US debut fiction: the best-written novels of the year and century
Read the opening pages of our picks below
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—The best-written books of 2024.
—Julian Evans on prose style.
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—‘Andi Taylor is pumping her hands together, hitting her own flat stomach, thinking not of her mother sitting at home with her little brother, not of her car, which barely got her here, not of her summer job, her lifeguarding at the overcrowded community pool, not of the four-year-old she watched die, the four-year-old she practically killed, and his blue cheeks’: the best-written work on the shortlist for this year’s Centre for Fiction Prize for debuts. The winner will be announced on the 6th of December.
—‘I got the world’: the best-written previous winner of the prize (this choice is part of our project to identify the best-written books of the century).
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THE SHORTLIST FOR THIS YEAR’S CENTRE FOR FICTION PRIZE
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao
They Dream in Gold by Mai Sennaar
Ask Me Again by Clare Sestanovich
Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer by Joseph Earl Thomas
Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga
The best-written of these is
ARTEMIS VICTOR vs. ANDI TAYLOR
Andi Taylor is pumping her hands together, hitting her own flat stomach, thinking not of her mother sitting at home with her little brother, not of her car, which barely got her here, not of her summer job, her lifeguarding at the overcrowded community pool, not of the four-year-old she watched die, the four-year-old she practically killed, and his blue cheeks. They shouldn’t give teenagers the job of saving children. It doesn’t matter how many CPR classes you’ve taken. She killed the boy with her wandering eyes. His swimsuit had small red trucks on it. He looked like he was made out of plastic. The feel of his thigh when she pulled him from the bottom of the pool, already dead, and the way it was so easy to grip, because it was so small, she’s not thinking about it. She’s looking at the skylight and the light it’s letting in on this shit-hole gym and she’s thinking about the things she always does wrong when she fights, her lazy left guard, the way her left hand slips away and doesn’t protect her face if she’s not thinking about it. She is also thinking about the way Artemis Victor will get her. If Andi Taylor doesn’t think about this, this fight will be over in a matter of seconds. Andi Taylor needs to think about her spacing and her stomach. Andi Taylor needs to think about her stance.
They’re still sitting and looking at each other meanly. They know each other but have never fought before. When you join the women’s youth boxing league this facade of a sports association makes you pay two hundred dollars and then you get a ‘free’ subscription to their magazine, which profiles its members, young girl boxers, one by one, so you see who’s out there, even if they are across the country, and you get a good sense of who you’re up against, and you know who they’ve fought and who they are going to fight and what their favourite hobby is because god only knows what kind of a journalist writes this excuse for a magazine, but whoever it is seems to think it is valuable information and that it should be included in every athlete profile, because in every issue there it is: name, hometown, favourite colour, hobby, wins and losses, photo of the girl in gloves. The photo is a wild card because some girls choose to take it in their gym clothes, while others choose to take it in halter tops, their hair down, their heads tilted, and their gloves resting on their hips.
Andi Taylor would know Artemis Victor anywhere because Artemis Victor is the youngest of the three Victor sisters, a family of boxers whose parents come to every single one of Artemis’s matches with shirts that say ‘Victor’, which is, of course, ridiculous, their proclamation of their daughters’ winning records on their chests.
Everyone knows the Victor sisters and what they’ve won and what they’ve lost and the judges treat Artemis’s family like old friends, which, in boxing, is especially infuriating because the grey area of a call is often so present, and if you know a judge has a special relationship with the participants, you can’t help thinking, I’m being slighted, this is the end of me, if only I had parents willing to befriend my coaches, if only I had parents who could get off work, who didn’t work, who could come see me win.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
Named a Best Book of 2024 So Far by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Time, Elle, Vulture, and The Guardian
Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls’ pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight.
This is a novel about the radicalness and strangeness of being physically intimate with another human when you are measuring your own body, through competition, against theirs. What does the intimacy of a physical competition feel like? What does it mean to walk through life in the bodies we’ve been given, and what does it mean to use those bodies with abandon?
Funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic, Headshot is equal parts subtle and intense, as it brings us to the sidelines of the ring and above and beyond it, examining closely the eight girls’ lives, which intersect for a moment – a universe that shimmers and resonates.
‘Bullwinkel’s writing is as poignant and visceral as the sport demands, her words inhabiting the thoughts and bodies of her characters . . . Beauty, brutality and the sheer banality of violence combine.’ Benjamin Myers, Guardian
PREVIOUS WINNERS OF THE CENTRE FOR FICTION PRIZE
2006 Marisha Pessl Special Topics in Calamity Physics
2007 Junot Díaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2008 Hannah Tinti The Good Thief
2009 John Pipkin Woodsburner
2010 Karl Marlantes Matterhorn
2011 Bonnie Nadzam Lamb
2012 Ben Fountain Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
2013 Margaret Wrinkle Wash
2014 Tiphanie Yanique Land of Love and Drowning
2015 Viet Thanh Nguyen The Sympathizer
2016 Kia Corthron The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter
2017 Julie Lekstrom Himes Mikhail and Margarita
2018 Tommy Orange There There
2019 De'Shawn Charles Winslow In West Mills
2020 Raven Leilani Luster
2021 Kirstin Valdez Quade The Five Wounds
2022 Noor Naga If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
2023 Tyriek White We Are a Haunting
The best-written of these is
RANDALL 1
I got the world.
My family and the trees, the library, picture shows, history and geography and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Longfellow and in the advanced class Mr. Faulkner. I got Prayer Ridge and Lefferd County and the state of Alabama and the United States of America. I got the future: college, law school, med school. Or businessman, choices. And ocean liners to Europe, China: all waiting.
B.J.’s world is smaller. The family, and the trees. Some days it’s smaller still, all inside himself. He’s my little brother. He’s eighteen. I’m thirteen.
I sit with him on the rug between our twin beds. A’s a fist, B.J., see? And B’s four fingers up. And let’s see, C, you just cup your hand like C, see? Then D oh wait. S is the fist, A’s sort of a fist but thumb points up. Then E—wait, that’s trickier. Shoot, I missed D. Guess if I were a better teacher, I’d’ve learned em myself before trying to teach him but I’m short on time, algebra exam tomorrow. I come across the drawings at the front of this book I borrowed from the school library, the “Manual-Finger Alphabet.” The book is The Story of My Life by Miss Helen Keller, which she wrote while still at Radcliffe. Barely anything been translated into Braille back then, yet Helen at fourteen knew Latin, devouring books in German and French and I don’t mean “See Jack run.” Grown-up books, literature!
A few verses of Omar Khayyám’s poetry have just been read to me, and I feel as if I had spent the last half-hour in a magnificent sepulcher. Yes, it is a tomb in which hope, joy and the power of acting nobly lie buried. Every beautiful description, every deep thought glides insensibly into the same mournful chant of the brevity of life, of the slow decay and dissolution of all earthly things.
Essay she wrote, and only a freshman! Well here’s my point: If Helen Keller could do all that in a world of total darkness and silence, why can’t B.J. read when all he is is deaf?
Next day I breeze through the test, 3y + 34 = 2y + 89 easy, finish five minutes early and turn it over in the avoidance of copycats which provokes a few glares in my general direction. Late September, the year barely begun but my reputation’s long been sealed: smartest in the class which is not exactly the golden path to eighth-grade popularity. Lunch I always eat alone which is fine—gives me good time to think. And today what crosses my mind: How’m I supposed to teach B.J. letters when he can’t hear the sound they make, words when he doesn’t understand what language is? Suddenly this whole teaching thing seems way too big, I better just return that Helen Keller book. Then again Helen had her breakthrough, right? Didn’t her teacher help her into the social world? Then again Helen was toddling, already a vocabulary when the sickness stole her senses, so was it that foundation of speech what sprungboard her into communal consciousness? I sip my milk pondering it all as Earl Mattingly pulls my seat out from under me, sticky white all over my shirt, my ass on the floor and half the school laughing.
When I get home the book is not top drawer of my dresser where I know damn well I left it, where the hell? Now B.J. at the doorway holding it, looking at me all eager for the next drill. I take lesson time down to the kitchen, ginger snaps my mother baked, and usually B.J.’d indulge with me but today too raring to learn. Or play, a game to him, like it was to Miss Keller at first.
Two Saturdays back he threw a fit. My mother: “This mighta been cute when you were a baby, but it is not cute anymore,” like he would have any idea, like her trying to reason with a cat. He only pulls that stuff when my father’s not home because Pa’d take the belt to him, “I don’t care how big you are,” though long ago he’d stopped whooping me and Benja. B.J.’s tantrum all about I wasn’t taking him to the park with me. Used to every couple weeks but then, July, there we are, the blanket all laid out, food my mother made for us and I saw em. Kids from my class, coming out the woods and spy B.J. and me. Even with the distance I can make out their smirks.
So lately when I go to the park I go alone, and here’s B.J. home by himself, nobody to play with, and this I think is related to how he’s such an attentive student now: got his playmate back. I dip cookie into milk and say the letters real exaggerated as I hand-show em. He’s all delighted with cross-fingers R, and when I accidentally confuse G for Q he looks in the book and corrects me. I I show him, J. He stares at J, making that hook with his pinkie over and over, then he big-time catches me unawares. B he spells and speaks it, pretty distorted but not out of the ballpark, then J, then points to himself. I smile. He figured that out without me telling him, my big little brother B.J. got his Helen-eureka fast. I spell him the rest of the family: Mother, Father, Benja, Randall and, smart again, he knows with the last one to point to me. When the lesson’s over I close the book. He snatches it and takes it back with him to our room. Oh Lord, how’m I gonna explain to him it’s borrowed and due back less than a week?
The next day’s Friday and by some miracle Mrs. Goodman’s already checked the algebra tests, and I’m pleased and unsurprised at my big fat A though perturbed her nitpicking brought me down to 96 even if it’s still the class high. When I get home B.J. and Ma are all into it. She doesn’t understand what kind of game he’s playing with his hands, with her hands, is beside herself with his frustrated conniptions. I give her the news flash: B.J.’s spelling “Mother.” She gets this dazed look like she can’t hardly believe it, and B.J. looks at me grinning, spelling “Randall” over and over so fast, faster even than fourth-period Madame Everhart’s spoken French so takes me till the third time before I get it.
On the eve of America's entry into World War II, in a tiny Alabama town, two brothers come of age in the shadow of the local chapter of the Klan, where Randall--a brilliant eighth-grader and the son of a sawmill worker--begins teaching sign language to his eighteen-year-old deaf and uneducated brother B.J. Simultaneously, in small-town Maryland, the sons of a Pullman Porter--gifted six-year-old Eliot and his artistic twelve-year-old brother Dwight--grow up navigating a world expanded both by a visit from civil and labor rights activist A. Philip Randolph and by the legacy of a lynched great-aunt.
The four mature into men, directly confronting the fierce resistance to the early civil rights movement, and are all ultimately uprooted. Corthron's ear for dialogue, honed from years of theater work, brings to life all the major concerns and movements of America's past century through the organic growth of her marginalized characters, and embraces a quiet beauty in their everyday existences.
Sharing a cultural and literary heritage with the work of Toni Morrison, Alex Haley, and Edward P. Jones, Kia Corthron's The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a monumental epic deftly bridging the political and the poetic, and wrought by one of America's most recently recognized treasures.