Michael Frayn, A Very Private Life, 1968

Though it depicts a future dystopia, A Very Private Life is actually less a science fiction novel and more a futurist fairy tale. The young female protagonist Uncumber lives in a sterile underground world in which personal privacy is paramount, being a cultural reaction against the invasions of privacy that began in the 20th century. Emotions must be drug-induced to be acceptable, babies are made at the factory when you provide the ingredients, and dark glasses are the only item of clothing because they help keep your feelings to yourself. But, being a bit of a rebel, Uncumber looks for something more tactile and goes on her way to the outside world in search of Noli, a surface-living man she accidentally encountered on her holovision TV. He turns out to be a selfish low class polygamist among other things, and her situation get worse from there. As an allegory for the dangers of withdrawal from the world A Very Private Life works well but the story never really comes alive as anything other than a mild comedy of manners. Yes, life is always far more complex than we can perceive from a naïve standpoint, but that observation seems self-evident from the beginning and the development of this theme never really moves beyond second gear.  PY

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Paul Auster, Man in the Dark, 2008

August Brill, an insomniac and retired book critic, composes in his head a story of a parallel America to fill the early morning hours. It’s a world in which 9/11 never happened and the US never went into Iraq (instead being preoccupied by the bigger nightmare of a secessionist civil war), and it’s a world in which he himself plays a remote but defining role. The science fictional element can’t be ignored but for the book to work in the way Auster probably intended, it ought to be (and of course others have done this particular kind of parallel world thing so much better). It’s just August Brill’s particular distraction, while his real preoccupation is his fractured family, defined by divorces and the violent death of his granddaughter Katya’s boyfriend in Iraq. Another sizeable part of the book is taken up with August and Katya’s eloquent discussions of movies – another deliberate distraction. If not set in darkened rooms or out in the night, most of this book takes place at least with a dark aura of regret and atonement, with everyone wishing to be somewhere else, and the distractions are coping mechanisms that help them occasionally look away from painful truths. I wouldn’t say this a brilliant book by any stretch of the imagination – the parallel world thread isn’t rigorous enough, for one thing – but I like the fact it’s not burdened by too much structure, feeling loose and improvised instead even though Auster clearly knew where he was going with it. It’s also a book that offers up many of the wisdoms of hindsight, and is all the better for that.  PY

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Paul Auster, Timbuktu, 1999

Mr. Bones is the canine companion of homeless Willy G. Christmas, the rather unhinged son of some Polish immigrants to New York and someone whose dreams exist far beyond the reach of his abilities. Timbuktu is a small marvel of empathetic writing: Auster puts the reader right inside Mr. Bones head and, anthropomorphism notwithstanding, you see the world through his senses, filtered through his panicky and slightly desperate nature as well as his unswerving devotion to the humans who show him love when he needs it. John Berger later did a similar thing with King – viewing homelessness through the eyes of a dog – and although this may not be a typical Auster novel it’s still a very rewarding distraction.  PY

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Julia Leigh, The Hunter, 1999

This debut was a very different animal to her later Disquiet. An unnamed man has been sent by a biotech firm to retrieve the DNA of the last Tasmanian tiger, a carnivorous marsupial now believed extinct in the twentieth century. This man is only one link in a chain and we don’t see any distance beyond the job he’s doing, so what’s noticeable are the areas that Leigh doesn’t explore such as the purpose to which this DNA might be put, or the immorality of hunting down the last of a species. Instead we get a straight-ahead story of survival as the man lays traps in the forest by day and sleeping rough at night, while also suffering the awkward negotiations of the bereaved family with whom he stays at weekends. Leigh was picked by the Observer as one of the twenty-one writers to watch in the new millennium and this was certainly a confident debut, though not as directly allegorical as I was expecting, or hoping for. However it does resonate with unanswered questions that invite further thought on her technique, ie. of what she chose to leave out and why. This was not an “extremely disturbing” read as one blurb quote puts it – far from it, unless I’m missing something glaringly obvious – but it was at least rather unsettling.  PY

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Julia Leigh, Disquiet, 2008

Fleeing a violent marriage in Australia, Olivia returns to her mother and childhood château in France with her two young children and a broken arm. By coincidence her brother arrives with his wife and newborn child, along with a tragic secret that will turn them into a family in extremis. Just two books into her career and Simon Schama is already calling Julia Leigh “one of the greatest living writers”. Before beginning Disquiet I was sceptical about this accolade, but I had to admit just fifty pages in that I admired enormously her distilled method that cuts out an enormous amount of in-between and focuses on tight prose that makes the family tension palpable, bleeding out in a long string of tense and, yes, exquisitely described interpersonal moments. There is much left unspoken in this rather gothic, present-day novella and Leigh doesn’t waste words, so as an example of how less is more this comes highly recommended.  PY

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Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases, 2007

It must have been heartbreaking all over again for the Argentine mothers of the Disappeared to end their protests back in 2006. There are inevitably several non-fiction works available on this dark period of Argentina’s history but little in the form of fiction other than The Ministry of Special Cases. It must be among the best there is, in English at least, as the focus is on one family as it is torn apart by the casual cruelties of a paranoid government. Kaddish Poznan is a family man in 1976 Buenos Aires, an aimless outsider by day but, with the political climate as uncertain as it is, by night he has created for himself the unusual job of erasing the family names of his hijo de puta clients from their headstones in the city’s forgotten Jewish cemetery. There’s a military coup on the horizon and worse in the shape of the Dirty War, and when Poznan’s teenage son enters that catalogue of the Disappeared he can only appeal to the strange labyrinthine bureaucracy that is the Ministry of Special Cases for any semblance of justice.

This debut novel has a masterfully burlesque yet confident beginning, necessary to establish Poznan’s colourful family history and the range of experiences that brought Buenos Aires its arm of the Jewish diaspora, but this quickly settles down as Poznan’s small family is revealed to be a typically ordinary one. Unexpectedly, and despite the seriousness of the subject, Englander finds plenty of opportunity for black humour (mostly revolving around plastic surgery), but he also explores many serious themes via a cast of shadowy characters, the impenetrable web of government lies and the absolute need for hope in a hopeless situation. This is obviously a broader subject than just being purely a Jewish experience therefore in some way it’s fortunate that Englander doesn’t consider himself to be a ‘Jewish’ writer, but it’s all too easy to see how this novel was his labour of love, eight years in the writing, and it deserves to be considered a triumph. He pulls you around by the heartstrings with a drama that reads easily but is always engaging, and his main problem must have been how to end the story of an unending nightmare. He handles it rather well if perhaps, inevitably, a little inconclusively, but this still comes highly recommended.  PY

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Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland, 1998

By the end of his eight-year rule in 1979 Amin was established in the British media as both a perplexingly charismatic figure of ridicule, and an inept and dangerous dictator with the blood of half a million Ugandans on his hands. Out of necessity Foden first had to focus on what made Amin so personable and hypnotic a character, after which he gradually takes the reader across a very distinct line into Amin’s dark side as his personal physician Nicholas Garrigan learns the truth (the hard way) about Amin’s excesses and abuses. The truth of the real Amin’s relationship with those he employed was probably somewhat different as he was both intimidated and threatened when surrounded by people of greater intellect than himself, though at the same time he was scarcely able to exercise restraint when keeping a personal stranglehold on power. Foden has also threaded his story around real events by weaving in several fictional news cuttings amongst the facts and maybe has added too much sparkle to Amin’s character, but for the most part it’s convincing, often drawing as much on the Ugandan landscape as on Amin himself, and the result is an engagingly audacious read. I expect even Amin himself would have approved.   PY

•  The Last King of Scotland was the winner of the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award.

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Keith Ridgway, Horses, 1997

This novella first appeared in the anthology First Fictions 13, though following on from the acclaim for his first full length novel, The Long Falling, it then gained its own edition. Set in Ireland, it’s a story of arson, attempted murder, grief, revenge and death, all set on a dark and stormy night somewhere south of Dublin, and it has atmosphere in spades. Ridgway is also strong on writing about motive for his characters, though those motives are often hidden even to the characters themselves, such are the impulsive behaviours that combine to make an unpredictable story of small tragedies writ large: while some are letting their worst sides show, others are trying to hold it all together. The ending is all there, but left in pieces for the reader to assemble. A taut and well written story, one that draws you in and holds your attention completely.  PY

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Banana Yoshimoto, Hardboiled / Hard Luck, 1999

Two novellas that explore how two slightly unconventional Japanese women react to situations after people close to them have died, the first discovering how her awareness of the spiritual world has opened up, the second discovering how the circumstances of her late sister’s life has now given her own a new direction. Yoshimoto focuses on seemingly irrevelant details that at first make the stories feel too mundane until their importance to the development of the story is revealed. The first tale is quietly unsettling, the second an understated gem of quiet observation.  PY

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Xiaolu Guo, UFO in her Eyes, 2009

Guo’s debut in English Village of Stone was a slow-burning but ultimately great read, so this one is a must-see. Despite the title her concerns aren’t in the least science fictional and the UFO is merely a McGuffin for some Chinese government officials investigating the sighting, something that sets off all the subsequent events. This is a crossover story in a number of ways: what we have in book form has been modelled as a lively film script, a format Guo-the-filmmaker clearly wants to do as a book in its own right; meanwhile Guo-the-author is bringing a couple of predominantly Western cultural facets (UFOs and 9/11) and shoehorning them into her own unsuspecting culture, a near-future rural China, with the result of rapid and mostly unnecessary development that changes the face of a town while leaving its people behind. It’s a beautifully produced book that's typographically inventive with plenty of stuff that makes the pages turn fast, but I found as a whole the story lacks much substance; by the end one is asking what has everyone achieved apart from putting the small town of Silver Hill a little more prominently on the 21st Century Chinese cultural map. The multiple viewpoints work well together with much wit and profanity (but again, at the expense of characterisation); the interview format for the entire book is original but it’s a novel that doesn’t do much more than scratch at some surfaces despite some clearly referenced gender and class issues: the novel is meant to be fun, and is.  PY

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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.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 2005

Perhaps a book best approached with as little foreknowledge of its theme as possible, Never Let Me Go’s narrator, Kathy, at first brings you deep into her everyday life as a modern day schoolgirl, though it’s only after a couple of chapters that you begin to notice the absence of... certain essentials. The subtle hint of unease that pervades the book is captured well in one early scene, and from there the reader’s perception is given small seismic shifts by the revelations held in small incidents. Kathy’s ordinaryness contrasts with the extraordinarily cruelty of her existence; she and her friends Ruth and Tommy twine around each other and interconnect like strands of a triple helix, always looking back because they have no future, a situation that a more traditional science fictional rendition would probably have had them rebelling against. This is a linear book that rarely reveals the turns up ahead, and is all the more observant and unusual in its restraint because of Ishiguro’s controlled avoidance of dramatic distractions. Excellent.   PY

•  Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and received a 2006 Alex Award.

Junot Díaz, Drown, 1997

With the release of his first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao there’s a buzz about Junot Díaz, and Drown is an impressive themed collection of shorts on growing up in the Dominican Republic followed by life as a New York immigrant, and the high expectations I had of this collection were largely met; most of the stories are narrated by Yunior and focus on individuals in his family at the expense of himself, and I suspect there’s a heavy autobiographical thread running through them. The writing is for the most part crystal clear and sophisticated, observant and considerably streetwise; to Díaz language is everything and he consciously uses it to illuminate character and impart detail and a sense of place with brilliant effect. Highly recommended.   PY