Lessons, Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan’s 18th novel, Lessons, is a chronicle for our times, an epic on history and humanity that begins post-World War 2 and take us to the present day.
While the world is still counting the cost of the war and the Iron Curtain has closed, 11-year-old Roland Baines’s life is turned upside down. More than 3,000km from home, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
Twenty-five years later, as the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe, Roland’s wife mysteriously vanishes, and he is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence and look for answers in his family history. This begins a search for meaning that will last for the rest of his life.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history but more often struggles against it. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means — literature, travel, friendship, drugs, politics, sex and love.
His journey raises important questions. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape us and our memories? What role do chance and contingency play in our existence? And what can we learn from the traumas of the past?
Publishers Weekly calls it McEwan’s best work since the Booker-winning Atonement: “Throughout, McEwan poignantly shows how the characters contend with major historical moments while dealing with the ravages of daily life, which is what makes this so affecting. He also employs lyrical but pared-down prose to great effect ... Once more, the masterly McEwan delights.”
The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell
How do you follow up a commercial and critical success like Hamnet? You turn to the Italian Renaissance.
In 16th century Florence, Lucrezia de Medici is married to the intended husband of her elder sister, who died young.
Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia enters an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not welcomed by everyone. Most mystifying of all is her new husband, Alfonso. One thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide an heir. Until then, for all her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.
O’Farrell has written a mesmerising historical novel of a woman whose life was shrouded in mystery. But Lucrezia’s plight speaks equally to modern themes of gaslighting and women’s agency.
Harry Sylvester Bird, Chinelo Okparanta
Okparanta is the award-winning author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water. Harry Sylvester Bird is a provocative, satirical novel about a young white man in contemporary America.
Harry grows up in small town Pennsylvania, with parents whom he greatly dislikes. They’re racist, xenophobic, financially incompetent and they have quite a few secrets of their own. To Harry, they represent everything wrong with the country.
When he finally leaves home, he moves to New York City, where he meets and falls in love with Maryam, a young Nigerian woman. But when Maryam begins to pull away, Harry is forced to confront his identity as he never has before — if he can.
Less Is Lost, Andrew Sean Greer
Greer follows up his Pulitzer-winning Less with another delightful road-trip story featuring awkward middle-aged writer Arthur Less.
Life is going surprisingly well: he is a moderately accomplished novelist in a steady relationship with his partner. But nothing lasts.
The death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis has Less run away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of literary gigs that send him on an adventure across the US.
He grows a handlebar moustache, ditches his signature grey suit and disguises himself as a cowboy-hatted true “Unitedstatesian” with varying levels of success. Less Is Lost is a philosophical and joyous novel about the enigma of life in America and the mystery of love.
This Devastating Fever, Sophie Cunningham
This is Australian writer Sophie Cunningham’s first novel in more than a decade. A fine blend of autofiction, travelogue and history, it interweaves the story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf and their friends in the Bloomsbury set with the story of Alice, a writer working on a book about Leonard.
Alice had not expected to spend the first 20 years of the 21st century writing about him. When she stood on Melbourne’s Morell Bridge watching fireworks explode at the start of a new millennium, she had no idea of the disasters that were to come: environmental collapse, the return of fascism, wars, a sexual reckoning, a plague.
This is a complex, darkly funny novel about what it’s like to live through a time that feels like the end of days.
Shrines of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson
London, the Roaring Twenties. Soho’s nightlife has become a haven for those recovering from the Great War. With ruthless ambition, Nellie Coker, the notorious queen of this glittering world, has built an empire amid Soho’s gaiety, desperate to secure advantages for her six children. But success breeds enemies, and the dark underworld of London threatens to ruin everything Nellie has built.
Atkinson gives us a Dickensian view into a vanished world inhabited by vivid characters. Funny, observant and ingeniously plotted, Shrines of Gaiety confirms that she is one the finest writers of our time.
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