A BOOKISH FRIEND SAID TO ME recently, “It’s been a terrible year for books.” Well, up to a point. The sheer volume of new novels, together with the difficulty of seeing through the thickets of bandwagonesque trendcentred publishing, mean it’s easy to feel oneself sub fiction. But at The Critic we are here to help. It’s time for our annual guide to the best new fiction of the year, which excludes those worthy candidates — including Tom Crewe’s The New Life, Jacqueline Crooks’s Fire Rush and Deborah Levy’s August Blue — already reviewed in these pages.
The “if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother” award
mine in fiction: the loving, the monstrous, the absent. In Elizabeth McCracken’s , the narrator’s mother has recently died, and the novel becomes a memory capsule. If I say that the story comprises an American writer walking around London thinking about her mother, you may reasonably suspect it to be “one of
