Anyone looking to the Booker Prize this year to affirm that dreams can come true would have seized on the example of Fiona Mozley, the 29 year bookseller who wrote the first chapter of her longlisted novel on a train. Her story seemed impossibly romantic: an unknown debut novelist, who wrote her book virtually in secret, was recognised alongside Paul Auster and Zadie Smith by one of the most famous literary prizes in the world. But while Mozley rather touchingly has said ‘I already feel like I’ve won,’ what about those writers who are always the bridesmaid but never the bride when it comes to literary prizes?
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends is a fluent and impressive first novel. Still only twenty-six years old, Rooney says she wrote the book in a “huge rush”, and this has translated to the page, where urgency is crucial; the quartet of bourgeois artists that the book centres on are so introspective that, at times, it requires this sense of propulsion to stick with them. Frances, a twenty-one-year-old spoken-word poet, performs with her confident and beautiful ex-girlfriend Bobbi. Their work comes to the attention of Melissa, who hopes to write a profile on the pair. She also introduces them to her actor husband Nick.
Sugar Money by Jane Harris
Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the Victorian era in Gillespie and I, and now, a young slave in this third novel. Disenfranchised they may be, but her protagonists don’t lack agency. The narrator of Sugar Money is Lucien, a slave who is barely in his teens and whose voice is startlingly optimistic. In Martinique in 1765, Lucien and his older brother, Emile, are tasked by their French master with returning to Grenada — where they once lived — and smuggling back 42 slaves who are living under the rule of English invaders at a hospital plantation in Fort Royal.
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
Kathleen Collins’s (1942–88) short stories, written in the 1960s and 70s, were unpublished in her lifetime. Alice Walker, then an editor at Ms. magazine, wrote Collins a generous rejection note but it took a posthumous screening of Collins’s film Losing Interest last year, organized by her daughter, for her prose to reach an audience.
This first published collection of stories offers an important perspective on themes of racial identity, sexual freedom and erotic fulfilment.
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
Brad Watson’s second novel is both charming and disquieting. The Miss Jane of the title is a baby born with a genital birth defect which Watson reveals by degrees. Notions of how anatomy constitutes identity might now seem modish, but Watson sets his novel in rural Mississippi during the early twentieth century and was inspired by the real-life example of his great-aunt, who died in 1975. This historical setting is crucial: the defect, which the reader can gradually piece together as being persistent cloaca, could now be operated on, but Watson is interested in exploring how a woman isolated by this abnormality could learn to live.