Fiction

While reading this book, I saw an ABC TV Foreign Correspondent program on volunteer health workers in Ukraine tackling frontline fighters’ horrific injuries. I was moved by the stoic optimism of the soldiers, the dedication and compassion of the doctors and nurses, one of them wearing a brave slash of lipstick.

It always surprises me when I encounter someone so well read that they seem to have every obscure literary reference to hand and yet the late Canadian writer Mavis Gallant has managed entirely to escape not just their attention but their knowledge. ‘Who?’ they will ask. ‘How do you spell that?’ Offer them titles of collections and stories and their perplexity only deepens. The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, edited by American novelist Garth Risk Hallberg and published by New York Review Books, both tries to explain that underappreciation and to ensure that every serious reader knows precisely why one might wish to spend time in Gallant’s idiosyncratic and determinedly realist house of fiction.

Josephine Rowe’s third novel, Little World, is a little novel, at least in terms of its length, which resembles that of a novella. Little World is also about a little person, specifically a child, or rather, the preserved corpse of a child, said to be a saint. There is nothing small, though, about the novel’s impact, which is grandly and enduringly enigmatic.

Would-be novelists used to be told that they should write about what they knew. That’s why, over the years, countless volumes have appeared that were at the very least semi-autobiographical.

On 22 January 1840, the Mettray Penal Colony officially opened. Mettray was a French prison farm for juvenile criminals that was imitated by other incarceration programs throughout Europe as a disciplinary model. For Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), its creation was a turning point in human power relations, as its structure reconfigured punishment as discipline and surveillance; it transformed society into a carceral culture. As Foucault claims, power and knowledge are one and the same.

The themes in Elegy, Southwest are big, nothing less than life and death. Madeleine Watts sets them against a backdrop of monumental scale: the endless desert vistas of the American south-west, the overwhelming monolith of the Hoover Dam, the massive grandeur of the Grand Canyon. The narrative Watts has crafted to explore these big themes rejects anything epic and instead goes small-scale, bringing an almost microscopic lens to the emotional world of a marriage coming apart.

Chris Flynn’s Orpheus Nine takes as its title the name given to the grisly mass death event that provides the novel’s premise and animates its plot. The event afflicts people across the globe at an identical moment and in an identical way, and its ill-fated victims are all children, specifically nine-year-olds. Curious already, owing to its scale and arbitrary application, this phenomenon proves all the stranger for what occurs immediately before these children finally succumb to its brutal consequences. Before their bodies swell and distort, before their organs fail due to an overload of sodium chloride, they sing, in angelic chorus, a Latin translation of a verse from King Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport.’

Connections made across time and space have long been a focal point of Irish writer Colum McCann’s oeuvre. From the construction of the first railway tunnels under New York (This Side of Brightness, 1998) to his singular portrayal of the history and emotional toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Apeirogon (2020), McCann has weighed what it means to tether oneself to another person, another place, another moment in history. Even his recent foray into non-fiction – American Mother (2024), written with Diane Foley, whose journalist son James was brutally murdered by ISIS – concerns itself with Foley’s attempt to find some sort of bridge between herself and her son’s killers.

What’s in a novel’s epigraph – this one for example: ‘In a general way it’s very difficult for one to become remarkable’? We might read these words as an elliptical suggestion that the narrative we are about to encounter will raise the question of character. Perhaps we will witness one or more characters struggling to achieve something out of the ordinary – or struggling in entirely unremarkable ways, remaining unremarkable. Such is the stuff of much of the best fiction, after all, as well as the course of most lives.

The title of The Empusium, the newly translated work by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is an invention. It is a portmanteau that fuses masculine and feminine literary allusions: first, Plato’s Symposium, which tells of a drunken Athenian banquet in which great statesmen give speeches on the nature of love; second, the empusa, a shape-shifting female demon who, according to Greek mythology, had the sirenic ability to lure and prey upon young men.