Our Share of Night: A Novel

"Celeste Ng (the author of Little Fires Everywhere ) will publish a new novel, Our Missing Hearts (Oct 4). As will Kamila Shamsie ( Home Fires ), whose latest book Best of Friends will be out at the end of this month. Fresh from her Booker Prize shortlisting (for Oh William! ) , Elizabeth Strout is shortly to publish one more novel starring her beloved Lucy Barton. In Lucy By the Sea , our heroine reluctantly agrees to wait out the pandemic with her ex-husband in coastal Maine. And Andrew Sean Greer offers a follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic novel Less : in Less is Lost , our hapless hero Arthur Less sets out on a road trip across the United States. It’s been endorsed by the great and the good, including David Sedaris—who called it “wildly, painfully funny.” A balm."

"Enriquez is a contemporary writer from Argentina, and she’s written some short fiction that I was already familiar with. This novel only just came out, and it’s brilliant. It’s a good-sized novel, and manages to sustain weirdness for the entire duration of the book without straining. It’s a recognisably Latin American book, not just in the sense of place, but in the way that it discusses things like politics and art… There’s no sense that you’re just supposed to tell stories, and not talk about this or that. Instead, there’s a sense that, as a writer, it’s what you do – you talk about politics and gender relations and things like this. You don’t lecture or scold or preach, but they’re part of the fabric of life. So all of that is in there. It’s absolutely serious, and the weird stuff isn’t a diversion – it grows very organically. The story is mainly about a man who is part of a cult. There are certain sensitive individuals who are selected by this cult, and used to conduct a ritual that makes contact with something. The cultists themselves, even the ones at the top, really don’t know what they’re doing. They know they make contact with this thing, and it helps keep them rich and powerful. And yes, it does involve children being sacrificed, and they do have them in cages down in a tunnel by the river, and we don’t talk about that… The main character does not want his son to get trapped by these assholes. He wants to keep him away, and that’s the main thrust of the plot. The way the magic is worked into the story is so deft. It’s not so subtle or elusive that it feels half-assed, or like she just waved her hand at the mystery, and didn’t really have a clear idea. No, it’s very clear. There’s this kind of darkness that appears, and you have to touch the dark; it is as vivid and as clearly realized as a Stephen King monster. And like The Haunting of Hill House, it reflects a sense of snobbery and arrogance. There’s a certain kind of power where just because of who I am, you defer to me – because of certain abstract symbols (which we might call money), and because of certain mystical calculations (which could be spells or investment schemes or whatever), I shape your life. I determine what is or isn’t possible. It’s really about not making a fuss over differing between that, and what’s actually magical. It’s such an intelligent book, you just feel like you’re getting smarter as you read it. And it respects you so much, too. It’s not just telling a story to while away a few hours, it’s trying to enrich your understanding of the world. It’s inspired and fresh and relevant, and it revitalizes your sense of what the genre can do – that it has its own way of telling the truth, and capturing real human experiences in a way that other genres can’t. Enriquez is very clearly steeped in writers like Stephen King and so forth, but at the same time, it’s so much her own voice. She’s absolutely in command of the material throughout. It’s a long book, but it never flags: you never feel like there’s anything self-indulgent, and she’s never scolding you or preaching at you or anything like that. And she’s writing now, so there’s the great joy of knowing that hopefully there’ll be more. She just did a great collection of short stories called A Sunny Place for Shady People . It’s a little harder to talk about because it’s so new, and I don’t have the advantage of so much hindsight with it, but I see it taking weird fiction in a very mature direction. You could go from reading Miéville into Enriquez and you would see certain lines fleshed out, developed and made fuller. It’s really extraordinary."