《经济学人》2015年度好书虚构类

 

A failed assassination² of Bob Marley becomes a prism through which to see Jamaica's history from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. Violent, lurid³, scabrous⁴, hilarious⁵ and beautiful, this novel teems⁶ with life, death and narrators.

 

 

A lyrical retelling of the Cain-and-Abel story in which four Nigerian brothers play truant⁷ from school, go fishing and meet a soothsayer who predicts that one brother will kill another. Not yet 30, Chigozie Obioma is a writer to watch.

 

 

Seventeen stories by a Hungarian modernist whose sentences wind and unwind and rewind, creating what one translator described as "a slow lava-flow of narrative⁸, a vast black river of type".

 

 

No other French novelist knows how to stir trouble quite like Michel Houellebecq. This account of France under Muslim rule is set in 2022. It came out on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack and has been called scaremongering. Its fans say it speaks to France's deepest secret fears.

 

 

On the surface a story about four university graduates trying to make it in New York, at heart Hanya Yanagihara's second novel is a fairy-tale about child abuse, pitting good against evil, love against viciousness, hope against hopelessness.

 

 

Restraint and a formal writing style, by a philosophy graduate from Cambridge University, give a tone of melancholy¹⁰ to this spectacularly accomplished¹¹, chilly¹² debut¹³ collection of short stories about thwarted¹⁴ lives and opportunities missed. The strongest are also the most ordinary.

 

 

This four-volume narrative, with all its operatic overtones, is a tribute to feminism and female friendship in mid-20th-century Naples.

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