The final instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy is likely to be one of the year’s biggest novels. Photograph: Richard Ansett/BBC
This has not been a vintage year for the novel.
The joint Booker winners and perhaps a handful of others aside, I’m not sure that much fiction published in 2019 will be read a decade hence. The good news is that I’ve spent the past several weeks joyfully immersed in proof copies of next year’s novels and can confirm that 2020 is shaping up to be a blinder. I’ve tried here to concentrate on the first half of the year.
One of the year’s biggest novels is sure to be the final instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell
trilogy,
The Mirror and the Light (4th Estate, March), which is under strict embargo. Will it be great? Probably. Will it win the Booker? Possibly (although there’s serious competition). It could well be pipped to the prize by Maggie O’Farrell’s miraculous
Hamnet (Tinder Press, March) – a beautiful imagination of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and the untold story of his wife, “Agnes” Hathaway, which builds into a profound exploration of the healing power of creativity.
Hot on Mantel and O’Farrell’s heels are three of the next generation: Evie Wyld, Daisy Johnson and Eimear McBride. Wyld’s The Bass Rock (Jonathan Cape, March) is her third novel and her best so far. Stepping elegantly through time and weaving together the lives of a host of strong yet damaged women, this is Wyld’s masterpiece – as majestic and monumental as the landmark it’s named after. Johnson’s Sisters (Jonathan Cape, July) is a short, sharp explosion of a gothic thriller whose tension ratchets up and up to an ending of extraordinary lyricism and virtuosity. McBride’s Strange Hotel (Faber, February) is an enigmatic, achingly sad book. A woman moves shiftlessly from one hotel to the next, obeying a seemingly abstract set of rules, haunted by her past.
Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters, ‘a short, sharp explosion of a gothic thriller’. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images
Colum McCann’s sixth novel, Apeirogon (Bloomsbury, February), is ambitious formally and thematically, taking on the Israel-Palestine conflict in a work that is both spectacularly inventive and grounded in hard, often brutal fact. It is about grief and forgiveness, about family and politics. If you can read it without sobbing, you’re a monster. Also tugging on the heart-strings is Sebastian Barry’s A Thousand Moons (Faber, March). Set in the wake of the American civil war, it tells the story of Winona, a brave, bruised orphan from the Lakota tribe whose new life on a Tennessee farmstead is threatened by the past.
AD Miller was shortlisted for the Booker in 2012 for his Moscow-set thriller Snowdrops. His latest, Independence Square (Harvill Secker, February), also looks east – this time to Ukraine. The story of Simon Davey and the mysterious Olesya is utterly gripping, a novel with its finger on the pulse of geopolitics that still manages to move deeply.
From the US, we have Jenny Offill’s Weather (Granta, February). Six years after her majestic Dept of Speculation, it’s a dazzling state-of-the-nation novel that is every bit as good as its predecessor. There’s also Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt (Tinder Press, January), the tragic tale of a mother and her beloved son on the run from a drugs lord. Kate Elizabeth Russell’s superb debut, My Dark Vanessa (4th Estate, March), is more than merely an inversion of Lolita for the #MeToo generation; this is a book that asks what we have lost and gained in an era that has revolutionised the way we think about sex and power.
James Scudamore has always written brilliant, twisted novels; his latest, English Monsters (Jonathan Cape, March), is breathtakingly good. Imagine Edward St Aubyn writing The Secret History and you’ll get an idea of how exquisite and compelling this story about male friendship and betrayal is. Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land was a bestseller in 2018 and made many books-of-the-year lists. Her next, The Golden Rule (Little, Brown, June), turns upon a chance meeting on a train that leads to a murderous pact. It does what her novels do best, wrapping the reader in a tight, lean narrative, showing the strangeness that lies at the heart of normal-seeming lives. Philip Hensher’s A Small Revolution in Germany (4th Estate, February) is a beautiful, regret-soaked story about the marks left on our adult lives by the idealism of our youth.
Polly Samson’s A Theatre for Dreamers reimagines the love affair between Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen (far left) on Hydra. Photograph: James Burke/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
A few more to look out for: Maaza Mengiste’s
The Shadow King (Canongate, January)
is a complex, lyrical and compelling historical novel set during Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. SJ Parris’s
Giordano novels are always worth reading. The sixth,
Execution (HarperCollins, April)
, is no exception – a brilliantly realised fictionalisation of the Babington plot against Elizabeth I. Nikita
Lalwani’s gripping thriller
You People (Viking, April)
is set among undocumented migrants in a shadowy London underworld. There’s a fine second novel from Stuart Evers
–
The Blind Light (Picador, June)
reads like a British Don DeLillo, telling the social history of Britain through two generations of a family. Finally, in
A Theatre for Dreamers (Bloomsbury Circus, April)
, Polly Samson goes to the Greek island of Hydra to imagine the first steps in the love affair between Leonard Cohen and his Marianne. As dreamily nostalgic as Cohen’s song
Famous Blue Raincoat.
Along with Kate Elizabeth Russell, there are a number of hotly anticipated debuts hitting the shelves. The 28-year-old Dutch dairy farmer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening (Faber, March), translated by Michelle Hutchison, is a rich and luminous novel about fate and grief. It is already a bestseller in Holland. Nazanine Hozar’s immaculate first novel, Aria (Viking, March), follows a group of Iranians in the lead-up to the 1979 revolution and marks the arrival of a major new voice. Rainbow Milk (Dialogue Books, March) by Paul Mendez is another worth looking out for – powerful, sensuous and thrillingly well written.
It’s not in the first half of the year, but I’m already hugely excited about Eley Williams’s first novel, The Liar’s Dictionary (William Heinemann, July). She’s a magnificent prose stylist and I can’t wait to read her in the longer form. We can also look forward to the final part of Ali Smith’s era-defining seasonal quartet, Summer (Penguin, July); and there’s a new novel by the dependably magnificent Kate Grenville – A Room Made of Leaves (Text, July) (which I’ve read and it’s every bit as good as The Secret River). Then, in September, there’s Piranesi (Bloomsbury) by Susanna Clarke, the long-awaited new book from the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and Mayflies (Faber) by the great Andrew O’Hagan