The best literary fiction out now: GLYPH by Ali Smith, THE OLD FIRE by Elisa Shua
GLYPH by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton £20, 288pp)
Smith, reliably unusual, is always up to something. Her latest book arrives billed as a standalone companion to 2024’s Gliff, which followed two siblings in a surveillance dystopia.
Cutely, that novel is being read by the characters in this one – a wide, free-wheeling meditation on war, told with Smith’s usual punning brio.
We follow two sisters, Petra and Patricia, as they mull over tales of conflict handed down to them through the generations, from the story of a horse blinded by a mustard gas attack in the First World War, to the horrifyingly grisly eyewitness account of a man flattened on a dirt road in France during the Second World War.
While these episodes gnaw at their imagination, Patricia’s daughter is haunted by the daily reality of live-streamed conflict in the present.
Melding history with today’s headlines, it’s invigoratingly political.
THE OLD FIRE by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Daunt £14.99, 176pp)
Dusapin made a splash with her first book, Winter In Sokcho, about the tense relationship struck up between the unnamed narrator and a graphic novelist on a trip to a South Korean fishing town.
Her new novel, just as spare and uncluttered, likewise brims with pent-up emotion.
In the wake of a miscarriage, the narrator leaves her life as a screenwriter in New York to clear her father’s home in rural France, where she is forced to reconnect awkwardly with her estranged sister Véra, who has been mute since the age of six.
The fairytale atmosphere of the book’s woodland setting contrasts with the brutal nitty- gritty of its detail.
Dusapin’s clear and direct style, seeded with implication, holds us in its spell as she immerses us in a moving tale of family strife, to say nothing of her between-the-lines portrait of relationship breakdown in the present.
TELEVISION by Lauren Rothery (Ecco £16.99, 256pp)
From a US-based novelist born in England, this punchy debut rotates between monologues from a trio of characters whose Hollywood travails lift the lid on the seamier side of showbusiness.
We unpick a knotty three-way relationship between two female scriptwriters – one seasoned, one aspiring – and a hard-drinking male lead whose midlife crisis is turbocharged by getting even more filthy rich from his latest brain-off role in an action franchise.
While the novel’s sex-soaked ambience can sometimes be a little on the sour side, the effect is inordinately compelling, less for any thrills and spills of plot than for the seductively heady sense that we’re being given the inside track on celebrity.