longlisted for the National Book Award
A gripping literary mystery in the vein of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, this coming-of-age novel unravels the fascinating life of a maligned Black author, based on Yambo Ouologuem.
Paris, 2018. Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer, discovers a legendary book titled The Maze of Inhumanity. It has an immediate hold over him. No one knows what happened to the author, T.C. Elimane, who was accused of plagiarism, his reputation destroyed by the critics.
Obsessed with discovering the truth about Elimane's disappearance, Faye weaves past and present, countries and continents, following the author's labyrinthine trail from Senegal to Argentina and France and confronting the great tragedies of history.
Will he get to the truth at the centre of the maze?
A gripping literary quest novel and a masterpiece of perpetual reinvention, The Most Secret Memory of Men confronts the impact of colonialism and neo-colonialism, the holocaust in Europe, dictatorships in South America and the Caribbean, genocide in Africa, and collaboration and resistance everywhere. Above all, it is a love song to literature and its timeless power.
‘It’s roughly the equivalent of footage of Pontius Pilate’s decision to murder Christ.’
If you want an enlightening time, put yourself through some YouTube clips of Twin Peaks: The Return then watch the standing ovation it received at Cannes. Watch everybody’s faces, the faces of the boomer and gen-x corporate-cinema elite as they applaud and Bravo away, as all of them including Kyle MacLachlan face in towards their quiffed Grand Maître to grin and rejoice. Watch the Demonic Twin of David Lynch’s expression as like Mr Trump’s after a rally it soaks up the adulation.
Though at least you sometimes saw protesters at those rallies, didn’t you? At Cannes, however, there’s not a single protester. Every last person is on their feet, in their tuxes and gowns, cheers and roars and whistles rolling down from the balcony in waves.
Don’t skip any of that ovation, please. Keep watching for the full five minutes. I promise it’ll do you good. It really brushes away the cobwebs, really clarifies matters.
It’s roughly the equivalent of footage of Pontius Pilate’s decision to murder Christ. That’s how historic the misjudgement is. I know this might sound blasphemous to some people, to all those scandalised and shellshocked by The Return who’d rate that ovation far below what Pilate did. And they may have a point, I suppose, because Pilate got his information about Christ second-hand, didn’t he, whereas these millionaires at Cannes had just sat through all the first-hand evidence anyone could need.
Now, fair enough, as at a Trump rally mass psychosis was clearly in the air, but still: five bloody minutes. They could have kept it to a polite twenty seconds. They could have remained sitting. They could have made a quiet exit. But no. Look at their faces, the grins of the company men and women who decide what cinema and TV drama you get to see. Look at their eyes, the abomination-betwinkled eyes of the people who control our most influential artform.
Pontius Pilate couldn’t have just made a quiet exit. The spotlight was on him, if you like, and he’s now been condemned for two thousand years. How do you think that audience at Cannes will be remembered?
COMING SOON:
It’s 12.33 a.m. and I start to write in this dark and silent room. Outside through the open window I hear voices in the night and police sirens in the distance.
I’m twenty-six years and a few months old; most people would say that my life is ahead of me, that nothing has started yet, but for a long time now I’ve been living with the feeling that I’ve lived too much; I imagine that’s why the need to write is so deep, to fix the past in writing and, I suppose, to get rid of it, or maybe, conversely, the past is so anchored in me now that I’m forced to talk about it, at every moment, on every occasion, maybe it has won out, and by believing I’m getting rid of it I’m only bolstering its existence and its ascendency over my life, maybe I’m trapped – I don’t know.
.
When I was twenty-one it was already too late, I’d already lived too much – I’d known misery, poverty in my childhood, my mother asking me time and again to go and knock on the neighbours’ or my aunt’s door with an imploring voice so they’d give us a packet of pasta and a jar of tomato sauce because she had no more money and she knew that a child would be more easily pitied than an adult.
I’d known violence, my cousin who died in prison at thirty, my older brother who was sick with alcoholism even as a teenager, who woke up drunk most mornings because his body was so steeped in alcohol, my mother who denied it with all her might to protect her son who swore to us every time he drank that it was the last time, that after that he’d never drink again. The fights in the village café, the obsessive racism of rural, isolated communities, underlying every sentence, or even every word, This isn’t France any more, it’s Africa, there’s nothing but foreigners everywhere you look; the constant fear of not making it to the end of the month, not being able to buy wood to heat the house or replace the children’s torn shoes, my mother’s words, I don’t want my kids to be ashamed at school; and my father, sick from a life of working in the factory, on the assembly line, then in the streets sweeping other people’s rubbish, my grandfather sick from the same life, sick because his life was almost an exact replica of his great-grandfather’s, his grandfather’s, his father’s and his son’s: deprivation, precarity, quitting school at fourteen or fifteen, life in the factory, sickness. When I was six or seven I looked at these men around me and I thought that their lives would be mine, that one day I’d go to the factory like them and that the factory would break my back as well.
*
I’d escaped from this fate and worked in a bakery, as a caretaker, a bookseller, a waiter, an usher, a secretary, a tutor, a sex worker, a monitor in a summer camp, a guinea pig for medical experiments. Miraculously, I’d attended what’s considered one of the most prestigious universities in Europe and graduated with a degree in philosophy and sociology, whereas no one else in my family had studied at all. I’d read Plato, Kant, Derrida, de Beauvoir. After growing up among the poorest classes of northern France, I’d got to know the provincial middle classes, their sourness, and then, later on, the Parisian intellectual world, the French and international upper classes. I’d rubbed shoulders with some of the richest people in the world. I’d made love to men who had works by Picasso, Monet and Soulages in their living rooms, who travelled only by private jet and spent their entire time in hotels where one night, one single night, cost what my whole family earned in a year when I was a child, for a family of seven.
I’d been close – physically at least – to the aristocracy, I’d dined at the homes of dukes and princesses, eaten caviar and drunk rare champagnes with them several times a week, spent my holidays in big houses in Switzerland with the mayor of Geneva who’d become my friend. I’d known the life of drug dealers, loved a railway maintenance worker and another man who, at barely thirty, had spent a third of his life in prison, and slept in the arms of yet another on an estate reputed to be one of the toughest in France.
At just over twenty I’d changed my first and last names in court, transformed my face, redesigned my hairline, undergone several operations, reinvented the way I moved, walked and talked, and got rid of the northern accent of my childhood. I’d fled to Barcelona to start a new life with a fallen aristocrat, tried to give up everything and move to India, lived in a tiny studio in Paris, owned a huge apartment in one of the richest neighbourhoods in New York, walked for weeks alone across the United States, through unknown, ghostly cities, in an attempt to unravel what my life had become. When I went back to see my father or mother we didn’t know what to say to each other, we no longer spoke the same language, everything I’d experienced in such a short time, everything I’d gone through, everything separated us.
I’d written and published books before I turned twenty-five, and travelled the world to talk about them, to Japan, Chile, Kosovo, Malaysia and Singapore. I’d been asked to speak at Harvard, Berkeley, the Sorbonne. At first this life awed me, then it left me jaded and disgusted.
I’d narrowly escaped death, I’d experienced death, felt its reality, I’d lost the use of my body for several weeks.
More than anything else I’d wanted to escape my childhood, the grey skies of the Nord department and the doomed life of my childhood friends whom society had deprived of everything, their only prospect of happiness being the couple of evenings a week they spent at the village bus stop, drinking beer and pastis in plastic cups to forget, to forget reality. I’d dreamed of being recognised in the street, dreamed of being invisible, dreamed of disappearing, dreamed of waking up one morning as a girl, dreamed of being rich, dreamed of starting all over again.
.
At times I’d have liked to lie down in a corner, away from everything, to dig a hole, burrow into it and never speak again, never move again, along the lines of what Nietzsche calls Russian fatalism: like those soldiers who, exhausted from fighting, crushed by the fatigue of battle and their pained, heavy bodies, lie down on the ground, in the snow, far from the others, and wait for death to come.
.
It is this story – this odyssey – that I want to try to tell here.
‘Change fills me with admiration and inspiration, as well as renewed faith in writing itself’ Maggie Nelson
Édouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination and violence in his working-class hometown - so he sets out to study in Amiens, and, later, at university in Paris. He sheds the provincial 'Eddy' for an elegant new name, determined to eradicate every aspect of his past. He reads incessantly; he dines with aristocrats; he spends nights with millionaires and drug dealers alike.
Everything he does is motivated by a single obsession: to become someone else. Change is at once a personal odyssey, a story of dreams, friendship and the perils of leaving the past behind, and a profound portrait of a society divided by class, inequality and power.