The year in nonfiction
The beginning of 2019 promises a genuine thrill in terms of genre-defying nonfiction, when Julia Blackburn publishes Time Song: Searching for Doggerland (Cape, February), in which she tells the story of the huge, fertile plain that once connected the east of England with mainland Europe using a singular combination of memoir, verse and story. Like lots of people, I adored Blackburn’s last book, Threads, a biography of a fisherman-turned-embroiderer called John Craske, and I expect this one to be every bit as charming and strange. It will also be timely, for by then – just maybe – we’ll once again be about to break away from Europe, albeit in a somewhat different manner than occurred in 5,000 BC.
On that subject, it looks like most of the major deep-dive books about Brexit are still some way in the distance; the story is moving too fast for journalists, let alone historians. However, Diarmaid Ferriter’s The Border (Profile, February) looks like a must-read. In it, the Irish historian charts the history of the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic from the 1920s to the present day. Will its future resemble its past? We can only pray that it won’t.
On different territory, but surely just as relevant once the Brexit postmortem begins is Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem by Francis Green and David Kynaston (Bloomsbury, February), a study that examines with forensic intensity our divided educational system and its effect on both social mobility and democracy. Green and Kynaston will give us, I think, the real elite.
Post #MeToo, many publishers are scrambling to get out books about feminism. Most, alas, look like being unsatisfying rush jobs that come with no real thought or depth. But a few do stand out. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (Chatto & Windus, March) will reveal how the world continues to be designed by men, for men. As one who prides herself both on her driving and her map-reading, I’m also looking forward to The Gendered Brain (Bodley Head, February) by the neuroscientist Gina Rippon, in which she will debunk once and for all the various stereotypes and dumb assumptions we have about the ways men and women think. Rude by the FGM campaigner Nimko Ali, which is about, among other things, vaginas is also likely to be quite perky (Viking, June).
Memoir is pushing on with its land grab, in publishing terms, on the territory once held by traditional biography and there are some good-sounding ones coming in 2019: Luke Turner’s Out of the Woods (Orion, January) is a frank examination of childhood trauma and sexuality set against the backdrop of Epping Forest; in Who Killed My Father (Harvill Secker, February), the acclaimed young French novelist Édouard Louis tells the story of a tough guy in a cruel world and his tender, complex relationship with him; fans of Tracey Thorn are bound to cherish Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia (Canongate, February), in which the singer and musician reconsiders the utopian cul-de-sacs of Brookmans Park, Herts, where she grew up. I also like the sound of Character Breakdown by the actor Zawe Ashton, aka Vod in Fresh Meat (Chatto & Windus, April), in which she will ponder the delicate (and sometimes not-so-delicate) line between art and life. Meanwhile, in biography – it still exists, honestly – look out for Fiona MacCarthy’s long-awaited biography of Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus (Faber, March), which is certain to be both fascinating and beautifully written.
One hot new subject in 2019 appears to be that of work. In Lab Rats: Why Modern Work Makes People Miserable (Atlantic, January), the bestselling writer Dan Lyons looks at the way that employees of all kinds are now expected to view their jobs with cult-like fervour – and rails amusingly against it. In Not Working: Why We Have to Stop (Granta, January), the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen explores the necessity of inactivity, seeing it as a condition of freedom and creativity, as well as a means of avoiding burn-out. He also looks at successful and well-known figures, among them Orson Welles and Emily Dickinson, who are associated with various forms of inactivity.
Fake news, you won’t be surprised to hear, is also very much in the air. In Merchants of Truth: Inside the News Revolution (Bodley Head, February), Jill Abramson, the former editor of the New York Times goes behind the scenes at her former employer, as well as at BuzzFeed, VICE and the Washington Post, the better to discover what effect a rapidly changing media landscape is having on democracy.
The digital world also takes a role in The Library Book by Susan Orlean (Atlantic, January). Having moved to Los Angeles, Orlean, the journalist best known for her bestseller The Orchid Thief, became fascinated by a fire that destroyed 400,000 books in the city’s public library in 1986. Who was responsible for this crime? Her efforts to find out become a lens through which to tell the story of libraries everywhere and to examine what we are losing as these institutions struggle to redefine themselves in the age of Google. “There could be no better book for the bookish,” says Dave Eggers of this unusual combination of true crime and social history – and I, for one, am inclined to believe him. Rachel Cooke
The year in fiction
Solzhenitsyn said that “for a country to have a great writer is like having another government” – and while 2019 looks as if it will bring yet more political mayhem, we can at least comfort ourselves with a splendid line-up of fiction to get us through the dark days ahead.
David Nicholls’s adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series was the best thing on TV this year. In July, Nicholls publishes a new novel, Sweet Sorrow (Hodder & Stoughton), a sun-drenched portrait of young love. Word is it’s every bit as good as his previous bestsellers One Day and Us. Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (Cape, April) sounds enormous fun; set against an alternative-history 1980s, it’s Jules et Jim with androids. Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again (Viking, September) is the follow-up to the Pulitzer prize-winning Olive Kitteridge and picks up where its popular predecessor left off.
There’s also a new novel from John Lanchester: The Wall (Faber, March) is set in a dystopian Britain under siege from the Others. Written in chilling, affectless prose, it’s like The Road meets Never Let Me Go – smart, speculative fiction from one of our most brilliantly wide-ranging minds.
Damian Barr’s bestselling memoir Maggie & Me was beautifully written and full of heart. With his first novel, You Will Be Safe Here(Bloomsbury, April), he has achieved something remarkable – a powerfully moving tale that weaves dazzlingly between the Boer war and contemporary South Africa.
Jessica Andrews’s Saltwater (Hodder & Stoughton, May) caused a right kerfuffle at Frankfurt Book Fair last year; Sceptre finally won the bidding war for the 25-year-old’s luminous coming-of-age tale. In The Girl Before You, Nicola Rayner (Harper Collins, July) has written the new The Girl on the Train, although her novel also features note-perfect prose and an ending that will leave you gasping. So addictive, it should come with a health warning.
Equally gripping is Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton (Harper Collins, April), the tale of a Jamaican slave girl in 1820s London. Then there’s Eleanor Anstruther’s superb debut, A Perfect Explanation (Salt, March), the fictionalised story of the granddaughter of the eighth Duke of Argyll, who sold her son to her sister for £500.
A 900-page novel in a single sentence? If that sounds like your kind of thing (and if it does, I like you already), then look out for Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar, July), a wildly ambitious and righteously angry portrait of contemporary America. Ali Smith follows up Winter with – you guessed it – Spring (Penguin, March) as her up-to-the-minute seasonal portraits of Britain pass the halfway point. Natalie Haynes is swiftly becoming this generation’s Mary Renault; her retelling of the Trojan war from an all-female perspective, A Thousand Ships (Pan Macmillan, May), is her best yet. Niven Govinden’s fifth novel, This Brutal House (Dialogue, June), is set in New York’s drag ball community and feels like it might be the break-out book for this superb prose stylist. Slack-Tide by Elanor Dymott (Cape, January) is about a love that arrives unbidden in the wake of a tragedy. It is beautifully written and had me sobbing. Then there’s the always-welcome news of a new book from Nicola Barker. I Am Sovereign (Heinemann, July), a novella, packs all the pleasures you’d associate with Barker’s longer work into the slim yet riotous tale of a boutique teddy-bear maker in Llandudno attempting to sell his house.
A few more for you to reserve at your independent bookseller: Benjamin Myers’s first book since winning the Walter Scott prize last year is The Offing (Bloomsbury, August), set in Robin Hood’s Bay in the years following the second world war. It’s a shift in direction for him as he moves to a mainstream publisher, but one that has paid off gloriously in this intense and evocative novel that brings to mind JL Carr’s A Month in the Country.
Leila Slimani follows up the brutally brilliant Lullaby with Adèle (Faber, February), an erotic thriller that couldn’t be more Parisian. Sam Taylor’s translation is typically flawless. Paolo Maurensig’s A Devil Comes to Town (World Editions, April) blew my mind – think Yorgos Lanthimos directing The Master and Margarita. Translated by Anne Milano Appel, it’s a bizarre slice of Alpine magic realism that deserves to be everywhere next year.
Finally, three novels that I’m tipping for prizes and praise in the year of Brexit. Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Hamish Hamilton, February) is an astonishing novel – an African Game of Thrones that must have TV execs in a hot lather to adapt it. Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock (Cape, September) is a multilayered masterpiece; vivid, chilling, leaping jubilantly through space and time, it’s a jaw-dropping novel that confirms Wyld as one of our most gifted young writers.
Then there’s Lanny (Faber, March), Max Porter’s follow-up to Grief Is the Thing With Feathers. Porter has an extraordinary ability to get under the reader’s skin and his story of a peculiar child and the even more peculiar Dead Papa Toothwort is a thing of total joy, written in prose that thrums with rhythm and life. Alex Preston
• This article was amended on 2 January 2019 to correct the fact that Jessica Andrews’s Saltwater caused a kerfuffle at Frankfurt, not London, Book Fair
