The best-written recent literary fiction: Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn
Read the opening pages below
1
What made the countryside countryside, thought Sebastian, a city boy born and bred, going very fast now, was the enormous gaps between the buildings, the gaping wounds, the wasted space. A rabbit twitching its way through the wet grass, or a desperate squirrel flinging itself from branch to branch, could not explain all that green unpleasant land. Sword in my hand. There must be an invisible city there, a bombed-out city, full of incandescent ghosts; men, women and children, rushing about like human torches, passing on their torment to the innocent woodland creatures, making rabbits hobble and squirrels take flight. Going screwy, chasing their tails around a trunk.
Rapid stabbing motion all over his chest. He could also see, through the reinforced glass (he wished he was reinforced glass), a herd of cows dotted across a nearby hill, their brown and white hides waiting for the tanners to turn them into shoes. They weren’t fleeing or limping because they were tethered by their appetites, wrenching roots from the ground with a twist of their stooped heads and juicing the grass with their slow rotating jaws. Masturbating. Milked for all they were worth. Sometimes, the sound of tearing roots was so loud he had to block his ears and hum to himself. Those shoes in ancient times.
Cows needed three or four stomachs to rip apart the tough fabric of the universe, to break down the cellulites, or cellophane, or cell mates, there was a word for it, the cell phones that bound everything together. A cow could stomach anything, any amount of connectivity. He wished he could stomach anything – anything at all – but he couldn’t digest his own thoughts, they came so thick and fast.
Another huge plus about being a cow was that you got to be humanely slaughtered, which explained why there weren’t any cows in this hospital, pacing up and down, day and night, working out how to top themselves. They had it all arranged for them. It was a package deal, a luxury holiday, being a grass-fed cow. A cow-fed cow got Mad Cow Disease and who could blame them? It was like crashing in the Andes and having to eat your fellow passengers: enough to drive anyone round the bend.
More information on the book US/Canada»
UK/Ireland»
LITERARY FICTION TITLES CONSIDERED THIS MONTH
Name by Constance Debré
Eden’s Shore by OisÃn Fagan
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn
Sister Europe by Nell Zink
Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt
Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp
The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce
Audition by Katie Kitamura
A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton
A Hole in the Story by Ken Kalfus
Big Chief by Jon Hickey
Plum by Andy Anderegg
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk
Atavists by Lydia Millet
The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett
Submitting work to Auraist
We offer writers a fast-growing audience of tens of thousands of discerning readers, including many world-class writers, major publishers and literary agencies, and journalists at the highest-profile publications.
If we publish your work, we’ll invite you to answer our questions on prose style. Your answers will be considered for inclusion in the print publication of these pieces by many of the world’s best writers.
The following submissions are welcome:
Books published in the last year
Works serialised on Substack
Start the process by signing up for a paid subscription below. Then email your work to auraist@substack.com.
We look forward to reading it.