Fiction

The Wonders is an allegorical novel with worthy intentions. However, O’Reilly’s attempt to unpack a surfeit of twenty-first century issues – including animal welfare, human rights, the cult of celebrity, ecology, conservation, disability and gender politics – is marred by over-simplification and a tendency to parrot clichéd and prosaic opinions.

The Tribe tells stories of people of largely Lebanese Muslim origin, stories of the young narrator’s immediate and wider circle of family, friends, associates. In relating the lines of agreement as well as the points of dissension and tension among his people, Ahmad shows that there are various streams of belonging, some that flow fiercely, some that are shallow to the point of being non-existent.

Intrinsic to Tóibín’s work, from The South and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe through to Nora Webster, is a social realist reformulation of what were known in Catholic circles, once upon a time, as ‘holy mysteries’. You will find no cheap irony in Tóibín about this. He has made himself a conduit for the concept, with its rootedness in ordinary human failure, loss and vulnerability.

The Book of Strange New Things is immersive, lightly surrealist and carefully plotted. It features well-realised characters and delicately carved sentences. The narration is more restrained and focused than in Faber’s epic bestseller, The Crimson Petal and the White, partly because he employs a single focaliser (his other large novels are multifocal), and partly because the bizarre content of the book requires a consistent point of view to render it coherent and credible.

In appropriating Demons for the title of his fourth novel, Wayne Macauley alludes not only to Dostoevsky’s Demons (which he also quotes in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation), but to the title’s biblical provenance. Near the end of Macauley’s Demons, in the holiday house off the Great Ocean Road where he traps his characters for the weekend, a secret is exposed and the cabin fever gives way to a physical confrontation.

Death Fugue is a tale of two Chinas, but not the usual contrast of urban and rural or rich and poor in one of the world’s most unequal societies. Rather, it is a contrapuntal figuring of two opposed dreams of what China could be. ‘China Dream’ is the current mantra emanating from the country’s new supreme leader, Xi Jinping. The promise is an economically rich, militarily powerful and ideally civilised China, run by and for the Communist Party. This replaces the other dream of democracy that was crushed in the protests of 1989.

It is important to note that despite its setting, The Golden Age is not a misery novel. It does not tell a story of abuse, and although it gives us a candid and painful account of Frank’s suffering, both as a small boy hidden from Nazis in 1940s Budapest and a few years later as a polio patient, it does not ask us to be either voyeur or fellow-sufferer. The Golden Age is a story about Frank’s dawning and intensely vivid realisation of self.

Readers familiar with the British novelist David Mitchell will find that The Bone Clocks bears many of the hallmarks of his work. It is structurally complex, readable and inventive. Its plot is ambitious in scope, crossing time periods and blurring genre categories. It is also impossible to summarise without making it sound completely ridiculous.

25 years after Leonardo Sciascia’s death, Granta has reissued most of his translated titles. These short, acrid tales are written in a dry Stendhalian style. Braided around their assured plotlines are philosophical dialogues on morality and politics, justice and mortality: universal themes with a distinctive Sicilian inflexion.

Sonya Hartnett has never been one to shy away from controversial subject matter. Her latest novel, Golden Boys, is the story of what unfolds when a new family moves into a suburban Australian neighbourhood one summer. Set during the mid-1970s or early 1980s, it explores a time when children roamed the streets freely, the only constraint on their movement a mandate that they return home for the evening meal. Although this recent past might be romanticised by some as a more innocent time, Hartnett examines its darker side.