Katharine Grant's Reading List

"It’s hard to categorise The Long Take , but essentially we follow the inner journey of a Canadian veteran of the Normandy Landings as he tries to rebuild his life in the bleak and sometimes violent streets of post-war America. An outsider now, unable to settle back with his family and his love, he escapes the silence and “the long stare out to sea” of Nova Scotia and travels from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco witnessing the destruction of communities in favour of cars, the sly horrors of McCarthyism and the forging of an America he won’t live to see. We meet Walker, “that is his name and his nature”, and a memorable cast of other characters in 1946, and through poetry, prose, filmic images and grainy black and white photographs—the text too offered like a series of film stills—we walk with him, right up to his final confession. If that sounds depressing, don’t be put off. Robin Robertson may offer us great suffering, but he also offers great beauty and it’s this combination—suffering and beauty—that draws you back to this book again and again. There’s so much to admire in this book, but perhaps, to the Walter Scott Prize judges, what made the book a winner was the success with which The Long Take transcends conventional literary boundaries, keeping narrative drive and poetic pulse completely in balance. This doesn’t mean that formal novelty will always win out. Not at all. Even without its unconventional form, The Long Take is a deeply moving, memorable and unexpected work. Add in the unconventional form and you have the Walter Scott Prize criteria laid out: original, innovative and (in our judgement) durable, with writing of such power that you occasionally have to stop to recover. Imaginatively (story, character, evocation of place and time) and technically (organisation, structure, pace, tone), The Long Take is a work of supreme artistry. Walter Scott would have read it and marvelled."

"We loved the life, the energy, the chutzpah, the wonderful cast of characters and particularly the “rich, ripe voices” of the two narrators, Irene Bobs and Willie Bachhuber. A Long Way from Home is a blast of a novel so atmospheric you can smell the burning tyres and sniff the dry eucalyptus leaves. Peter Carey has taken the Redex Trial, a car-race round the continent of Australia, and hung on it the tale of a marriage and a country, of maps and map-less-ness, of glories and shames. So far, so you might say, so conventional. You’d be wrong though, because even for a writer as experienced as Peter Carey it’s hard to write a rollicking picaresque which has, at its heart, the infamy of colonial oppression. We read this book with huge admiration, amused, amazed and moved in equal measure. The idea of a book having any kind of ‘function’ bothers me. To me, historical fiction is simply a genre of literature onto which writers and readers project their own preoccupations and concerns. These concerns may reflect current events or fears for the future, but may also simply be the immediate preoccupations of any reader at any time. I think, though, that Walter Scott would agree with Peter Carey. Scott tells us himself that his own aim—we might call it a function—was to portray the Scots “in a more favourable light than they had been placed hitherto” and “to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles”. As judges of the prize that bears Scott’s name, though the prize has of course broadened out far beyond Scotland, we hear him! Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Just thinking more deeply, though—the function of historical fiction is a lively question—it’s impossible to read, for example, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (winner of our prize in 2010) without drawing parallels with the so-called ‘strongmen’ of our own age, or read any of Tim Pears’ West Country trilogy without being resolved to save what’s left of the untrodden country he describes. But we need to take care. There’s a difference between readers of historical fiction drawing parallels or being moved to action, and writers of historical fiction feeling that influencing the reader, which of course can be malign as well as benign, is one of their functions. Prize-winning historical novels aren’t morality tales or even cautionary tales. They are first and foremost readable tales. If we don’t want to read them, they fulfil no function at all."

"Such a good topic for a novel. Cressida Connolly’s book illuminates a sliver of history which, in the post-war rush of disassociation with even the briefest flirtation with fascism , is still uncomfortable, isn’t it? Aristocratic flirtation was marvellously addressed by Kazuo Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day , and After the Party offers a less socially elevated but perhaps more insidious slant. Phyllis Forrester isn’t so much heroine as dupe, or so the contemporary reader, her children safe from military call-up, smugly feels. Yet can you, hand on heart and forgoing hindsight, say that you’d have completely resisted the snare of the charismatic leader preaching war avoidance? Connolly doesn’t overdo the discomfort. She’s too clever for that. Instead, she winds the hopes and fears of 1938 into a tale of sisters, the undercurrents of their relationships mirroring the early rumblings of the war. Why was After the Party on the shortlist? Because—apart from filling all the Walter Scott Prize criteria—Cressida Connolly’s writing is gently remorseless, gently relentless. She never cops out. With courage and skill, she sees her story through to its bitter end and, as happens with the best historical fiction, leaves the reader asking ‘what if’."

"Immediate transportation into the rural isolation and rough Catholicism of 1491! Speaking at the Borders Book Festival, Sam Harvey said she thought she’d written a novel about religion and was surprised to find she’d written a first-class historical novel. But that’s the best type of historical novel: when the writer is so deeply immersed that period setting is almost by-the-way. And immediate transportation was just the first of many things to admire, including the evocation of life in a village both sustained and cut off by a bridge-less river, the wonderful rural dean, and that’s before taking full account of the technical expertise required to tell a mystery story in reverse. Best of all, though, and almost miraculous, is the anxious, occasionally querulous voice of John Reve, the priestly hero, as he struggles with poverty, superstition, his temper and fear of redundancy. Here he is, railing against the medieval faith hierarchy: If there aren’t enough people to see to the land and animals, and if half the animals have died, the village starves, and if the village starves it looks to me [John Reve, the priest], and I look to him [the rural dean], and he looks to the archdeacon who looks to the bishop and finds nobody there. And people lose faith because their protectors have not protected them, and the Lord loses faith in the protectors, whom he appointed to keep him in the hearts of all. Once the Lord has lost his faith in you, you’re upriver with no raft and one leg. If you ever read a better 1491 priestly voice, I’d be surprised. Accuracy in historical novels only applies to certain facts: clothes; forms of transport; weapons; historical events, and of these only historical events are really fixed. Can we be sure, for example, of the exact date the first crinoline appeared on a London street? Or a phaeton was driven in Bath? Just because it’s recorded, can we really insist that firearms were first used in warfare at the Battle of Agincourt? Things appear before somebody notices them. Things happen before they’re recorded. As judges, historical accuracy is only a factor when it jars. Otherwise, though we may question it, it can’t be a deciding consideration, particularly when the most unlikely things often turn out to be true. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That doesn’t mean research isn’t vital. I think Andrew Miller, another author on this year’s shortlist, speaks for many historical novelists when he likens research to beach-combing. Nobody who has read his The Crossing (2015) could have any doubts about his forensic dedication but, like flotsam and jetsam, there are things to pick up, and things to leave. ‘Imaginative accuracy’ is perhaps a better term for the research that scaffolds historical novels—contemporary novels, too. And let’s not pretend. Even the most skilful novelist can’t really get into the mindset of somebody living in another time, any more than somebody from the past could get into ours. Try getting a young person to imagine life without the internet. Full accuracy can never be achieved, and even if it was, is no guarantee of a good book."

"We’re lucky to live in the era of Andrew Miller. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is just the latest in a series of remarkable novels, each of which is so fresh, so vivid, that I sometimes wonder if he’s possessed of magical powers. He doesn’t just make you see sea or snow, or a man after he’s been shot, or a cow being ridden ashore, but feel the swell, the cold, the flowering of blood, the sway of the cow’s hips. It’s a great skill, dramatically honed. In this particular book, we find ourselves in the aftermath of the British army’s withdrawal from Corunna, six years before Waterloo, in the company of Robert Lacroix, a good man who, so the reader learns in incremental steps, leaves bad things in his wake. As Andrew Miller tells us, the book’s origins were musical, “specifically a little piece called ‘Mary Young and Fair’” collected by “a military type in the Hebrides in 1815.” Such a peaceful genesis for the story of a man on the run from both himself and (though he learns this late on in the novel) from a real pursuer. If you haven’t yet read Now We Shall Be Entirely Free , set aside a weekend. Once begun, it’s hard to put down. To me, emphatically no. We don’t even really understand our contemporaries! And then there’s the burden of hindsight. If you write about the Second World War , for example, no matter how hard you try, you can’t forget the destruction; you can’t forget the concentration camps; and most crucially of all, you can’t forget who won. If you’re writing about the 13th century, you’re never really going to know what it was like getting up in the morning. As Andrew Miller said in his shortlist interview, “the past is held in the belly of now.” Not, he says, that “everything is merely a matter of subjective interpretation.” It’s more complicated than that! Helpfully, he sends us to the start of ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets . Have a look and see what you think."

"Any book beginning “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals” is off to a good start and, as we already know, Michael Ondaatje is a superb storyteller. But the Walter Scott Prize doesn’t take past glories into account. Warlight made the shortlist for the skill with which it paints the curious and sinister post-war reverberations most of us hardly think about, the London beyond the celebrations of VE day, the mopping up, as we might call it. Warlight is a book of mysteries shrouded in detail: life in the nether regions of a smart hotel; the watery byways of East London down which greyhounds are smuggled. And matching the mysteries are the people: the Moth, the Darter; Marsh Felon. It’s a book to read and re-read. Stories usually come before categorisations, so I don’t find it surprising that several of our shortlisted authors don’t think of themselves as historical novelists, particularly if, like Michael Ondaatje, you set your book within your own lifetime. Also, most novelists hate labels, so being stuck with another isn’t a very attractive prospect. The founders of the Walter Scott Prize understood this very well. By tagging it ‘a prize for historical fiction’, they elevate the genre without trapping the writer. I think this is why entries increase year on year, and why the Prize forges into its second decade confidently vigorous, hotly debated and a prize to gladden the hearts of the judges, and of the poet, verse-romancer, playwright, historian, ballad-collector and novelist after whom it’s named."

"This is a wild love story set in a mining town in 1890s Montana. Tom Rourke, a degenerate hard-liver with a poetic imagination, falls for Polly Gillespie who arrives as the bride of the self-flagellating religious fanatic Captain Long Anthony Harrington. Tom and Polly are twin souls, living life to the full. It’s a stormy ride of a book. Kevin Barry can conjure up a street, a scene, a person, in a couple of words. The story he tells roars along like a Montana river in full spate. And there’s no shrinking. Barry follows his story with a twinkle in his eye, a gift for language and absolute, unblinking vigour. Plus, as David Mitchell observes on the cover of the hardback, The Heart in Winter includes—arguably—the finest American frontier magic mushroom scene in the Western canon."

"Essentially, this novel asks the reader many uncomfortable questions about responsibility. When does it rest with others? When does it rest with you? Hermine Braunsteiner is a New York suburban housewife whose past as an ambitious female Nazi concentration camp guard catches up with her. The reader watches Hermine’s post-war American life, and that of her faithful husband, unravel. The book time-travels and has two narrators: we see the German camps through Hermine’s eyes, and we see Hermine through her husband’s eyes. Well, on a technical level, Angharad Hampshire has a perfect understanding of structure. Time travel is difficult but she achieves the moves seamlessly: the reader is never lost. Her characters are unshowy yet absolutely stick with you. I can see Hermine. I can see Russell. They are complete human beings. So many writerly pitfalls lurk when writing about the death camps. Angharad Hampshire falls into none of them. Her writing is plain and direct, and her control makes the story she’s telling all the more compelling and disturbing."

"I’d advise readers to sit with this book, sit and breathe, as we might sit and breathe with a Book of Hours. The story is tense and full-bodied – you want to know what happens. At the same time, with the skill of a weaver, Francesca Kay depicts the passing seasons, both natural and liturgical, without fanfare but with much beauty. Drawn into the little rural community, the reader also witnesses the building of a chantry, that is, a chapel endowed by the founder to pray for his or her soul, or the souls of others ‘in perpetuum.’ The poignancy of building a chantry in the religiously perilous sixteenth century! The culture shock is, I suppose, that despite many upheavals, religious faith underpinned every facet of life in western Christendom until, say, the scientific discoveries and growing religious scepticism of the late nineteenth century. For twenty-first century readers, whose faith in everything is shaken on a daily basis, it’s almost impossible to imagine such entrenched certainties. Through prose that glints like a stained-glass window, Francesca Kay offers a glimpse of that vanished world. In novel terms, this may be as near to the sixteenth century as we’re ever going to get."

"In some ways, the further back in history you go, the easier it is to write because you have more latitude with facts, tone, speech, really almost everything. Also, the further back you go the harder it is to prove an author wrong, though it doesn’t stop some readers from trying. As a writer you have a different, and in some ways more daunting, challenge: to try to recreate lives, mindsets and experiences which are, if we’re being truthful, pretty unknowable. You can copy a picture from a Grecian urn and that’s fine, but if you try and write like, say, Homer, you just sound like somebody trying to write like Homer. Ferdia Lennon most emphatically does not do that! He has launched out in a way that to most authors would feel foolhardy but he has turned into a triumph. With no preamble, he presents us with an informal, chatty Syracuse of 412 BC. He can see the place and hear the tone so clearly in his head that the reader, whilst knowing perfectly well that both tone and story are fiction, never doubts him. That’s quite a feat. Such a good question! It’s easier to be funny in ‘factual’ history books, isn’t it, for example The Horrible Histories and 1066 and All That . I’d say historical fiction is more witty than outright funny. From Walter Scott through the Asterix series to the Blackadder scripts we find witty banter and comical situations. Ferdia Lennon offers a different kind of humour, unique – at least I’ve never read anything quite like it before. Startling, too, particularly to the modern reader to whom the whole notion of finding any humour in the dumping of your enemy prisoners in quarries and leaving them to boil in the day, to freeze at night and to starve all the time might be troubling, to say the least. What we’re really offered in Glorious Exploits is, I suppose, a tragi-comedy, with the emotional complexity that that particular brand of humour brings with it."

"In choosing the winter of 1962 when, for some weeks, life in Britain paused, suspended in heavy snow, Andrew Miller has subtly identified a moment – perhaps the moment – when we shifted from looking backwards to the Second World War which, for so many, was still the defining event of their lives, towards the future. People were still finding, and some losing, their post-war way; the sixties were not swinging yet. Down in the West Country, where The Land in Winter is set, we experience this Janus moment, this pause, this snow-suspension, with two couples negotiating themselves and their marriages. Intense, immersive and beautifully paced, we move with Bill and Rita and Eric and Irene towards an uncertain spring. Is it the way that like a great piece of music you’re hardly aware of the work that lies behind Andrew Miller’s novels? Is it the details he chooses to perfectly evoke a mood, a room, a journey, a party, a conversation? Is it that he finds a good story and offers the gift of total immersion? Is it the emotional integrity—by which I mean nothing is ever done simply for writerly effect? Is it his ability to capture a truth which you feel you’ve always known but never articulated? Different readers will have different answers."

"Amongst many other joys, a page-turner! We’re in the Dutch province of Overijssel, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War . The reader will learn many uncomfortable truths. I won’t spoil the plot with revelation except to say the obvious: that war isn’t over when hostilities cease. Readers can expect to be shocked, disturbed, conflicted, haunted even, by this story. They’ll also find the book stays with them after they’ve put it down. But if it’s a story of past hates, it’s much more a love story, written with all the power of love that’s unexpected, in many ways unwelcome, yet can’t be denied. Yes and no. Always bearing in mind our criteria – originality, innovation, durability, ambition, quality of writing – we have read some marvellous books. We’ve also read books whose writers paste twenty-first century mindsets, morality and preoccupations onto people living in times that had completely different mindsets, morality and preoccupations. Such books may be novels but they aren’t historical novels and it’s a bit depressing when they’re labelled as such. Historical novels should respect the past. If you don’t respect the past, this genre is not for you. The winner of the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction will be announced on Thursday 12 June at the Borders Book Festival ."

"Intimate books are very tricky to write. I think it’s the balance between narrative impetus and quiet observation that often fails. Not here. The Narrow Land is a triumph of intimacy, an immersive experience, illuminating through different perspectives and revealing through layers. The book is all-absorbing as only a picture can be all-absorbing. You witness events, some small, some larger, from varying angles and through differing lights and shades, and all the way through, though the technique is invisible, the effect intense. Certainly, the complexities of the Hoppers’ relationship are explored in The Narrow Land —most dextrously, how these complexities bleed into Edward and Jo’s relationships with their Cape Cod neighbours, and particularly with the two boys, Michael and Richie. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Turning to truth, I think evidence-based truth—who, what, when, where—is for the biographer. The novelist works mainly with ‘why’, an elusive truth even if you’re writing about yourself. Does the truth matter? Yes. But a novel is more painting than photograph. It’s truth re-imagined. After you’ve read The Narrow Land , take a look at Hopper’s ‘Cape Cod Morning’ and you’ll see exactly what I mean."

"Ambition, bravery, freshness— The Parisian , a first novel, has all three in spades. It’s a rare talent that can take on the complications and shifting identities of early 20th-century Middle Eastern politics and keep the reader charmed. But through her hero, Midhat Kamal, Isabella Hammad does that and more. It takes a remarkable eye for detail and ear for dialogue to succeed in both broad panorama and delicate miniature. As for the latter, the scene in which Midhat observes his future bride through the keyhole is a particular favourite. Wonderfully done. Every historical novel requires huge research, and research is part fun, part pitfall. How you long to slot in some fascinating—to you—discovery, even if it moves the novel onwards not at all. Surely, surely the reader will forgive? The reader doesn’t. All research self-indulgences must be stamped on. Kill your darlings, as journalists say, but don’t always do. But it’s horses for courses. “If the reader remembers the historical context but not the characters, something has gone wrong” All our shortlisted authors use their research according to the needs of their novel. So, for example, we need more context in Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian and Marguerite Poland’s A Sin of Omission than for the other four books. When context is needed, the skill is not to let it drown the story. If the reader remembers the historical context but not the characters, something has gone wrong. As you’d expect, in the view of the judges, the Walter Scott Prize shortlisted books don’t fall into that trap."

"Contemporary resonances are always a plus in historical novels. But, quite apart from timeliness, James Meek has quite simply given us something technically ambitious and glorious to read. I found myself smiling and occasionally doing that strange British thing of shaking my head in admiration. It’s punchy stuff! For some readers, the language may be challenging, so I wouldn’t start reading To Calais in bed. Instead, sit, and once comfortably immersed in the novel, lean back and stretch out. Open wine. Perhaps light a candle. Keep a handkerchief handy. I suppose because To Calais isn’t written in the neutral English employed by most modern historical novelists— i.e. mainly current grammatical constructions, except in direct speech, with words from the time that are easily translatable, for example ‘chamber’ for room or ‘coney’ for rabbit. Digging into the Oxford English Dictionary, James Meek has fashioned a language both familiar and unfamiliar, in other words a language that without losing subtlety or nuance sounds ‘fourteenth century’. But readers shouldn’t be alarmed. Two pages in and you’re fluent."

"A better question might be: what didn’t catch the judges’ eyes? Shadowplay employs both first and third person narrative, uses diary pages, private notes, newspaper cuttings and, occasionally, Ellen Terry’s voice. Yet it’s so smooth. Never a hiccup. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Also, though the novel’s ostensibly about three titans of the Victorian theatre, it’s really a deep exploration of the exposed and the hidden, “the other man that every man contains.” Joseph O’Connor wants us to shiver, and we do. As for the writing, every page has an eye-catcher, often more than one. I could hardly read the book in public, so strong was the urge to accost complete strangers with ‘Just listen to this!’ Could there be a more perfect vignette than Ellen Terry clip-clopping home after a show, alone in the dawn? I can still hear the “alleluia of the linnets.” A collective biography can only go so far in relationship exploration. So, for example, a collective biography of Bram, Henry and Ellen—after Shadowplay , I feel on first-name terms—would focus more on time and place of meetings, on correspondence, on what is irrefutable. A novelist is free to fill the emotional gaps (and other gaps, too, if there are any), without being accused of speculation. So biographers and novelists do different jobs. I’ve never tried to flip from one to the other, but I imagine that’s pretty hard."

"The plot of The Redeemed concerns the reuniting, or not, of the star-crossed, would-be lovers Leo Sercombe and Lottie Prideaux. The book opens in 1916 with Leo, now a boy-seaman on the battlecruiser HMS Queen Mary—shortly to be plunged into the Battle of Jutland—and Lottie at home in quiet Devon, following the local vet and absorbing the knowledge that will, eventually, lead to her training as a vet. Their paths are not smooth. “We witness the birth of something new, and the birth isn’t an easy one” But plot is the least of it. In The Redeemed we, like Leo and Lottie, move from what we might call the ‘prelapsarian’ world—the established, hierarchical world measured in horse-speed—towards the noisier, speedier world of the motor, with class barriers broken, or at least breached. Through their experiences, we witness the birth of something new, and the birth isn’t an easy one. Many critics describe Tim Pears’ prose as ‘lyrical’. It is, but there’s steel in the lyricism. Pears shies away from nothing. Too wise to go technicolour, he instead deploys meticulous detail to intensify emotional heft. Reading The Redeemed is like watching a master craftsman at work. All authors of trilogies would prefer that you started with book one, so do start the West Country Trilogy with The Horseman , then turn to The Wanderers , and then come to The Redeemed . But to qualify for the Walter Scott Prize, a book must stand alone. So if you were to read only The Redeemed , you would find a book complete in itself."

"There’s no getting away from it: the story of Stephen (Malusi) Mzamane is difficult. Found starving in the South African scrub, he and his brother Mzamo are adopted by the Anglican missionary establishment and trained for the missionary life themselves. Blighted hopes and wrenching loyalties follow as both, in different ways, are ensnared in and betrayed by prejudices hard-wired into the Anglican church of the late eighteenth century. In the hands of a careless writer, A Sin of Omission might have been an impossible read, but Marguerite Poland’s restraint, whilst not sparing us, beckons us on. We trust her, and when you trust an author, you enjoy being absorbed into the world being offered, whatever the delights or otherwise of that world itself. And so, though sorrowing for Stephen, we can enjoy Unity Wills, a woman called to be a soldier of Christ yet only a “Sunday worshipper in her best bonnet”; Mfundisi Turvey, who has learned Xhosa “and not only in the imperative”; and most of all, enjoy being swept from the Donsa bush to Shropshire, from Grahamstown to Canterbury in prose that rings like a bell—subtle, bold, unafraid. I personally was drawn to historical fiction because in my family, history was always more ‘story’ than ‘history’. Not much difference was made between ‘then’ and ‘now’. But there is a difference between then and now. I find it fascinating, for example, that during this Covid-19 outbreak, boredom is as prevalent as fear. Was it the same during the plague? I don’t think so. And then today, dying is deemed the worst thing that can happen to you, even though until perhaps the nineteenth century, the worst thing was to die unshriven. Yet at the same time, stories set in the past offer that essential commodity, hope, history by definition being an account of things that have come and gone. An excellent time, then, to turn to historical fiction. But if you’re fed up of being exhorted to read, here’s something just to ponder: 200 years from now, how will the story of the 2020 pandemic be told? Would we recognise ourselves, or would we be saying, ‘You think that’s how it was? Well, let me tell you . . .’"

"Fundamentally, beneath the story itself, this is a book about loneliness, in particular the loneliness of gay life in the 1890s. It’s the story of a brave attempt to rationalise sexual behaviour, and thus remove the stigma attached to homosexuality. Tom Crewe has used, quite loosely, the lives of two men, John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis who, in the book, become John Addington—a single-minded man who wants to create a world in which everybody is free to live as their nature dictates, but who is also flawed and selfish; and Henry Ellis, a shy, fragile, clever man who wants the same thing. Both these men personify that high Victorian belief that if only one could educate people, people would understand and accept. So, by proving that homosexuality has always been a part of human life and human nature, they hoped it would become ordinary, as indeed has happened now in the UK. But what happens when principle, rational thinking and hope crash into reality? Will they succeed or themselves face ruin? That’s the great tension at the heart of the book. There’s a rare honesty in the writing of this book. It’s written so directly, the sex graphic yet unsensational. Tom Crewe is a true craftsman. I would, although I’m not a great believer in always drawing parallels from the past to the present. But there are certainly parallels in this case. The New Life also reminds us, though, that change isn’t only about protesting in the streets. There’s a place for quiet, rational argument. In this book, the two men have a wonderful optimism and courage, and perhaps in order to change anything there needs to be an element of selfish single-mindedness although that selfishness causes suffering not just in the lives of these men, but also in the lives of the people they were attached to. Yes, particularly Addington’s wife, although I’d say that the only non-lonely person in this book is Ellis’s wife, Edith. She’s beautifully drawn."

"It’s a great quote, and true. Hungry Ghosts is a tragedy, and we’re swept into it by writing that conjures a whole physical, emotional and natural world of Trinidad; you get a sense of a burgeoning place, almost overwhelmed by vegetation. Hosein write with what one critic has called “sensory maximalism”. The colours are bold. The smells waft from the page. When you close the book, you’re surprised to find yourself still at home. Hungry Ghosts is the story of a man, Hans Sharoop, born into poverty, who hopes for better things, who is optimistic, and who gets an opportunity—which he takes—but then falls prey to all kinds of temptations. His family is destroyed as a result, but he’s not a bad man, only weak. If you’re born into abject poverty, it’s hard not to fall for a dream. It’s also a book about absence, with the absent Dalton Changoor, whose business is shadily successful and who employs Hans, hanging over this book like a sinister cloud. Absent also is Hans and his wife Shweta’s dead daughter, whose name they never utter yet who is always present between them. Kevin Jared Hosein’s absences aren’t just absences, they’re characters in their own right. “At least the label is no longer pejorative. People are now proud to be writers of historical fiction” Hungry Ghosts is a tough read, not for toughness’s sake, but because life was tough, sometimes more than tough as we learn from the backstories of the characters. As these backstories unfold, we flinch. But Kevin Jared Hosein writes with such energy, such command of his plot, such confidence, that you don’t want to look away in case you miss something. You feel the desires of the people he’s created; you can see where they might lead. You feel for them all. A gripping read from striking start to tragic finish."

"I suppose so, although that seems a bit cruel—as if other thrillers aren’t literary. It’s certainly a thriller. It’s tense, tense, tense. But the big thing in this novel is not just the tension, it’s the voices. Joseph O’Connor gives a masterclass in the different voices of the people gathered around the priest Hugh O’Flaherty to help him organise and run the Escape Line—the escape routes out of Italy for prisoners of war and others being pursued by the Nazis. The voices are unforgettable, their code-name ‘The Choir’ absolutely apt. So, we have the tension and the voices, and also we have Rome. If you feel you know Rome, you’ll find much to enjoy in the twists and turns of the streets, the hidden alleys, the sudden expanses and that ever-present ‘seethe of black water’, the Tiber. It’s full Rome immersion. But we also have a clever construction in this novel. Through a series of post-war interviews inserted at various points, we know who survives, and we know how the characters became involved in the Choir. So the tension is less about who will live and who will die amongst the characters we get to know, and much more about whether the Escape Line will succeed for the countless unnamed people secreted all over Rome. And of course there are deeper tensions about how human nature evolves during wartime. When faced with the complexities of war, what is courage? What’s the difference between courage and self-aggrandisement? As with all the best thrillers, I felt a bit breathless at some stages reading this book! And beware if you’re reading on the bus or the underground: it’s the kind of book that can make you miss your stop. I’m not really a genre person. I don’t terribly like labels. I find them unhelpful. Like other novels, the historical novel is, fundamentally, simply a story, as a spy story is simply a story. Even with fiction featuring real figures, as is the case with much historical fiction, fiction is, by definition, a product of the imagination. It’s just fiction. Returning to historical fiction, though, if we must use a label, at least that label is no longer pejorative, which is a good thing. People are now proud to be writers of historical fiction. Some of that pride has certainly to do with Hilary Mantel , not just what she wrote in the genre itself, but what she wrote about it, and also how she spoke about it, particularly in her Reith Lectures . If historical fiction needed its rehabilitation firmly stamped, Hilary Mantel was that stamp, moving the argument on from ‘isn’t historical fiction just a, usually misconceived, facsimile of the past?’ by showing how the writer of historical fiction actually works with the past—the nuts and bolts, as it were. It takes a lot of courage to write any kind of book, but to write historical fiction takes a different kind of courage because you are going to get a different kind of critique. As well as the usual gripes you open yourself up to the nitpicker and also the person who feels the need to say ‘I know it wasn’t like that’. If a novel isn’t labelled ‘historical fiction’ perhaps you don’t get quite so much stick for errors! Another reason, perhaps, for doing away with labels."

"First of all, this book—which is Kai Thomas’s first novel—is marvellously done, technically speaking. It’s stories-within-stories, a bit like Scheherazade . There are two women, one old, one young, telling each other stories and these stories and how they tell them are intrinsic to the book. It’s a brave construction, and very successful. The novel is set not on the Underground Railway by which Black people fleeing from slavery crossed the border into Canada, but in the free town established at the end of the Railway. We’re in the complicated world of individuals from different communities – the Black community, the Indigenous community, the Métis community – whose histories are rich and whose choices are complex. Everybody wants ‘freedom’ but freedom is more complicated than it sounds, as we learn through the aftermath of the shooting of a slave hunter by an old woman. In most novels, the propulsion is forward. In In the Upper Country , the energy is more flexible, flowing forwards and backwards, sweeping the reader along as if in the tide, never ceasing, but you’re not always sure exactly where you’ll find yourself. In other words, the experience of reading is more like sitting and listening to a storyteller, which is just as it should be given the construction of the book. But don’t misunderstand me. The stories aren’t random. Each story is a small revelation, so it’s like doing a jigsaw when you haven’t got the picture on the front of the box. You’re there, in this book, piecing it all together. Particularly for a first novel, In the Upper Country is very sure of itself and confidence is such a big thing in writing, particularly in a novel like this. If the author is confident, you feel carried along. Exactly. The author is saying: this way, no, this way. Come with me. It’ll be okay. So interesting that according to the blurb at the back of the book Kai Thomas is a carpenter. I wonder if that helps with putting a novel like this together, whether you think in a different way about what the finished artefact will look like, how it will work, what’s underneath the polished surface. I don’t know."

"Yes, Rose Tremain always offers the reader so much! Absolutely and Forever is the coming-of-age story of a girl, Marianne, from a well-to-do family—boarding school, tennis courts, ponies—who, aged 15, falls ‘absolutely and forever’ in love with a boy. It doesn’t work out. The story may not be unusual in itself but in Rose Tremain’s hands it’s so ‘funny, piercing, singular’, as one critic described it, that it turns into a small masterpiece. Marianne may be as naïve and guileless as girls of her age in the 1960s were, but her sense of herself completely bewitches the reader. And Rose Tremain keeps a tight hold of her story. The book is short and may, to some, seem slight, but every word, every detail, is carefully chosen. It’s a book you can read a second and a third time and still find new aspects to admire. Charming, and indeed sad, this isn’t a tragic book. Amongst other things, it’s a book about recognising what things actually are, which, and this is so bitter-sweet, Marianne never quite does with her ‘absolutely and forever’ love. Yes, it is. In I Capture the Castle , the girls’ lives are constrained by their education and upbringing. They dream, but they don’t really know what they’re dreaming about. I think we all remember—particularly women—dreams you’ve had and never wanted to abandon. Absolutely and Forever is a beautiful evocation of just that."

"There are a lot of different strands to this novel, one of which is secrets. But it’s also about memory and loss, and the stories we tell to ourselves and to others. Set in 1921 in the Straits Settlements of Penang, we have Somerset Maugham and his lover coming to stay with the Hamlyns: Robert Hamlyn, a lawyer, and his wife Lesley a society hostess. The visit is uneasy. Everybody has secrets, and Somerset Maugham was notoriously good at persuading people to share them, and then, barely disguising the characters, using the stories to his own authorial advantage. With great artistry, Tan Twan Eng shows us how the unravelling of secrets leads to other stories—and so, in The House of Doors , we have, through Lesley Hamlyn’s eyes, the story of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the revolutionary, the story of Ethel Proudlock, who shot a man and was charged with murder, and the secrets of Lesley herself. Stories within stories, and all told with what has been called the ‘reverse colonial gaze’. Yes, it’s a different angle. Brave! And Tan Twan Eng has a wonderful style, sharp and clear. Those painted doors! ‘They spun slowly in the air, like leaves spiralling in a gentle wind, forever falling, never to touch the earth.” It has. Given the apparent strictures on novelists, whether real or imagined – accusations of cultural appropriation, for example –there’s always the worry that writers might avoid writing about anything beyond themselves. Of course, we’ll never know how many historical novels will not be written because in the climate of culture wars people are nervous, but among the novels that have arrived I think there is a brightness, yes, a kind of optimism, and a determination to write about things in which the writer is interested, and in which writers feel readers will be interested. So that’s heartening, and I’m sure I can speak for my fellow Walter Scott Prize judges when I say that we’re already looking forward to next year."

"It’s a great story, isn’t it, and beautifully told. Maggie O’Farrell’s prose is smooth as silk. You can almost run your hand over it. But what readers experience is the top of the writerly iceberg, the visible peak below which, unseen by the reader, pulses the solid, confident and inventive technical skill of the true novelist. Look at how deftly Maggie O’Farrell deals with time. Back we go, and forward, but we’re never lost. And see how she ensures that Shakespeare’s wife and children are never overshadowed by their father. In less skilled hands, not naming Shakespeare would grate and fail. With Maggie O’Farrell, this not-naming seems effortless and natural. As we said in our judge’s quote, a bravura performance."

"No subdued reaction from the judges! Writing a book that closes a trilogy but also stands alone is in itself a challenge that defeats many, but that’s the least of what Hilary Mantel achieves. The Mirror and the Light isn’t just a miracle of imagination, with even the smallest character—Dick Purser, keeper of the guard dogs, Sexton the fool—completely vivid and memorable, it’s also a miracle of pace. We start with an ending—Anne Boleyn’s head has just been severed. Nobody does an execution like Hilary Mantel. If you haven’t already read A Place of Greater Safety , her French Revolution novel— —just see how she manages the executions of Desmoulins and Danton. In The Mirror and The Light , after this heart-stopping panorama, the pace slowly but inexorably increases as the complications of Cromwell’s ambitions and responsibilities multiply. We know what the end will be, but the tension, the tension!"

"Writing a novel about words is a tricky business, ripe for accusations of pretentiousness. How has a debut novelist managed? I think there’s only one phrase for it and that’s ‘with love’. Pip Williams writes with such love. The Dictionary of Lost Words is the kindest book you’re ever likely to read. But don’t mistake me. Pip Williams’s kindness isn’t of the sweetly insipid variety. Rigorous, full of insights and honesty, always avoiding the stereotype and the obvious ploy, we’re with a writer whose gentle authority touches places that flashier novels never quite reach (to coin a phrase). This isn’t luck. The Dictionary of Lost Words is as carefully constructed as the Oxford English Dictionary whose creation is the novel’s setting. Notice the way Pip Williams moves Esme’s story along, with just enough time to absorb but no dwelling where there’s no need to dwell. And Esme’s story is an important one. Lost words, usually women’s words, need to be found. In this novel we find them, and a great deal more besides."

"‘Highly anticipated’ is such a difficult phrase for authors! Stress levels are high, particularly when the author has decided, in effect, to turn history inside out. Kate Grenville has taken the bland letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of John Macarthur, the so-called ‘father of the [Australian] wool industry’, and read between the lines to give us an alternative story. And what a compelling tale she’s woven, of a canny, resourceful woman, not perfect by any means, but who, through her own efforts and ingenuity, is transformed from reluctant Australian immigrant, a victim of sorts, into a vigorous and successful matriarch. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter A Room Made of Leaves doesn’t shy away from the moral complexities of opportunity and exploitation of late eighteenth century colonialism, but Kate Grenville is one of those generous writers who leaves the reader to think for themselves. And that’s not all. I haven’t even mentioned her exploration of the nature of home, or of nature itself, both strong themes, or the mysteries of desire, or the quietly observed joy of a woman ‘breathing the sweet air of solitude’. Highly anticipated, and fulfils all its promise."

"Control of material, perfect pacing, absolute grasp of war’s absurdities as well as its tragedies—what’s not to admire! Steven Conte’s writing is direct and compelling—the chapter describing a forty-hour shift of operations on the wounded is a masterclass of relentless horror and humour. But The Tolstoy Estate is much more than just a war story and, indeed, much more than a triumph of writerly techniques, although the abrupt change of perspective in the middle really is a triumph. This novel is also a love story and, with most of the action taking place at Yasnaya Polyana, the former estate of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, it’s also a love-through-literature story. But now I come to think of it, the word ‘admire’ sounds as chilly as the Russian winter into which Conte pitches the reader. We did admire this novel—it’s absolutely admirable. But we loved it, too. I’m not sure. Even three swallows don’t make a summer. But if Pip Williams, Kate Grenville and Steven Conte set the standard, we can expect more literary treats to emerge from Australia in the years to come. Part of our best books of 2021 series."