The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis (January 17)
In the early 1980s three budding young writers, Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, and Jonathan Lethem, arrived to start their freshman year at Bennington College in Vermont, a campus focused on literature and the arts. Along with Jill Eisenstadt, Tama Janowitz, and Jay McInerney, they would become known as the literary “brat pack” and go on to produce some of the best writing of the past 50 years.
By the mid-to-late 1980s, Ellis’s star was in the ascendant. Considered by several critics as the literary voice of Generation X, he wrote his first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), when he was 21. Set in Los Angeles in the early 80s, it became a cult classic, capturing the mood of an apathetic, nihilistic generation driven by mindless decadence.
Next came The Rules of Attraction in 1987, a satire about spoiled bohemian students. American Psycho (1991), a violent black comedy about a Manhattan investment banker and serial killer set against the backdrop of ’80s’ consumerist culture, is his most controversial book and the one he is best known for.
Ellis wrote several more novels, including Lunar Park (2005) and Imperial Bedrooms (2010), a sequel to Less Than Zero.
His first novel in 13 years, The Shards will be published on January 17. It seems only fitting that his latest work sees him return to a fictionalised ’80s Los Angeles in 1981 with himself as the star of the show.
Thinking that the gory details would be too much for the literary world, Ellis initially bypassed book publishers, debuting The Shards as a serialised story — a memoir of sorts — read at the start of each new episode of his podcast. It remains to be seen how a new generation of easily triggered readers — he described millennials as “Generation Wuss” in a 2014 Vanity Fair essay — responds to this erotic horror story, but fans of his metafictional brilliance will no doubt be delighted.
“Bret Ellis”, 17, is a senior at Buckley, a school for entitled rich kids who remain lost and alone. Bret lives with his largely absent parents on Mulholland Drive, site of the most exclusive and expensive homes in the world, where he is taken care of by Rosa the maid. He develops an obsession with Robert Mallory, a clever, good-looking and charming new student who becomes part of Bret’s circle, even though it’s clear that Robert is hiding something. Oh, and there’s a serial killer too. Nicknamed The Trawler, he begins targeting teenagers.
In a celebration of his “triumphant return to form”, The Guardian’s critic writes: “The Shards isn’t just Ellis’s strongest novel since the ’90s, it’s a full-spectrum triumph, incorporating and subverting everything he’s done before and giving us, if we follow the book’s ingenious, gleefully self-aware conceit, nothing less than the Ellis origin story”.
I Have Some Questions for You, Rebecca Makkai (February 21)
Rebecca Makkai, award-winning author of The Great Believers, a story of the lives of a group of gay men and their friends at the onset of the AIDS epidemic, locates her gripping new literary thriller on campus. Similarly to Ellis’s novel, I Have Some Questions for You, is also paired with a true crime podcast.
Narrator Bodie Kane, a film professor and podcaster, is invited back to her old boarding school — scene of her former roommate’s death — to teach a course. She is drawn back into the events of 1995 and the events surrounding the conviction of the school’s athletics teacher.
LitHub outlines the story as “the secret history meets serial”. Booklist describes it as “a beguiling campus novel ... Chilled as the deep New England winters during which it takes place and twisty with the slowly found and then suddenly illuminated branches of memory, Makkai’s rich, winding story dazzles from cover to cover”.
Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton (March 3)
Eleanor Catton, winner of the 2013 Booker Prize for The Luminaries, sets her latest novel in modern-day New Zealand.
The publisher describes this character-driven thriller about a guerrilla gardening group as “Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerising, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.’
The Trackers, Charles Frazier (April 11)
From Charles Frazier, the author of Cold Mountain (1997), comes The Trackers, an exploration of life in the Great Depression set in rural Wyoming. Artist Val Welch makes his way to the small town of Dawes where he is lucky enough to be commissioned to paint a mural for the new post office.
Val moves into a ranch owned by art collector John Long and his wife Eve. He is soon captivated by this intriguing couple and their mysterious pasts. When Eve steals a valuable painting Long hires Val to track her down. “In The Trackers,” writes the publisher, “singular American writer Charles Frazier conjures up the lives of everyday people during an extraordinary period of history that bears uncanny resemblance to our own.”
Yellowface, RF Kuang (May 16)
The title of Chinese-American fantasy writer RF Kuang’s latest novel refers to the practice of wearing makeup to imitate the appearance of an Asian person. Yellowface, a story about two competing writers, is an indictment of white privilege.
June Hayward, a white woman steals the work of her friend Athena, an Asian-American who died in a car crash. Passing the book off as her own, June chooses to believe she is honouring her friend, but soon people start questioning her identity.
“Yellowface takes on questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation,” writes the publisher, “not only in the publishing industry but the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society. RF Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.”
The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor (23 May)
Brandon Taylor’s debut novel Real Life was a finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize. His highly anticipated second work of fiction, another campus novel, is about a group of people — including lovers and friends — who attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The publisher describes The Late Americans as “a novel of intimacy and precarity, friendship and chosen family”.
The three main characters go through a year of self-discovery ending in a farewell trip to a cabin where a moment happens that will leave each of them changed. Oprah Daily describes The Late Americans as “Erudite, intimate, hilarious, poignant ... A gorgeously written novel of youth’s promise, of the quest to find one’s tribe and one’s calling”.
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