Elena Knows

"Elena Knows is a day in the life of a woman with advanced Parkinson’s disease. Technically it’s a crime novel , a thriller—of sorts. It’s about a woman whose daughter has died recently, and wrapped up by the police who have said that it’s a straightforward suicide. But Elena knows that it’s not, because she knows that her daughter would never have gone near the church when it was raining, because she was terrified of lightening, and there was a lightning rod on the church, and so on, and so on. But actually, Elena Knows is an extraordinarily beautiful and harrowing description of ageing and disability. Everything that happens in it happens to the rhythm of the pills she needs to take, every time she needs to stop and sit down, to pause on her way to get to the metro or the church. So, in fact, as a book, it is much closer to something like Elizabeth is Missing or Olive Kitteridge than a crime novel. She has an extraordinary humanity. The focus is absolutely on these people, what they feel, and their frailty and weakness. It is as compelling a novel about age and illness and doubt and love as I think I have ever read. I suppose the thing that all the books on the shortlist do share is a fascination with boundaries and borders. What happens if you cross them, what happens if you don’t. Whether those are physical borders; the borders set down by the rules of the theology in The Books of Jacob; in Cursed Bunny , the borders are human skin; in Heaven , we’re looking at the power structure within a school—it’s quite deliberately used by Kawakami to mirror the power structures of states and governments, and how people police each other. There is a sense in which what Kawakami is doing is enacting a sort of Nietzschean approach to how people police each other. In Tomb of Sands , there are the physical borders that now separate India from Pakistan, though not when Ma was a young girl. There are also the boundaries of gender, and between life and death, also the ways in which roles impose boundaries on us—the roles of mother and daughter being inverted. So there is, I suppose, something that ties these books together. The experience of reading each one of them is singular. And while you are reading them, you are not thinking about how they compare to other things, you are simply there: in the moment. Never forget the longlist . So many sacrifices were made for us to get from the longlist to the shortlist. I don’t want to single out individual books, but the thirteen books that made up the original longlist encompass an extraordinary wealth in what fiction can do and how it plays out. Part of our best books of 2022 series."