Egan's Proustian meditation² on time, fame and music won the National Book Critics Circle and Pulitzer awards. Who's the goon of the title? "Time is the stealth goon, the one you ignore because you are so busy worrying about the goons right in front of you," she says. Egan concocts³ her narrative⁴ around punk rocker-turned-music producer Bennie Salazar, his sticky-fingered assistant Sasha and a circle of wannabes, has-beens and hangers-on. Colette Bancroft, book editor of The Tampa Bay Times, named Egan's novel her top pick "not just because it is a splendidly written experiment in form that succeeds resoundingly, but because the 21st Century is its essential subject matter. Egan juxtaposes timeless literary themes, most notably⁵ the inexorable journey from youth to age, with an exploration of the ways in which a rapidly changing world reshapes the human experience. It's a novel that is prescient, surprising, wise and simply a blast to read." (Anchor)

 

 

Eight rookies from the US army's Bravo squad, fresh from a firefight with Iraqi insurgents⁶, in which one of their fellow soldiers died and another was disabled, are dubbed⁷ war heroes by the Fox News cable channel. Their two-week stateside victory tour ends with a halftime salute⁸ at a Dallas Cowboys game. Fountain captures the excesses of Texas, American football, business and war, and gives us a memorable⁹ narrator in 19-year-old Billy Lynn, with his combination of lust¹⁰, bedazzlement and post-traumatic stress disorder¹¹. "It is sort of weird," he tells a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, "being honoured for the worst day of your life." (Ecco)

 

 

The novel opens on a summer day in 1935, when 13-year-old Briony shows her mother a play she's written to perform with her three cousins the next evening. "Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project's highest point of fulfillment," McEwan writes. "Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration¹²."That evening, Briony witnesses her 15-year-old cousin Lola being assaulted in the darkened woods. Her testimony¹³ implicates¹⁴ Robbie, her sister Cecilia's boyfriend from Cambridge and son of the family house maid, and he is jailed. In a second section, McEwan gives a panoramic¹⁵ account of the harrowing evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, with Robbie among those saved. Realising she has ruined Cecilia and Robbie's lives, Briony works as a nurse during the Blitz in a third section. As McEwan follows these characters through six decades, Briony's search for redemption evolves into a meditation on the power of art. (Anchor)

 

 

In her audacious and vividly¹⁶ imagined second novel, Adichie drew upon her ancestral past to write about the Biafra conflict, which traumatised her country and her family for three years after the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria seceded¹⁷ in 1967. The novel is told from the perspectives of twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, a 13-year-old houseboy and Richard, a British expatriate who is in love with Kainene. Olanna's academic boyfriend, who favours secession, is also a key character as Adichie shows the repercussions¹⁸ of postcolonial power struggles on individual lives. Adichie's 2013 novel Americanah also ranked high in the poll, but missed out on a spot in the top 12 by one vote. (Anchor)

 

 

Smith, then a 23-year-old prodigy¹⁹, wowed the literary world with her first novel, which introduced a writer of inimitable wit and scope. White Teeth, which won Whitbread and Guardian²⁰ first book awards, is set in London, where Archie Jones and Samal Iqbal, friends who met while serving in WWII, have settled to raise their families. Smith opens as Archie, divorced by his second wife, sits in his "fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering²¹ wheel". He's chosen suicide on New Year's Day 1975, his car parked in front of a halal butcher's shop, only to be saved by the owner. As White Teeth unfolds, it is chockablock with vivid scenes and characters, a portrait of postcolonial multicultural²² London: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete²³ within them mass exodus²⁴, cramped²⁵ boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks", Smith writes. (Vintage)

 

 

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably²⁶ smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974," Eugenides writes in the opening lines of his novel. At 14, Calliope Stephanides discovers she has a rare recessive²⁷ mutation²⁸ that renders her a pseudo-hermaphrodite. Claiming her "male brain", she shifts genders²⁹ and becomes Cal. In often exuberant³⁰ language, Eugenides layers questions of fate and free will onto Cal's coming-of-age story and the tale of the entrepreneurial rise of his parents, Desdemona and Lefty. (They have their own genetic³¹ secret.) Ultimately Cal's condition gives him a near mythic gift - "the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both". Middlesex bridged the gap between critical and commercial acclaim³², as well, winning a Pulitzer and selling millions of copies. (Picador)

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