Martyr! (Kaveh Akbar) Published 2024
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss. His mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past – towards an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and towards his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed. [Gloria]
I, the Divine (Rabih Alameddine) Published 2001
Named by her grandfather after the ‘divine’ Sarah Bernhardt, red-haired Sarah Nour El-Din is feisty, rebellious, individualistic – a person determined to make of her life a work of art. In I, the Divine she tries to tell her story, sometimes casting it as a memoir, sometimes a novel, full of sly humour and dark realism, always beguilingly incomplete. [Catherine]
Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis) Published 1954
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, this is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that ‘there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones’. Amis’s presents a gallery of English bores, cranks, frauds and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy. [Juliana]
Life After Life (Kate Atkinson) Published 2013
This is the first of two novels about the Todd family. The story centres around Ursula Todd, who is born one snowy night in 1910 and dies that night from strangling on her own umbilical cord. On that same night in 1910, Ursula is born and lives. What follows is a strange life full of many deaths that were, at the same time, also avoided. [Brendan]
So He Takes the Dog (Jonathan Buckley) Published 2006
On a beach in southern England, a dog returns to its owner with a human hand in its mouth. The hand belongs to Henry, a homeless eccentric who has been wandering the south-west of England for the last thirty years, most recently living rough in the town. A local policeman and his accomplice, in piecing together his movements prior to his death, uncover an extraordinary life, but their investigations also shed light on the town itself. The story of Henry and those who tell it begins to affect the narrator-policeman’s own life in ways he never expected. [Paul]
Nights at the Circus (Angela Carter) Published 1984
Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, Sophie Fevvers is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney’s circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia. [Gloria]
Small Country (Gaëlle Faye) Published 2016
Set amidst the beautiful scenery of Africa and based on a dark chapter in Burundi’s history, Small Country – which won France’s most prestigious literary award – is a powerful, important story about family, cultural differences, and war. Gaby is a boy of ten living in Burundi with his French father and Rwandan mother. The book is a beautiful but harrowing tale of coming-of-age in the face of civil war. [Brendan]
The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho (Paterson Joseph) Published 2022
Actor Paterson Joseph’s debut novel, chronicling the life of the first Black man to vote in Britain, began life as a one-man play. It opens in 1775 with Charles Ignatius Sancho declaring his intent to revisit his diaries and set down his life for his son, Billy. Sancho is born and orphaned in 1729 on board a slave ship. On returning home, his master gifts the small boy to three maiden aunts in Greenwich, who treat him like a pet. The story ignites with his description of Sancho’s short-lived attempts to tread the boards as Othello. [Bridget]
Death and the Penguin (Andrey Kurkov) Published 1996 in Russian, 2001 in English
The novel follows the life of a young aspiring writer, Viktor Alekseyevich Zolotaryov, in a struggling post-Soviet society. Viktor, initially aiming to write novels, gets a job writing obituaries for a local newspaper. The source of the title is Viktor’s pet penguin Misha, a king penguin obtained after the local zoo in Kyiv gave away its animals to those who could afford to support them. Kurkov uses Misha as a sort of mirror of (and eventual source of salvation for) Viktor. [Paul]
Harsh Times (Mario Vargas Llosa) Published 2019
The novel portrays the ins and outs of the military coup that, in 1954, ended the government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala and elevated Carlos Castillo Armas to the presidency of the country. With a mixture of real and fictitious characters, it reveals the power of manipulation and its capacity to direct public opinion and turn lies into truth. [Paul]
The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann) Published 1924
The book is considered a towering example of the bildungsroman, a novel recounting the main character’s formative years. It tells the story of Hans Castorp, a young German engineer who goes to visit a cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the mountains of Davos, Switzerland. Mann uses this sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. [Paul]
Mating (Norman Rush) Published 1991
This is a first-person narrative by an unnamed American anthropology graduate student in Botswana around 1980. It focuses on her relationship with Nelson Denoon, a controversial American social scientist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari Desert. [Catherine]
The Spinning Heart (Donal Ryan) Published 2012
In the aftermath of Ireland’s financial collapse, dangerous tensions surface in an Irish town. As violence flares, the characters face a battle between public persona and inner desires. Through a chorus of unique voices, each struggling to tell their own kind of truth, a single authentic tale unfolds. [Bridget]
The Mountain Lion (Jean Stafford) Published 1947
Eight-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother Ralph are inseparable. One summer they are sent from the Los Angeles suburb they call home to backwoods Colorado, where their uncle Claude has a ranch. This is a haunting, unnerving portrayal of a close but volatile brother–sister relationship, laced with an undercurrent of menace as adolescence beckons on the horizon. [Catherine]
Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh) Published 1928
This is a social satire based on Waugh’s own experiences as a teacher. The protagonist, Paul Pennyfeather, accepts passively all that befalls him. Expelled for indecent behaviour from Scone College, Oxford, he becomes a teacher. [Brendan]
OR
A Handful of Dust Published 1934
Tony Last is an English country squire who, having seen his illusions shattered one by one, joins an expedition to the Brazilian jungle only to find himself trapped in a remote outpost as the prisoner of a maniac. This book is often grouped with the author’s early, satirical comic novels, for which he became famous before the Second World War. Some commentators regard it as a transitional work due to its serious undertones, pointing towards Waugh’s Catholic postwar fiction. [Juliana]