The Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction: the best-written work on this year's shortlist

And the best-written previous winner

COMING SOON:

—November is the busiest month for literary prizes, so we’ll be featuring the best-written books from their shortlists, and also from the century’s previous winners of these prizes. To avoid sending you too many posts, we’ll leave the recent releases until December.

—Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes will be joining me on the 16th of November for a live video discussion of what we mean by the term ‘literary’. All of you are welcome to join us, and you can find more information here, restacks of which would be appreciated.

IN TODAY’S ISSUE

—‘She presumably had teeth at the back of her mouth, but the almost daughter had always avoided being close enough to be able to check, as doing so caused her a vague, pulsing nausea. On the days when the lonely woman spoke too much, the almost daughter could imagine the saliva pooling and foaming in the throat the voice was coming from, and the sensation would then spread out to her own throat’: the best-written work on the sho…