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The North Shore

Over the past ten years, we have seen a seismic upsurge of interest and enthusiasm for what has come to be known as folk horror, a peculiarly British brand of weird fiction characterised by subtle intimations of the supernatural, an understated delivery and most crucially an interest in landscape and sense of place. The folk horror revival has produced some excellent work, texts that have already earned their place in the canon and will endure as classics. It has also produced its own share of duds, derivative works that rely too much on familiar tropes and showing little inclination to break new ground. All literary movements tend to run to a law of diminishing returns, and such disappointments are inevitable. Which makes it all the more marvellous when out of nowhere something brilliant arrives to surprise you.

Ben Tufnell’s novel The North Shore is that rare beast, a work of folk horror that holds its own with the classics whilst exhibiting genuine points of difference, a radical literary sensibility combined with an old-fashioned appetite for the strange that will, I am sure, see me returning to this novel repeatedly for new inspiration.

The unnamed narrator – we learn only their initials – grows up somewhere on the north Norfolk coast (I am guessing Salthouse, or Stiffkey), a landscape of treacherous marshland and sudden storms. Alone on the shore during one such storm, the narrator unwittingly becomes a part of something extraordinary, an event that will mark their life while never fully revealing the true extent of its mystery.

Ben Tufnell is a museum curator and writer on art, so while it is not entirely surprising to find him bringing aspects of art criticism into his narrative it is entirely to be welcomed. His writing on the transformative power of Dürer and Bosch came as a real joy for me, and the landscape writing – a vividly sensuous evocation of liminal spaces – is truly exceptional.

To mix folk horror with film criticism and botanical illustration – yes, please! The narrator’s own uncertainty over what they have experienced, the ways in which the potentially treacherous landscape reflects their personal isolation – this is a timeless book, one that will outlast any fashion and repay close attention. The author’s refusal to provide any easy conclusion or explanation enhances the whole.

This elegant, thought-filled book has been an unexpected delight during a difficult week and I am already looking forward to Ben Tufnell’s next novel.

The 10 Best Books from the past 10 years

As I watched a recent Booktube video in which Eric Karl Anderson aka Lonesome Reader celebrates a decade of book blogging by naming his ten favourite books from the past ten years, I found I couldn’t resist the temptation of following in his footsteps . Of course, it is inevitable that the choices I make right now will be governed by what I am drawn to right now, rather than what might have seemed more important to me back then. But that makes things, if anything, even more interesting. It has been a little over a decade since I first started keeping detailed records of the books I read – and what I think of them. Every year at around this time I open a new Word document where I can make a note of upcoming releases as and when I hear about them, a document that will eventually become my tally of books considered and discussed and read in the year to come. These lists act as a reminder not only of those books I do actually end up reading, but also of those that catch my interest, however fleetingly, books that I might return to in subsequent years. Each of these documents as I look at them now powerfully brings back the literary flavour and texture of the year in question. As a record of the changing literary landscape, of how my interests as a reader and writer have evolved in new directions, I find them fascinating.

2013 – the year Eleanor Catton won the Booker for her superbly achieved megatext The Luminaries. But my pick of the year – then and now – is Richard House’s The Kills, which made the Booker longlist but should have gone further. It remains as strong in my mind in 2023 as during the month I spent reading it a decade ago.

2014 – a weirdly awful reading year, in which much of what I read seems in retrospect to be of zero consequence. Among the few titles from 2014 that still resonate, Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed is the one I still think about with love and awe.

2015 – another depressingly inconsequential reading year in which I was clearly struggling to find direction. Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, with its piercingly beautiful landscape writing and impassioned defence of personal freedom remains a favourite. The fact that I can still remember where I was when I was reading it – on the train to and from Cornwall sometime in late summer- stands testament to that fact.

2016 – a fascinating reading year, in which my current interests are clearly beginning to solidify. A toss-up between Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser and Martin MacInnes’s Infinite Ground.

2017 – the year of the Sharke, and many fond recollections. Memories too of reading Paul McAuley’s Fairyland while on the Paris Metro. No contest though for book of the year, which is Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, a touchstone work and one I am planning to reread very soon. Kitamura’s expert manipulation of the mystery template continues to be inspirational.

2018 – reading through this year’s list brings back powerful memories of what was clearly a breakthrough year for me in terms of thinking about my own writing. With a dozen titles at least in contention, I am going to plump for This House of Grief by Helen Garner, if only because I very recently read her novel The Spare Room, which reminded me so powerfully of how much I love and admire her, and how much territory she has conquered for women who write.

2019 – on trains a lot, doing stuff for The Dollmaker. Also the Dublin Worldcon, reading all of Ben Lerner and discovering the genius of Mary Gaitskill. Top pick though goes to The Porpoise by Mark Haddon, which is a glorious and wonderful feat of experimental storytelling and didn’t get anywhere near enough attention.

2020 – as with 2018 I find it almost impossible to single out one book as emblematic of what was a stellar reading year, with so much achieved in terms of thinking and writing. It would be wrong of me not to mention my beloved Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson, Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn and Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride, which closed out the year on a wave of pure joy and inspiration. But if I have to make a choice I’m going to declare the book of 2020 to be a dead heat between Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry and The Spire by William Golding. Both are, of course, masterpieces.

2021 – to be remembered for a journey from Liverpool to Glasgow that kept me trapped on the train – several trains, in fact – for long enough to read the entire second half of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, mostly while crammed into a luggage rack between York and Edinburgh. But the top spot would still have to go to Beyond Belief by Emlyn Williams, a peerless reconstruction of the social, political and cultural landscape of the Moors Murders that should be cited in every true crime aficionado’s top twenty.

2022 – bit of a weird reading year – bit of a weird year full stop, illuminated by points of particular brightness, including Heather Clark’s magnificent landmark biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet, and especially Optic Nerve, by Maria Gainza, which rescued me at a moment of particular darkness.

I have today opened and named my document ‘Books 2024’.

Prix Medicis et Prix Femina

I am thrilled and a little overwhelmed to announce that the French edition of Conquest (translation, as ever, by the incomparable Bernard Sigaud) is a finalist for the 2023 Prix Medicis. It has also made the second selection for the 2023 Prix Femina for best translated work. You only have to look at my fellow shortlistees to see what an honour this is.

The growing visibility and success of my work in France is in no small part down to the dedication and commitment of my French publishers, Sylvie Martigny and Jean-Hubert Gailliot of Editions Tristram. These are very special people, who live and breathe literature. Their generosity and sensitivity, their belief in what I have done and what I can do is indeed a beacon in dark times.

Bravo, mes amis, bravo. C’est tout pour vous.

Lamb

Today sees the appearance of Matt Hill’s long-awaited fifth novel. Lamb is published by the Liverpool-based independent press Dead Ink, the home of Naomi Booth’s Exit Management, Gary Budden’s London Incognita and Missouri Williams’s The Doloriad, provocative, unsettling works that challenge every aspect of the status quo. Given the nature of Hill’s literary identity – northern, speculative, discomfiting yet humane – it seems inevitable that this writer and this publisher would come together eventually.

Hill made his presence felt from the moment he arrived on the scene in 2013 with The Folded Man, which was a runner-up for the Dundee International Book Prize. Set in a disturbingly near-future Manchester and ‘starring’ the superbly dislikeable Brian, The Folded Man presents a fertile clash between gritty Gibsonian futurism and a distinctly home-grown eco-noir, an ambience that persists throughout his tangentially related 2016 follow-up Graft, which was a finalist for the Philp K. Dick Award.

The two novels that followed are equally distinctive. Climate change and the post-work environment become major themes in Zero Bomb (2019) in which grieving father Remi becomes drawn into a murky world of government surveillance and anarchist plots. The Breach (2020), published on the eve of lockdown and thus denied much of the attention it deserved, is a potent mix of evocative landscape writing and post-Brexit paranoia.

Indeed, what Hill’s books have in common is an obsession with the enforced inequalities and social divides – north and south, worker and manager, government and citizen – that have come to define our disunited kingdom in the present century. Hill is too young to have fully formed memories of Thatcher in government, but his political and literary consciousness have clearly been shaped by and within the long and continuing fallout from the 1980s.

This new novel Lamb, the latest chapter in Hill’s evolving oeuvre, is as brilliant as anything he has yet written, keeping faith with his core themes of future-shock, environmental degradation and the structural imbalances tearing at the fabric of our post-truth society. Following a family tragedy, teenager Boyd and his mother Maureen flee north from Watford to the village of Sile, an eerily closeted community where Boyd feels not just out of place but actively threatened. He knows there is something amiss here, whilst amongst certain elements of the townsfolk, the suspicion begins to surface that what is wrong in Sile is Boyd himself, or more specifically his mother Maureen.

With Lamb so newly published, it would be wrong of me to reveal much more about the exact nature of Boyd’s catastrophe, except to say that the journey he embarks on is one of radical transformation. The truth of who Boyd is – WHAT Boyd is – has far wider implications than the fate of one family, and as always with Hill, the vision presented to us within the pages of this story has more to say about our unreliable present than any possible future.

One of the most arresting aspects of Hill’s fiction is its boldness in incorporating dramatic speculative ideas into deeply human stories. From The Folded Man onwards, Hill has seemed compelled to place his characters in extreme situations, to test their resilience, and thinking about this today, the book that keeps coming to mind is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like Shelley, Hill writes about responsibility, about cause and effect and the price of human arrogance. About technology run out of control, about the costly repercussions of moral failure.

Lamb is a unique blend of the personal and the political, the kind of work that reminds us how radical science fiction can be, how well it retains the power to shock and to surprise. A road trip like no other, Lamb will leave you thrilled, changed, unsettled, and still asking questions.

Tying the knot

Eaglesham House, Rothesay, 30th September 2023 (photo by Garry Charnock)

Chris and I were married on Saturday, surrounded by friends and members of both our families. It was a joyful day, marking the end of what has been a summer of difficult news and major life adjustments.

In July, Chris was diagnosed with cancer. He spent six weeks in hospital in all, mainly on account of a broken leg, an injury that came about as a direct result of the disease, though of course we did not know that when it happened.

He is now home, and concentrating his energies on his current writing project. His spirits remain high, his resilience remarkable, his sense of humour undiminished. We are relieved to have regained a passable version of what we think of as normality, and aim to keep things that way for as long as possible. We are doing the work we love, being together, and focusing on the positive.

Just sayin’

When I reread Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home a month or so ago I found it astonishing to remember that the book was published in 2012, more than a decade old already and yet still, in my head at least, so enmeshed in and essential to our literary present.

The same could be said of Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, published the same year and which I have finally, belatedly caught up with. I remember reading the press at the time, intrigued by the outrage the book seemed to be causing, though not enough to dive in immediately. I felt instinctively on the side of the writer, who seemed to have committed no other sin than have the temerity to say what she thought.

That writers say what they think seems to cause outrage rather too often, especially if the writer is a woman.

I feel amazed, disappointed, tired as I reread the reviews of Aftermath from the week of publication. Frances Stonor Saunders and Julie Burchill damning with faint praise, their responses inadvertently, embarrassingly sexist and profoundly un-literary. Burchill finds the final chapter of Aftermath ‘baffling’; Saunders thinks it ‘bizarre’ and feels it ‘should [have been] dumped altogether’. Most of the discussion seems to revolve not around Cusk’s astringent analysis, her mastery of language and form, but – as with Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child – whether or not she ‘should’ have written the book at all.

Aftermath is one of the most powerfully interrogative, furiously honest and boldly imaginative texts I have read. The final chapter is what makes the book a masterpiece. Always, but especially now, I feel grateful, inspired, humbled to have such talent to look up to, to show me what can, with sufficient courage, be achieved.

Mid-year thoughts

This year started very normally but has become deeply strange. Chris has not been well. Plans have had to change suddenly. I have been caught mid-thought, at that peculiar moment of transition between one book and the next. This has happened to me before but never, I don’t think, which such violently immediate effect.

Something good has always come out of such derangement in the past, so I am keeping faith with that knowledge. In the meantime, books.

The best, the most impactful, the most personally significant book I have read so far this year has been Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. If I could hold up one book and say this is the kind of thing I want to write, the level of achievement I intend to keep before me as my perfect example, it would be this one. I think about it most days. The quality of the writing. The vision. The timelessness, which is the stuff legends are made of. A book that both transcends and suitably honours its source material.

Second comes a reread: Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy, which I read when it first came out and found slight, and vaguely annoying. This time round I got it, and it’s a masterpiece. Again, I think about it most days. Please read this wonderful article, if you haven’t already.

Third would have been The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, a great bollocking romper stomper of a book that helped keep me going through the earlier part of this month, the most perfectly addictive long novel I’ve read since first discovering the Stephen King doorstoppers – Salem’s Lot especially – that The Shards is at least in part a homage to. Then, like King, Ellis blows it in the final quarter. I am convinced he rolled with this thing right into the last hundred pages without properly understanding how he wanted it to end. So he stuck in a stupid knife fight. Heavy disappointment. But it’ll stick with me, I guess, and the guy can write, so.

Honourable mentions go to Julie Myerson’s brilliant The Lost Child, Rachel Cusk’s The Last Supper, Gordon Burn’s inimitable Alma Cogan, Benjamin Myers’s Cuddy and of course M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here, which is more than an honourable mention, it’s in its own category. So far as weird precursors go, it is the epitome.

Looking forward to the Booker longlist, as I always do. Hoping to post here more often as the year progresses.

Shining a light

Earlier this summer, I reread Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This was the first time I’d revisited the book since seeing Bennett Miller’s film Capote when it was released in 2005. Capote is a favourite film of mine, one I rewatch frequently and with undiminished admiration. Of course, Philip Seymour Hoffmann is out of this world in it. But it’s not just him. From the opening frame, there’s something about the texture of this film, the evocation of sense of place most of all, that keeps me coming back to it, wishing that there were more true crime dramas that accorded their subject matter this level of attention and restraint.

Over time and with repeated viewings of the movie it was perhaps inevitable that book and film had become inextricably enmeshed in my imagination. This was a good part of the reason I chose to revisit the novel. I have read a significant amount of true crime literature in the almost twenty years since first encountering Truman Capote’s magnum opus. How would it have fared in the onrush of time and memory?

If anything, it was better than I remembered. Not just a masterpiece of true crime literature but a masterpiece full stop. The attention to detail, the restraint, the beautifully jointed, watertight sentences. In Cold Blood is rightly called a novel, not simply because it goes beyond the reporter’s brief in imagining scenes, dialogue, alternative scenarios but because it is a novelist’s feel for structure and for narrative form that Capote brings to his material. The thing that surprised me most – the thing I’d forgotten – is how little Capote inserts himself into the text. There is just that one line near the end, in which he refers to ‘the journalist’, a person that can only be him, but who is neither named nor referred to again.

I have read criticism of In Cold Blood that suggests Capote’s obsession with the two perpetrators and his uncomfortably close relationship with Perry Smith in particular makes the book unforgivably unbalanced, that he ‘did not do right by the Clutter family’. Though one has to take account of and respect the views of those who knew the Clutters as neighbours, I would have to disagree with this assessment. Whatever his private turmoil, Capote does not in any way ‘favour’ the murderers. His summoning of an entire community and way of life, very much including the personalities and daily lives of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter is a act of imagining – I almost want to say resurrection – that favours nothing but the truth insofar as he was able to discover it, an inextricable tangle of opposing truths, contrary points of view, accidents of fate that are as horrifying today as they were in 1959.

More than sixty years ago and still, this story. There is nothing that can forgive or make right the evil act that ended the lives of a blameless family. But in literature as in life, the line between ‘evil acts’ and ‘evil men’ is a notoriously tricky one to navigate or to describe. That Capote attempts to do so is his job as a writer and he succeeds brilliantly. The only certain thing is that the death penalty helps no one, and solves nothing.

There is similarly much to contemplate in two more recent works of true crime, both published this year. Francisco Garcia’s We All Go into the Dark revisits the Bible John murders that took place in Glasgow in the 1960s – less than a decade after the Clutters were murdered – while Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer recounts the murder of Garza’s twenty-year-old sister Liliana in Mexico City in 1990. In the case of Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock, no one was ever charged with their murders and the identity of Bible John remains a mystery. In the case of Liliana Rivera Garza, the identity of her murderer is all too clear – but he, similarly, has never been charged.

Francisco Garcia admits up front that he has little to add to the Bible John narrative as it is already known. His intention in writing the book is to examine the effect the crimes had on Glasgow at the time, their treatment by the media and the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of detectives to shine a light on the identity of the killer for decades afterwards. While I might have liked a little more commentary on the harshly constrained lives of Glasgow working class women in particular, Garcia’s work is honest, thorough and captivating and I like his book a lot. His unsensationalist, self-questioning approach to writing true crime should be noted and applauded. I hope his next book will push this envelope still further.

I know Cristina Rivera Garza’s work from her strange, elliptical 2012 novella The Taiga Syndrome. It would be impossible for her not to insert herself into the text of Liliana’s Invincible Summer – whole tracts of this heartbreaking narrative are inevitably her story, too – but the miracle she performs in allowing her sister not only to be properly seen for who she is but in some sense to be the narrator of this remarkable book is no less an act of literary resurrection than Capote’s. As an examination of coercive control, intimate partner violence and the only recently named and acknowledged crime of femicide, Liliana’s Invincible Summer is an essential addition to the library of true crime literature. As an elegy for a lost beloved it is equally indispensable.

Reading this excellent interview with Eliza Clark over the weekend – Clark is the author of the smartly original novel Boy Parts and has recently been named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists – I was particularly struck by what she says about what it is that attracts her to true crime narratives:

“I’m just interested in people’s lives and the histories of places… True crime, done well, feels like one of the only times you get to read nonfiction about day-to-day lives.”

This chimes so exactly with my own reasons for being interested in true crime literature, why I think it’s important. It’s good to see new voices entering this arena, even better to see the inventiveness, seriousness and respect with which they approach this difficult and sensitive material. I cannot wait to read Clark’s new novel, Penance. And while I’m waiting, I have my own research to be getting on with…

Faith in the Future

My new novel, Conquest, is published today.

Jonathan Thornton’s insightful and generous review at Fantasy Hive offers an eloquent analysis of its structure and intentions, while Steve Andrews brings his particular knowledge and engagement to our ‘interview-review‘ at Outlaw Bookseller. As always, I hope that readers both familiar with my work and entirely new to it will enjoy discovering their own reactions and responses to a book that was a long time in the making and is to an extent a personal commentary upon the last few years.

Conquest is a novel about truth and post-truth, the familiar made strange, communal crisis and personal epiphany. But on the day that sees the book pass from my hands into the hands of readers, I would like to reflect upon the theme that perhaps most of all provided its guiding inspiration. In one section of the novel, my private investigator Robin remembers how at the age of twelve she fell ill with pneumonia and as a result was absent from school and from her normal life for more than six weeks. Feeling weakened from the disease and with no one to talk to, she listens to Radio 3 for hours on end. This is where, for the first time, she hears the Goldberg Variations, and falls in love with the music of J. S. Bach.

The same thing happened to me, more or less, and I count those six weeks spent listening to music as some of the most formative in my cultural life, a period in which I was able to experience works that might not otherwise have crossed my path until much later. Where I was able to think, in privacy and without interruption, about what music meant, not only in terms of my own emotional reaction to it but in the abstract.

Unlike Robin, this was not when I first heard the Goldberg Variations. I came to know Bach through others of his compositions: through listening endlessly to the violin concertos and playing the flute sonatas, through singing in the B minor mass, a valuable and joyous apprenticeship that meant when I finally did come to know the Goldbergs, in my middle twenties, it felt like coming home.  

One of the fringe benefits of my many years spent working in a music shop was the opportunity for listening. I was responsible for our whole stock of classical recordings, which meant I could buy in and test drive anything I wanted to. The effect was similar to being let loose in an enormous playground. One of the lessons I learned from all that listening was that recordings I initially considered my favourites could and often did cede their position to other performances, sometimes in the same day. That the point of studying different recordings is not simply to establish a hierarchy, fun though that can be, but to come to a deeper understanding of a piece of music through its various interpretations.

You would be surprised at the number of times you rub shoulders with Bach – through advertising, through film or game soundtracks, even through lift music – during the course of a single week. Without our consciously realising it, Bach reveals himself to us through an accumulation of encounters over many years, sure proof of his continuing ability to speak directly to millions of people across every conceivable divide of age or culture or background. Bach’s work deepens our relationship with the past, even as it informs our present. Through an intricate interweaving of sound and meaning that seems hardwired into all of us, Bach gives us faith in the future.

I have tried to convey something of Bach’s timeless and magical appeal in my writing of Conquest. I have not felt ready to write at length about music before now, precisely because the subject means so much to me, and also because it is difficult, for any writer, to add anything to what is already present in the music itself. In setting out to explore Robin’s world, and most especially Frank’s, I have found myself constantly in mental dialogue with those writers who have struggled with similar questions, and in so doing provided inspiration of their own. I hope I have added something to the conversation. I hope most of all that anyone reading Conquest who has for whatever reason persuaded themselves that Bach is not for them will throw aside their preconceptions and listen again.

Girls Against God #7: I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel and Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko

What he is, is greedy and lazy, selfish and a coward but what he also is, is clear and when he gives me a way out, I refuse to take it.

Readers and critics alike have described the unnamed narrator of Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan as an ‘unlikable character’, one of those Moshfeghian millennial bitches we love to hate. I have problems getting to grips with this designation. To me, she’s simply real. If angry and uncomfortably honest makes you unlikable, I guess that’s just more of the shit we’re having to wade through.

As in Anna Burns’s Booker-winning novel Milkman, with which Patel’s debut shares more than a strand of literary DNA, no one is named. Characters are ascribed a function within the text: ‘the man I want to be with,’ ‘the woman I am obsessed with’, ‘his wife’, ‘my boyfriend’. This is both alienating and strangely intimate, as if we too are engaged in spying on these people, as if we too are complicit with what is going on. As, if you are a woman, you will be. Because in one way or another, you will have been there.

If I had been writing about this subject at the time when similar stuff was happening to me, the resulting text’s internal furniture would have been different: street maps instead of Google maps, telephone boxes instead of iPhones, newspaper articles instead of Insta. The sentences would have unfolded differently as a result, more formally structured and punctuated in keeping with the times. But the story would have been the same, or broadly similar. That tortuous tract of time when one’s internal weather is mainly dictated by the narcissistic, self-seeking actions of another person. The madness of knowing that, but still sacrificing one’s agency. The pointless suffering that – with a portion of luck and a fuckton of time – you eventually wrest yourself free of and pick up your life.

What cannot be wrested free of are the adjacent pitfalls, the systemic inequalities of class, race and gender Patel’s unnamed narrator catalogues and interrogates with matter-of-fact, intimate knowledge and brutal precision.

*

No, I would really like for someone to explain to me, why the hell would one come into this world a woman – and in Ukraine, yet! – with this fucking dependency programmed into your body like a delayed-action bomb, with this craziness, this need to be transformed into moist, squishy clay kneaded into the Earth’s surface…

You’re a woman. And that’s your limit./Your moon sleeps like a silver fish lure./Like spices off the edge of a knife/Dependency sprinkled into your blood.

Oh, this book.

So there it was, girlfriend – you fell in love. And how you fell in love – you exploded blindly, went flying headfirst, your witch’s laugh ringing to the heavens, lifted by the invisible absolute power of whirlwinds, and that pain didn’t stop you – although it should have – but no, you cut the juice to all your warning signs that had lit up with their red lights flashing and screaming “meltdown” – like before the accident at the atomic station – and only your poems, which switched on immediately and rushed forward in a steady, unrelenting stream, sent out unambiguous signals of danger: persistent flashes of hell, and death, and sickness.

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is as much about language as physical intimacy. The vexed and now murderously abusive relationship between Russia and Ukraine, between the Ukrainian language and the Russian language, runs through this novel like a sword, as its true subject matter, the matter of language not so much a metaphor for sexual politics as the other way around.

Zabuzhko’s work contains some of the most thrilling, innovative writing at the sentence level that I have ever read, and I want to give particular mention here to the novel’s translator, Halyna Hryn, who has conveyed the raw force of the original with a facility and passion that keeps English-language readers as close to Zabuzhko’s furious rhythms, her sardonic humour and dextrous word choices as is possible.

The way this novel is freely punctuated with poetry. The way there is no redemption, save the hunger for freedom.

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is most likely the most important novel I will read all year. The fact that it was written in 1996 should make us all ask ourselves questions about the gaps between the real and the imagined in our attitude to nations, peoples and individuals threatened with existential as well as physical annihilation.

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