Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl, 1989

The two linked stories included in The Shawl were not combined into a unitary edition until 1989, having both first appeared in The New Yorker earlier in the 1980s. The first story is ‘The Shawl’ which, in a mere two thousand highly succinct words, is calculated to deliver a short, sharp shock of the first order, describing the plight of Rosa Lublin, a Polish teenage mother and concentration camp inmate who witnesses the murder of her daughter Magda by a Nazi camp guard.

It might have been a self-contained if very bleak tale, had not Cynthia Ozick, a recognised American ‘lady of letters’, capped it with a more sympathetic but no less saddening portrait in the second story, ‘Rosa’. Now living in Miami, Florida, it is immediately clear Rosa lost more than her child that day fifty years before, there are aspects of herself that she has sadly also not been able to recover. With an internal life that is far richer than the actual life she lives out, Rosa writes letters to her late daughter, convincing herself that Magda has grown into a wise and worldly woman, while herself hiding this secret life from others by simply stating, more realistically, that thieves took her life. Like the shawl that once held Magda, memories of Magda herself seem to have become the shawl that Rosa uses to protect her permanently damaged psyche from the reality of a daughter and life stolen from her. There are tormented psychological depths here sketched out but to my mind not fully explored, instead going for a more distilled portrait of personal pain and inner despair, making it a book probably best approached with some trepidation.  PY

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Brian Aldiss, ed., A Science Fiction Omnibus, 2007

The best from Aldiss’s three patchy-but-famous Penguin Science Fiction anthologies from the early 1960s, plus ten or so new selections from the intervening years. Aldiss was the right man for the job then to further popularise SF, and this time around his editorial point again seems to fall in favour of diversity with slightly less regard for conventionality. There are a few that read less well today, as I’m sure Aldiss is aware; it’s interesting and strange how perception of a story can change while the words themselves never do. Not all the stories here are now worth the effort involved, but of those that are it was particularly good to read again James Blish’s ‘Common Time’, Ward Moore’s ‘Lot’, William Tenn’s ‘The Liberation of Earth’, and John Steinbeck’s ‘The Short-Short Story of Mankind’, a Cold War story worth keeping in print despite its scant relevance to science fiction. Best pick: Ted Chiang’s sublime and perfectly structured ‘Story of Your Life’, an SF tale with few equals from any era, because there is simply no other story here that comes close in either concept or execution.  PY

lê thi diem thúy, The gangster we are all looking for, 2003

The lives of Vietnamese boat people as immigrants to the cultural strangeness of the US, this largely autobiographical novel is sometimes stunningly lucid, as if lê is treating us to some faded super-8mm home movies with the sound turned off. Despite the simplicity of the story the sophistication of her writing is very evident and always elegant, somehow making this book both ordinary and extraordinary. Highly recommended.  PY

Sōseki Natsume, The 210th Day, 1915

Two old friends, Kei and Roku, decide to walk up Mount Aso, a rumbling volcano that is actively spitting out smoke and dust. It’s nothing more than a slightly mad and comic adventure, and one that offers no point other than to provide the lively exchanges of banter as they cajole each other into not chickening out. Sōseki was a giant of Japanese literature, in his time of the same stature as Dickens in England, and of his fourteen novels only a handful are currently in print in English of which this is an entirely new addition. The 210th Day is considered a rather slight work for him, being composed almost entirely of fast and snappy dialogue, but that’s also precisely why it’s so vital and engaging. Very enjoyable.  PY

Tim Winton, Blueback, 1997

In the waters of the reefs near his Queensland home, 10 year-old Abel Jackson encounters an old grouper, a creature that inspires his sense of wonder and who becomes a ‘friend’ he keeps returning to as he passes through school, university and out into the world as a marine biologist. Blueback is a pearl-like fable for kids and adults; Winton doesn’t put a foot wrong, and he pitches a well-aimed ecological message to wake people up to Australia’s natural heritage that is both taken for granted and casually endangered. A great place to start reading Tim Winton, it reminded me of Peter Benchley’s The Girl of the Sea of Cortez in its intent, only this is far better.  PY

Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, 2000

A good story set in 1970s China in the grip of Cultural Revolution, when Western books were banned because of their ‘decadence’. Two friends sent into the country for re-education by peasants come across a stash of translated French literature, and this informs their relationship with a young seamstress who becomes enchanted by the words of Balzac. Good fun and spirited, with the kind of slightly cynical tone you would expect the telling of such a tale to have, and the film version which Dai also directed supplies some excellent visual richness. Recommended.  PY

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949

It’s getting harder to believe there was once a time when Nineteen Eighty-Four was just a useful piece of socialist political science fiction, a somewhat far-fetched thought experiment though clearly a proverbial canary in the coal mine to the British political intelligentsia. Instead the intervening years have seen us brought considerably closer to too many aspects of Eric Blair’s vision, particularly with respect to surveillance in the UK and the conduct of political hypocrisies on a global scale. As a warning Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to serve the Western world very well indeed, and one wishes Russian and Chinese literature could have come up with equally potent fables of their own that would have had a similarly enlightening effect on their own populations and a restraining effect on their leaders: the intervening sixty years since it was written have often resonated with sentences and passages from this book that could be read as historical fact in parts of the world – the excesses of Russian and Chinese communism particularly, the former which Orwell feared English Socialism had a real danger of resembling – or echoes of the world’s present nervous condition, in which realities are habitually fabricated for entire populations in a way that would horrify our ancestors. Necessarily (and thankfully) extreme, it has inevitably become one of the defining books of the twentieth century, and with the invention of Newspeak has also made a useful and indelible stamp on the English language and conceptual thought everywhere. Doubleplusgood.  PY

Michael Chabon, The Final Solution, 2005

In 1944 a silent German boy arrives in Sussex as a refugee, with a talkative African Grey parrot on his shoulder. The parrot goes missing, a murder ensues and a veteran detective comes out of retirement. The influence of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories is clearly there above and beyond the usual trappings of mystery fiction, and the story also functions as a self-contained microcosm the same way that Agatha Christie’s ‘Miss Marple’ stories do, in that by knowing the ways of her village she knows the ways of the world; similarly, over the years the detective has developed an almost extrasensory intuition about people’s unseen behavioural patterns, and also seems to know what is in the air by the temperament of the bees he keeps. Michael Chabon, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, writes with an extraordinary confidence in his own words that could almost convince you he’d spent time back in that era, and he quickly gets to the weary soul of the elderly detective, necessary for the reader to see how the detective himself gets to the heart of the matter. Impressive.  PY

Michael Kimball, How Much Of Us There Was, 2005

A challenging yet brave book because of the specific absence of any life-affirming sentimentality. The story of a grandfather whose wife is going through her days of hospitalisation and dying leading up to her funeral and the grieving days beyond, How Much Of Us There Was is unusual in that it’s an account of a very ordinary and unremarkable death, the kind that is around us every day, and Kimball describes the internal effect it has on the bereaved. The word to define this book is ‘closeness’: the first-person telling provides immediate and often unsentimental detail, and the reader is brought uncomfortably close to a private grief, such that I was grateful for the equally strong presence of love that acts as a counterbalance. There is comfort here but it is often hard to separate from the anguish, much as one would find at this stage of life itself.  PY

Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World, 1986

In post-war Japan, the successful artist Masuji Ono was a man who once played a small part in the rise of Japanese militarism, but years later, with a more contrite political climate and a daughter looking for an approving husband, he believes that what the Japanese are referring to as ‘the past’ is now casting a shadow over the present. The pivotal events on which this book turns are small, but in those microcosms the receding background of the damaged psyche of an entire nation becomes apparent. Plotwise there is little more to this story, but each page reads like an incremental tightening of the noose as Ono, a rather vain but upright man, believes he must head off the consequences of his past actions as his daughter’s marriage prospects become paramount. With some marvellous and sensitive conversational sequences, this is a masterfully delicate and closely observed book. Recommended.   PY

•  An Artist of the Floating World was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize, and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for the same year.

Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams, 1993

Einstein’s Dreams is a useful work to see how odd scientific notions can be embedded in the everyday. Lightman tries to get into the head of Einstein, as the latter entertains a series of ideas about time while tying in some detail of 1930s Europe around him: here, time is either running backwards, in circles, slower, faster, ad infinitum... and peoples lives are altered accordingly. This book’s construction is fairly simple, but the rather repetitive nature of the writing means it could have included any number of observations which make for a highly impressionistic composition. Nevertheless, it’s good to know that noted physicists such as Lightman can write – and think – like this.  PY

•  Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller and has been translated into thirty languages. It was runner up for the 1994 PEN New England / Boston Globe Winship Award, and was also a selection for NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” Book Club. The novel is one of the mostly widely used texts in American colleges today.

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Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, 1966

Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, has had his intelligence experimentally enhanced to such a degree that he becomes ostracised and emotionally remote, unnerving even the scientists who created his vastly superior mental abilities. Then Algernon, the intelligent mouse who served as the prototype for his experiment, prematurely dies and Charlie must face the possibility that his redemption was only temporary.

Daniel Keyes crafted an exceptionally insightful and readable book, one that succeeds in just about everything it sets out to do while exploring most of the philosophical avenues aswell. It’s also noticeable how Keyes can look into the hearts of his characters to show just how inescapably fallible they all are, no matter how great or small their intellectual achievements. A book that’s never superficial, A perfect example of how science fiction doesn’t need any science in order to tell its most humane stories.   PY

Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story, 1991

A Dutch teacher and classical scholar goes to sleep in Amsterdam and inexplicably wakes up the next morning in Portugal, in a hotel bed in which twenty years before he slept with another man’s wife. But this Kafka-esque premise goes in a very sardonic direction and is delivered with a sharply observant humour, as the protagonist roams back and forth in his life seemingly searching for clues. The Following Story covers a lot of ground in its brief 97 pages but there seems to be no place at which you can say with certainty “ah, so that’s what the author is getting at” as it is constantly moving on to the next thing, never chronologically, but evidently with Nooteboom’s own sequential thought processes, perhaps making it an analysis of fulfillment by taking the reader through a game of join-the-dots in prose – one in which if you haven’t arrived at a clear picture by the end, makes you want to start again for another try. Very enjoyable, despite Nooteboom’s habit of disorienting the reader, which almost seems wreckless at times.   PY

Paul Smaïl, Smile, 1997

Life as see through the eyes of a Parisian of Moroccan origin, though somehow filtered through Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. This was a big hit when first published in France, its heavily autobiographical content showing Smaïl continually trying to escape the perceived stereotype of the crooked North African immigrant. His string of McJobs takes him from being a nightwatchman in a Paris whorehouse to pizza delivery boy to a thoroughly patronised bookstore clerk, writing Smile as he goes, knowingly amateur but likeable all the way. Recommended.   PY

Rigoberta Menchú & Dante Liano, The Girl from Chimel, 2000

Rigoberta Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work on the human rights of indigenous peoples, and here she combines her family history with an illumination of ancient Mayan fables. These short tales have a gentle simplicity as seen through childhood eyes, capturing the innocence of her rural life before Guatemala descended into its 36-year civil war. A brief but refreshingly positive read.   PY