![]() ![]() Sebastian Barry’s beautiful, nightmarish Old God’s Time (Faber) also digs back into the past, to show how trauma remains an open wound. Nigerian-American author Teju Cole’s Tremor (Faber) is deeply engaged with the horrors of colonialism, using autofiction for a subtle and up-to-the-minute study of how ideas around art, value and trauma are inflected by historical knowledge. It expertly links Jamaican and British history, and offers a timely, quizzical reflection of our current age of globalisation and hypocrisy. Zadie Smith also took on a new genre with her first historical novel, The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton), which sets a gently comic portrait of 19th-century literary London, and a real-life trial which stirred up passionate emotions around class and identity, against harrowing testimony from a slave plantation. ![]() This is a propulsive thriller responding to the climate crisis, apocalyptic thinking and political ideology, and as stylishly written as you’d expect. In Birnam Wood (Granta), idealistic guerrilla gardeners in New Zealand run up against a ruthless billionaire. There was another long-awaited return to fiction from 2013’s Booker winner Eleanor Catton.
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