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Telegraph
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The male novelist isn't extinct – just look at this year's Booker longlist
It appears rumours of the death of the male novelist have been greatly exaggerated. This year's Booker longlist, announced today, bucks recent convention by celebrating this most unfashionable literary creature over hot new faces – six of the 13 authors on the list are men, not to mention middle-aged ones (by contrast, last year's shortlist of six featured five women). With Sarah Jessica Parker on a panel headed by Roddy Doyle, the list plays a curiously straight bat. The men, in particular, are mid-career – Andrew Miller, Benjamin Markovits, David Szalay, Benjamin Wood, Tash Aw and Jonathan Buckley – meaning the list has largely eschewed this year's buzzy debuts. British-Hungarian writer Szalay, one of Granta's Best Young Novelists in 2013, leads the pack with Flesh, his brilliant novel about masculinity, sex and modernity, told through the rags-to-riches life of a Hungarian immigrant. Miller is another venerated, if overlooked, author of exquisitely observed, character-led novels – it's great to see the elegantly atmospheric Our Land in Winter get the nod. Joining them is the 44-year-old Wood, five novels-deep into his career, with his arresting novel, Seascraper, about a 20-year-old loner in a 1960s English coastal town. And, too, Jonathan Buckley: author of 13 radical novels, his career has been maintained through the faith of independent publishers, including his current stable Fitzcarraldo. (These are, let's face it, hardly household names. Instead, they represent the quiet men of – largely – British fiction, toiling away in the slipstreams.) So they are not the usual suspects. There's noticeably no Ian McEwan, whose new and highly anticipated sci-fi novel, What We Can Know, is out in September (although, to be fair, the last time McEwan got the Booker nod was in 2007 for On Chesil Beach). No Alan Hollinghurst, who won in 2004 with The Line of Beauty and whose recent elegiac novel, Our Evenings, was a hotly tipped contender. No Tim Winton, the Australian heavyweight whose admittedly hard-going climate change novel, Juice, has been critically acclaimed. This year's crop of swaggering new talent from across the Irish sea has also been omitted. There's no Wendy Erskine, whose time-bending, polyphonic debut, The Benefactors, has received rave reviews. No Roisín O'Donnell, or John Patrick McHugh, or Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin, whose respective first novels have each been causing a splash. Nor is there much room for the Americans, whose usual dominating presence on the shortlist each year generates palpitations of anxiety about undue American cultural might. There is the London-based American Benjamin Markovits (a regular fiction critic for this paper, and picked along with Szalay as one of the Telegraph's Best Novelists Under 40 in 2010); the Korean-American Susan Choi, and the experimental minimalist Katie Kitamura. They're all fine writers – yet they hardly have the razzle-dazzle force of say, a Percival Everett, whose bravura novel James narrowly lost out on the top prize to Samantha Harvey last year. So what are we left with? There are a few stylistic stand-outs – Kitamura's Audition, which tells one story in two radically different circumstances; Jonathan Buckley's modernist-leaning, elusive beauty, One Boat; Maria Reva's tricksy Ukrainian heist caper Endling – one of the most eye-catching novels on the list. But in general, these are novels that are structurally conservative, opting for traditional narrative over technical innovation and without the daring of, for example, Patricia Lockwood's forthcoming Will There Ever Be Another You (another disappointing omission from this list). Several books – Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny; Choi's Flashlight – deal in the sort of narrative the Booker judges tend to love: they're bustling, intergenerational family dramas about migration and post-colonialism, set against heaving geo-political backdrops. The judging panel may exult in their list's roving global energy, but in truth, many of the novels this year are intimate psychological dramas. Some are also strikingly modest, such as Love Forms, Claire Adam's novel about a woman haunted by the baby she gave up for adoption – a result perhaps of the influence of SJP, whose book club picks tend to be both populist and easy on the eye. So, ostensibly a far from exciting list. But at its best it also celebrates the sort of quietly observational, superficially traditional storytelling that has been passed over by critics and judges in recent years – yet which often deliver just as much satisfaction as the most extravagantly hyped new sensation. No doubt this is down to the much more consequential presence of Doyle, who excels at precisely this sort of book. Will one of these underrated writers triumph? My bet is that Szalay, Reva, Wood and Desai are placed to do well, with Szalay's authoritative, deceptively spare examination of male desire at this point, arguably, the leading contender. But with so many dark horses on the field, it's a wide-open race. The 2025 Booker longlist Love Forms by Claire Adam (Trinidadian) Forty years ago, Dawn, a white Trinidadian teenager, was forced by her family to give up her illegitimate daughter following a brief encounter during Carnival. Now a divorced GP living in London, she has never been able to escape the thought of what she has lost – when, out of the blue, a mysterious Italian woman gets in touch. This is a novel of quiet sadness, steeped in the grief of a life half-lived. Flesh by David Szalay (Hungarian-British) Jonathan Cape David Szalay leads the heavyweights on the list with this critically acclaimed exploration of the socioeconomic forces that shape a single life. A superb novel about sex, money and masculinity, it's the story of István, a teenage offender who moves from a Hungarian council estate to a position of extreme status and wealth – and back again. Universality is playful but modest: it's a literary striptease which comprises alternating chapters from various characters, all linked to an assault on a Yorkshire farm. A novel about the commodification of language and truth, in the age of the sound bite. The South by Tash Aw (Malaysian) 4th Estate It's third time lucky for Tash Aw, one of Malaysia's most venerated authors. He's longlisted once again, this time for a tender epic about a love affair between two boys in an unnamed Asian country. A novel of Proustian luminosity, it's the first in a quartet tracing the lives of a family against the fall-out of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Buckley is a virtuoso stylist, barely known in his native Britain. An elliptical work about memory and selfhood, and comprising mostly a series of fleeting encounters, One Boat centres on a woman retreating in the wake of her father's death – to the same Greek shoreline where she mourned her mother nine years previously. Flashlight by Susan Choi (American) Jonathan Cape In this sprawling, sometimes heavily political novel, a Korean academic disappears the night his daughter nearly drowns. Spanning four decades in one Korean family's history, the novel explores the idea of exile in both emotional and geopolitical forms. Our critic called it an 'engrossing' tale 'which delights in playing with the reader's expectations'. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Indian) Hamish Hamilton Desai has been working on her third novel ever since her second, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Booker Prize in 2006. A busy, decades-spanning novel about love, family and solitude in a post-colonialist, globalised world, think of it as an Indian-style Romeo and Juliet (that runs up to 700 pages). A quintessential Booker novel. Audition by Katie Kitamura (American) Fern Press In a list short on technical daring, Kitamura's Audition stands out – it's a gnomic meditation on character and artifice which pivots on the familial tensions between a New York art critic, actor and their adopted son. Not everyone is a fan: among reviewers, Kitamura's tonally vacant prose and equivocal narrative approach have proven literary marmite. Wood is another welcome British surprise: a 44-year-old author from Stockport whose five lyrically tense novels have slipped under the radar – until now. Set in 1960s Lancashire, the pungently atmospheric Seascraper explores ideas of class, dreams and creativity through the unlikely friendship between a 20-year-old shrimp farmer and an American director, in town to shoot a film starring Henry Fonda. The Rest Of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits (American) An American road trip and a midlife crisis novel in one: The Rest of Our Lives follows Tom who, after dropping off his daughter at university, heads west instead of back home. Twelve years previously his wife had an affair, and while on the road, he reckons with this ongoing emotional fallout, problems at work and his place within our new modernity. It's an understated book which simultaneously seems to nod to all the great 20th-century American novels about the disillusionment of the white middle-class male. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (British) Sceptre Set during the freezing winter of 1962, this psychologically interior novel from a master of the form centres on two married couples – one living in a well-to-do doctor's residence, the other in a run-down nearby farm – who are forced to re-examine their lives when a blizzard cuts off their homes from the outside world. Endling by Maria Reva (Canadian-Ukranian) Virago This arresting debut, which features endangered snails and the mail-order bride trade among other eccentricities, is one of the liveliest and most original novels on the list. Three women make a journey across the Ukrainian countryside with a van of kidnapped bachelors in tow – then they're abruptly torpedoed by the Russian invasion. It's a bleakly comic novel about war – and a meta-fictional delight. Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Albanian-American) Daunt Books Originals An Albanian interpreter based in Brooklyn throws her marriage into crisis when, faced with clients who include refugees, she finds herself unable to draw the line between professional conduct and emotional impulse. A rather earnest debut, about PTSD.
Irish Examiner
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Summer books catch-up: 20 of the best novels so far in 2025
1. The Children of Eve by John Connolly There are few more enjoyable crime series characters than Detective Charlie Parker, John Connolly's former cop whose cases invariably find him knee-deep in the supernatural in picturesque Maine. This time out of the traps, he's tasked with finding an ex-soldier on the run who has apparently abducted the children of a mob boss. 2. Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney Elaine Feeney is one of Ireland's most talented novelists. In her third novel, Claire, moves back from London to Athenry following her mother's death, needing to care for her dying father. When her old flame moves into a house close by, it opens up a pandora's box of personal and family drama. 3. Flesh by David Szalay Flesh is the sixth book from the Booker Prize nominee David Szalay. He writes brilliant, meandering novels. His latest story is about a teenage Hungarian boy whose life over the course of decades takes a downward spiral owing to misfortune. 4. Fun and Games by Patrick McHugh Patrick McHugh's debut novel – following on from a well-received short story collection, Pure Gold, in 2021 – has been hailed. It follows the tribulations of a 17-year-old boy on an island off the coast of Mayo over the summer of 2009, a time of romance and ambiguous friendship. 5. Stories of Ireland by Brian Friel If you're looking to pack something in your suitcase for holidays, look no further than Brian Friel's short story collection published this year by Penguin, which is in paperback and mercifully slim. Most of the 13 stories were published in the New Yorker in their day. Each one is a marvel. Patrick McHugh's Fun and Games; Eimear McBride's The City Changes its Face 6. The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride Eimear McBride's quasi-sequel to the brilliant The Lesser Bohemians re-unites us with the actors Eily, 20, and Stephen, 40. It's set in London in the mid-1990s. Stephen's teenage daughter has resurfaced. Something terrible has happened, which will have consequences. 7. Air by John Boyne Air is the fourth instalment in John Boyne's elements series (following on from Water, Earth, Fire), novellas which examine abuse in different circumstances. In Air, a father, 40, is 30,000 feet above ground, in a passenger plane, flying with his teenage son. Both are trying to mend their broken lives. 8. The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O'Connor Joseph O'Connor returns to wartime Rome – scene for his previous novel, My Father's House, about wartime hero Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty – for a second instalment. Again, the theme is about escape lines for refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe, as Contessa Giovanna Landini, member of the activist group 'The Choir', tries to evade the unwanted attention of a Gestapo chief. 9. Twist by Colum McCann Colum McCann has a gift for storytelling. In Twist, Anthony Fennell, a journalist, in pursuit of a story to do with fibre optics, finds himself on board a boat off the west coast of Africa and in thrall to the ship's captain. When he disappears, Fennell goes hunting for him. John Boyne's Air; Emma Donoghue's The Paris Express 10. The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue The brilliant Emma Donaghue, author of Room and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of its movie adaptation, goes back in time to Paris in 1895 for her latest novel, a story inspired by the moments leading up to a fatal train crash, and the lives of several of the train's passengers. 11. Eden's Shore by Oisín Fagan Oisín Fagan's second novel has been acclaimed. His character Angel Kelly is a dreamer. In the late eighteenth century, he sets sail from Dublin, via Liverpool, intent on living in a commune in Brazil but ends up, unwittingly, in the middle of the slave trade, a mutiny and a colonial dispute, amongst other capers. 12. The Dark Hours by Amy Jordan Amy Jordan's crime novel, The Dark Hours, has been lauded by the New York Times. In 2024, Julia Harte, a retired Garda detective, gets a call from her old Superintendent. Two women have been murdered in Cork, in identical circumstances to a case she worked on 30 years earlier, forcing Julia to tackle some demons and hunt down a vicious serial killer. Amy Jordan's The Dark Hours; Patricia Scanlan's City Girls Forever 13. City Girls Forever by Patricia Scanlan The first three books in the City Girl series by the popular Patricia Scanlan were written in the 1990s. Dubliner Devlin Delaney and her best friends, Caroline and Maggie, return in middle age for more adventure and heartbreak, weighed down by their blended families, aging parents and sibling rivalries, but buoyed by friendship. Some of This is True by Michelle McDonagh 14. Some of This Is True by Michelle McDonagh On a January morning, a body is discovered at the bottom of the Wishing Steps at Blarney Castle. The mother of the dead tourist girl, who came to Ireland looking for her father, travels over from Boston. She's convinced her daughter's death wasn't an accident, setting in train an investigation that divides the local community. 15. The Bureau by Eoin McNamee The Bureau is perhaps Eoin McNamee's most personal novel yet, as it features his father as a central character in the action. It's a story of love and death during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, set along the border involving the vivacious Lorraine and Paddy, who's caught up in smuggling and money-laundering. Cork Fiction Highlights William Wall's Writers Anonymous; Catherine Ryan Howard's Burn after Reading 1. Writers Anonymous by William Wall: During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, Jim, an Irish novelist, organises an anonymous online writers group to pass the time. Things get messy when one of the writers starts drip-feeding him details about the suspicious death of Jim's childhood friend, which draws the reader back into the teenage world of a seaside Irish village in 1980 and a crime that must be resolved. A magnificent mystery novel. 2. Camarade by Theo Dorgan: Poet and writer Theo Dorgan has just released a philosophical thriller. A teenager abandons his life in Cork, having killed a policeman in a revenge plot. He flees to Paris, during a time of tumult, May '68 and camaraderie. Several decades later, he begins writing his memoir, which forces him to address the seminal event in his life. 3. Burn After Reading by Catherine Ryan Howard: Catherine Ryan Howard's novels are always page-turners. In Burn After Reading, Emily, a ghostwriter, gets a gig working on the book of a possible murderer who might be about to admit his guilt. Emily harbours her own secret, one of many twists in this tale. Catherine Kirwan's The Seventh Body; Louise Hegarty's Fair Play 4. The Seventh Body by Catherine Kirwan: Excavation comes to a halt on a Cork building site when six bodies are discovered. Therein lie the remnants of men from centuries ago. When the remains of a seventh person, a female less cold in the grave, emerges, a historical find turns into a murder case Detective Garda Alice McCann is desperate to solve, despite interference from her superiors. 5. Fair Play by Louise Hegarty: Louise Hegarty grew up in Glanmire, Co Cork. In her debut novel, a group of friends gather on New Year's Eve 2022 to celebrate Benjamin's birthday with a murder mystery-themed party. Friendships and affairs blossom and fray as the night unfolds. In the morning, they wake to find Benjamin is dead and so begins the real murder mystery investigation. Next week: 20 non-fiction tips
New York Times
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Molly Recommends 2 Very Male New Novels
By Molly Young Dear readers, In a startling break with tradition, we're examining two new (not antique) books today, both of which happen to offer glimpses into the male psyche. Feeling frisky and contemporary as summer approaches! We'll be back to regular programming in coming editions; in the meantime, please enjoy this detour into the present. —Molly PS: Read Like the Wind will be on hiatus for the next few weeks, but will return in July. 'Flesh,' by David Szalay Fiction, 2025 After finishing 'Flesh' in under 48 hours I tried to figure out how it worked, why it moved so quickly, what it was doing. Came up with a few possible answers but nothing conclusive, and would welcome any hypotheses from readers who felt similarly catapulted through its pages. 'Flesh' is the story of a Hungarian man born in (probably) the early or mid-1980s, with each chapter excavating a meaningful period in his life. Then the chapter ends and a silence is imposed, and the following chapter picks up a few years later. A reader interpolates what has occurred during the elided time. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Hypebeast
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
Oakley Factory Team's Flesh Silhouette Just Won't Stop Evolving — Introducing the Flesh Warp
Marking the second installment of its SS25 collection,Oakley Factory Teamis introducing a new evolution of its alien-likeFleshsilhouette, theFlesh Warp. Debuting in two key colorways,Brain DeadandOakleyshow that they aren't done remixing their favorite model, now manifesting with an asymmetrical lacing system, a custom-built outsole, and a sculpted, full-leather upper. To herald the new model, Oakley Factory Team starts with a classic greyscale duo, offering 'Vaporous Gray' in a light neutral leather and 'Black/White,' an all-black silhouette contrasted with the Oakley logo. While representing perhaps the most sneaker-geared design from the collaborators via the laces, leather upper, and stitched overlays, it also sets itself far from tradition with its futuristic shape and bold asymmetry. The final result evokes high-performance design found in specialty equipment for biking and football, most notably in the diagonally placed lacing system. In conjunction with the updated model, the collaborators reprise the original Flesh with full-grain leather, hairy suede, and translucent Orbital tooling. The Full Grain Leather Flesh is offered in 'Lucent White,' while the Hairy Suede Flesh is offered in 'Ganache/Burgundy' and in 'Sand/Blue,' and lastly, the Orbital Flesh arrives in 'Ghost Gray.' The second drop of Oakley Factory Team SS25 is set for release on June 3 at 10 AM PT at theBrain Deadweb store, Brain Dead locations,Oakley's web store, Miami Oakley Lincoln Road, Milan Oakley Cadorna, Milan Oakley San Babila, London Oakley Covent Garden, Oakley Marina Bay Singapore, Oakley Foothill Ranch, Tokyo Oakley Shibuya, and selected stockists.
Chicago Tribune
19-04-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Biblioracle: David Szalay's novel ‘Flesh' has an approach I wouldn't have thought would work
Within the first 20 pages of David Szalay's new novel, 'Flesh,' I knew that I would be writing about the book, but I truthfully had no clue what I might have to say. Several days after finishing the novel, I find myself in the same state of mind, which is a testament to the novel's unusual approach, and because of that approach, its haunting power. 'Flesh' is the story of István, who we first meet as an adolescent having moved to a new town in Hungary, where he lives in a small apartment with his mother. Adrift like many young teen males, István is — in a way — seduced by his married neighbor and begins a sexual relationship with her. István is not even particularly attracted to the neighbor, but the power of his sexual desire, particularly in the absence of attraction, is both interesting and impossible to resist. After the neighbor's husband discovers the affair, István kills the man accidentally as part of a scuffle on the apartment building stairs. He goes to juvenile jail, and once freed, enlists in the Hungarian army, where he winds up experiencing combat — including the death of a friend — in the Iraq war. The rest of the novel unfolds with István's fortunes (literally and figuratively) improving. He moves to London and finds work as a bouncer and then is recruited by a private security company, eventually getting steady work as a live-in driver for a wealthy couple with a young son. Throughout his journey, István, despite lacking any kind of apparent charm, or even intention at seduction, is irresistible to a series of women, the pattern started with his next-door neighbor repeating. This includes the wife of the wealthy couple, much younger than her husband, and frequently shepherded around London and its country environs by István. She initiates an affair, later conducted with increasing openness. István, both vicariously and then directly, is given access to a life of great material privilege, a condition to which he takes with seeming comfort, but also without apparent pleasure. I'll leave off the narrative summary there because what Szalay unfurls next generates some surprising and satisfying tension, but the intrigue of this novel goes well beyond its plot. What's most fascinating to me as the reader is that Szalay has deliberately removed one of the most potent tools in the novelist's shed, the ability to render a character's interiority — their thoughts, feelings, worries and excitements — in exchange for an exceedingly spare accounting of István's life. The most frequently used word is 'OK,' mostly coming from István in response to something another character has said. We know that he has been through trauma — he sees a therapist for PTSD after his military service — but we are given no insights into how István feels about any of this. He is stimulated by the sex, but what goes beyond or gets underneath this stimulation is never explored. Other events that would be objectively devastating happen and then are put behind him as life inexorably moves on. At first, these authorial choices rankled, I thought something was missing, but as I kept reading, I fell in with Szalay's approach and found myself more and more invested in István, and as the novel heads toward a fateful choice we are, in a way, aching for him, even though we hardly know him. I'm not sure I would've believed novels can work this way, but as I remain haunted by the book and eager to have others check it out, I recognize that with 'Flesh,' Szalay has done something quite special. John Warner is the author of books including 'More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.' You can find him at Book recommendations from the Biblioracle John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you've read. 1. 'The Last Amateurs' by John Feinstein 2. 'The Passengers' by John Marrs 3. 'Stoner' by John Edward Williams 4. 'The Color of Law' by Richard Rothstein 5. 'Real Americans' by Rachel Khong — Luca W., Chicago It's the inclusion of 'Stoner' here that makes me want to recommend a novel that's very different, but also, for some reason, provided a similar kind of impact on me: 'The Italian Teacher' by Tom Rachman. 1. 'Blaze Me a Sun' by Christoffer Carlsson 2. 'The Fox Wife' by Yangsze Choo 3. 'Possession' by A.S. Byatt 4. 'In the Distance' by Hernan Diaz 5. 'White Noise' by Don DeLillo — Christine C., Skokie For Christine, I want a book with a bit of postmodern gamesmanship without being too heavy-handed about it. How about Colson Whitehead's debut novel? 'The Intuitionist.' 1. 'What Does it Feel Like' by Sophie Kinsella 2. 'The Ride of Her Life' by Elizabeth Letts 3. 'Headshot' by Rita Bullwinkel 4. 'The Cliffs' by J. Courtney Sullivan 5. 'Here One Moment' by Liane Moriarty — Rita A., Naperville Rita needs something with enough snap to the story to keep things moving: 'Such a Fun Age' by Kiley Reid.
