Novels aren’t responsible for the climate crisis and probably won’t solve it, but there is plenty they can do. They can make us feel for lives unlike our own; modelling careful thinking and analysis.
Short-circuiting the language of literary value, permanently wrongfooting the custodians of taste, Gravity’s Rainbow proposes a new way of thinking about what we treasure most.
Polyglot texts — texts that use many languages — have become increasingly common as writers document struggles between regimes of European hegemony and decolonizing movements.
Kath O'Connor’s debut novel, Inheritance, follows two women – an IVF hopeful and her grandmother – who carry the BRCA1 gene and contract ovarian cancer. It’s very close to being memoir.
In the shadow of the climate crisis, a wave of speculative stories ask what it means to live in a world where everything is not an extractable resource — and where humans are not in control.
Ian McEwan has forged his own genre – crisply realist surfaces mixed with sudden excursions into the darkest corridors of the mind. In Lessons, the central character reveals a writerly consciousness.