The best-written recent literary fiction
And the author answers our questions on prose technique.
Every week we identify the best-written works of fiction, speculative fiction, and nonfiction from recent releases and shortlists for major prizes. We also publish guides by their authors on prose technique.
1
They are always present when you walk through the city at night. Glance up at the oldest buildings, those that have survived the gutting, the ripping out; look up at the silent upper floors of the former linen mill, the warehouse, the bank or department store, accounting offices and hotels, and you sense them in the emptiness, on dusty stairwells, in boarded-up back rooms where even the brashness of the city’s new light struggles to enter. They live on in their own realm, waiting and watching at the mouth of the river where the city started, built on reclaimed mud and the slime of sleech. The lives of all those who have dwelt here are layered, linked eternally through the ages from when time was nothing more than the rise and set of the sun and spectral stick figures foraged the shoreline for clams and cockles.
Now time is marked by the stream of the universe, the spin of the earth; the hands of a clock, tick after tock in the darkened hall when all are sleeping; the calendar on the kitchen wall that pretends to control the space of days wherein we live. They say time flows like water but in this place that they call the Manor House because they don’t wish to use its older Irish name, something is happening to time, with its course diverted, its journey subverted, harnessed – who can say what the right word is and who can tell where it will carry us?
An old house with a newly dug lake that waits patiently for the water to fill it. Its owners stand expectantly at the best vantage point, behind them at a respectful distance their servants, separated in turn from those who have worked to excavate the void. The time has finally come. An excited order is shouted, then repeated. Slowly the water loses its accustomed direction as it seethes and rundles through the channel that men’s callused hands have laboured to create. The river is confused, suddenly pulled out of its expected path, a path so familiar that the enclosing banks are shaped and smoothed by its passage, banks that have long held it tightly like the embrace of a lover.
Tumbling in a sudden surge of expectation, it rushes out of its preordained channel, thinking it is finally breaking free, but instead finds itself filling the great hollowed-out basin of earth that stands waiting. Its confused, skittering entry is greeted by cheers from those who stand watching it. An old house with a new lake and at its edge a boat house with red tiles and two stone dragons on either side of its doors. Men wave their caps in the air. And all around them, as if summoned from hidden cloisters, come the others, all those who are no longer bound by time’s restraints. They stand at the lake’s edge as if mesmerised by the water’s flow, before vanishing again like some early morning mist sifting through the trees.
And here too amongst the unseen is a child, a newly born child, whom the water will wash clean and render timeless. Its cries are soft, momentarily lost in the rising cheer from the army of labourers who now toss their caps in the air and slap each other on the back. The lake slowly fills, but with it comes a sense of disappointment that the water is as brown as the earth it covers, its surface laced with a froth of milky suds because time has not yet had a chance to purify its essence. The child cries again. But still the water seethes and courses with excited rivulets running ahead, searching out the contours of its new home, layering and pooling in ever-changing patterns until the weakening cries slowly slip below its surface and time settles once more.
More information on the book »
‘You can tell on the first page of a book whether it’s true or counterfeit.’
David Park is a multi-award-winning author, with accolades including the Authors' Club First Novel Award for The Healing, the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize for The Truth Commissioner (which was adapted into a film), and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year for Travelling in a Strange Land.
In your early writing career, ​were there writers whose sentences permanently affected the standards of your reading and your own writing aspirations?
In writing about style it’s perhaps best to start with a disclaimer. So let me say from the outset that I have no coherent overview of my writing style. There are of course descriptions over the years offered by critics and I tend to go with the thought that if enough people say something, there might just be some truth in it. But I honestly don’t give it much consideration and if I was preoccupied with style I think it would be really difficult to write anything at all.
And to be honest, in a work of fiction, style should always be subservient to the needs of the novel as a whole. If it becomes a self-conscious element then it’s a spoke in the wheel of the storytelling. Style also needs to adapt to circumstance, just as in the real world we might not choose to wear the same clothes at a funeral as we do on the first day of our holiday.
One person however who does have a clear view of my writing style is my wife. I know this because once when working on a novel I left it on my computer screen overnight. In the morning after she had gone to work I found it ended with a paragraph that was similar to something I might have composed but couldn’t remember having written it. In a bit of a panic and thinking I was experiencing some memory lapse I phoned her and amidst much mutual laughter she admitted the – what’s the right word here? – pastiche? replication? forgery? I enjoyed the joke.
I grew up in the fundamentalist religious orthodoxy of a Baptist church so the first stories I heard were Biblical and the Authorised Version of it provided a language and rhythms that helped shape my consciousness. Much later as that faith was fading I stumbled breathlessly into the world of literature.
And despite living in Belfast, the magic portal was the work of American authors - writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Carson McCullers and Steinbeck. And when I reached the end of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and Rose of Sharon suckles the dying man I felt a life changing wonder at the power of the written word. I suppose there must be a lasting influence in my writing of those earliest experiences, however unconsciously, whether it is in the direct economy of Hemingway, the burgeoning lusciousness of Fitzgerald or the social relevance of Steinbeck.
And as anyone who grows up in fundamentalist faith understands, there is always an enduring legacy. So as a writer I find myself interested in many of the central concepts that are found in scripture – redemption, the search for atonement, the miraculous, and particularly the imagery of transfiguration. In relation to transfiguration, I find myself encountering images of unexpected and ephemeral illumination amongst the mundane repetition of our lives. And what we choose to write about is as important a part of our style as the way we construct a sentence.
So what then is my writing style? I can’t do a full-face answer but if you twist my arm I would guess perhaps it’s a kind of plainsong leading to moments of lyricism, even though I hate that word. I hate it because it carries a resonance of artificiality, of deliberate contrivance and that’s never what I want. So perhaps I might replace it with ‘moments of revelation’, of unexpected luminosity.
It might also help if I declare what I don’t like. This would include the ostentatious; the too showy and obvious display of ego; writing that has its eyes fixed unblinkingly on the ephemeral zeitgeist; writing that wants to shock me – I live in the modern world, you can’t show me anything worse than what I see each night on the news; a lack of understanding of narrative pace and writing that is unnecessarily long (let’s give thanks here for Claire Keegan). And above all these things, I turn my face away from writing that isn’t true.
It's the great paradox of fiction. For fiction to work it has to be true, has to make us believe that we have entered a world that is real. It has to be true in its psychological fidelity to the complexities of what it is to be human, true in its narrative and absolutely always true in its language. That’s why writing is hard – one slip, one clumsy move and everything will come tumbling down like a house of cards. And you can tell on the first page of a book whether it’s true or counterfeit. So especially for writers setting out there is an absolute necessity to keep testing the language for its fidelity, rejecting the shop-worn, the tired, the predictable.
So finally, where does style come from? Style is a complex combination of multiple things – your personal history, your tastes, your dislikes, the music you listen to, the clothes you wear, everything that has influenced you, the things you aspire to, the things you value, the people you love or hate. It’s not something I think you can make a definitive rational choice about because ultimately for better or worse it’s an expression of your inner self.
And that’s why you can’t adopt someone else’s style. So please stop writing a pastiche Sally Rooney novel – she got there first and as the excellent ‘Intermezzo’ demonstrates she has developed and expanded her style and subject matter. She’s no longer writing ‘Normal People’. And that’s why in writing it’s futile to try and catch a wave. Before you launch your writing surfboard the wave has raced away and someone else is riding it.
‘If I had to do multiple drafts I would die of boredom.’
Do you have any pet ideas about style and voice you could share with us?
The revelation of how I write may well undermine your long-held concept of the creative process and possibly diminish my work in your critical eyes. But I can only share the truth as it exists.
When I started writing I had a full-time demanding job and continued to have it for most of my writing life. There were consequences. Firstly, I avoided anything that required long detailed research and more importantly I developed the habit of trying to get things as right as possible from the start. So my fourteen works of fiction have never had multiple drafts – the finished published work is very close to the original. When the book is written I try of course to check for typos, repetition of words, sentences starting the same way, any sentence that is convoluted or unsatisfactory or feels unbalanced.
But I rarely, if ever, do much substantial rewriting. If I had to do multiple drafts I would die of boredom. And then I hand myself over to the copy editor. I admire their skill-set intensely – the ability to spot repetition, overuse of a particular word – in one novel it was the word ‘seep’. They are meticulous and sometimes you feel shame-faced when their laser attention to detail exposes sloppiness. But the sloppiness is generally in small easily remedied things. Not in fundamentals.
I think that for better or worse I am an instinctive writer. There are always conscious decisions being made about character, narrative, pace, etc but in the actual process of writing I am not really thinking about it. It just happens. For better or worse it just happens. I like to play racquet sports and when the ball comes over the net there must at some level be calculations about velocity, angles and body shape, but when your arm swings to hit that ball it’s coming from some other part of the human self. It’s a flow, it’s an instinct, it’s something slightly miraculous.
And I also want to say this about my writing experience. Of course sometimes it’s hard work, particularly at the start, and you might feel as if you’re climbing the mountain, but when I reached the end of my last two novels I was deeply conscious that the writing had gathered its own momentum and if anything all I had to do was stand back and steer very lightly but not get in the way of that flow. That’s the very best experience a writer can have.
Which stylistic issues mattered most when you were writing and editing WOMAN OF THE HOUR?
This is a novel both about the human archaeology of where we exist, the layers of lives on which place is built and also the human ghosts or presences that inhabit our memory and from which there is no escape. I have no active memory of its creation so I imagine now that in the opening paragraph I wanted a narrator’s voice that isn’t personalised so we’re not sure who it is or where it’s coming from.
I wanted too through the choice of language to create an early contrast between two worlds - the brutal physical impact of destruction – ‘the gutting , the ripping out’- and the mysterious, unseen presences who inhabit ‘the emptiness’, ‘the dusty stairwells, and ‘boarded-up back rooms’. These two very different worlds are present in each of us and are portrayed in the novel through the lives of the characters and the pivotal moments when they collide.
Tell us one piece of standard stylistic advice you strongly agree with.
In relation to advice about writing I think it’s largely pointless, not in the particulars of course, but when it tries to set doctrinaire rules for everyone. There is no one methodology that is right and sadly no golden ticket.
But if I were to subscribe to one piece of advice it would be Raymond Carver’s ‘Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.’ If you want to be a writer nothing is more important than the going on. To do this you will need to overcome a range of doubts, hold tightly to the vision you have, even though there will inevitably always be that excruciatingly sad moment when you realise that you can never fully achieve what exists untrammelled in your imagination.
Try to keep your sentences light and fresh, carried on the breeze, trying always to find the word that fits best. And the opening sentence I wish I had written is Richard Ford’s in Independence Day:
‘In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems.’
If you want an image that encapsulates writing and the search for a perfection of writing style, find it in this ultimate aspiration that if only we can strike it true, find the right words, the world itself will fall in tune with its own beautiful and mysterious anthems.
Between them, the Substacks we recommend receive over a thousand new subscribers that way every month. If you recommend us on Substack, we’ll reciprocate if your publication is likely to interest our readers.
Please consider completing our reader survey or clicking the Like (heart) button to help spread the word about the only publication set up solely to champion beautiful prose and battle the Replicant Voice.
On Friday we published for paid subscribers our pick of the best-written book of the month.
Literary fiction titles considered this month
The Director by Daniel Kehlmann; translated by Ross Benjamin
The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen by Shokoofeh Azar
Twelve Post-War Tales by Graham Swift
All the Mothers by Domenica Ruta
The Names by Florence Knapp
Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis
Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund
The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne
The Missing Kidney by Maxine Rosaler
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
That's All I Know by Elisa Levi; translated by Christina MacSweeney
Sing to Me by Jesse Browner
The Fate of Others by Richard Bausch
Autocorrect by Etgar Keret; translated by Jessica Cohen & Sondra Silverston
Ghost Wedding by David Park
The Boys by Leo Robson
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey
A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi
Gunk by Saba Sams
Dream State by Eric Puchner
The Pretender by Jo Harkin
The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies
Lovers of Franz K by Burhan Sönmez
Back in the Day by Oliver Lovrenski
Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst
Best-written books of the century
Recommended Substacks
Coming soon we have the best-written recent releases, and more authors answer our questions on prose technique. Plus more selections from our subscribers’ submissions.
Our archive has dozens of author articles on prose style, hundreds of picks from recent releases and prize shortlists, and the best-written books of the century. A paid subscription gives you full access to this archive.
Thanks for reading Auraist and purchasing the books we recommend, to help to support fine writing.
Sean McNulty
Exquisite. This utterly sells me on this book. The excerpt, the thoughts. Gorgeous.