From a Rumi biography to the long-awaited translation of a Mexican masterpiece, these should sit on your shelf next year, writes Jane Ciabattari.
Brad Gooch, Rumi’s Secret
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, the medieval Persian poet and Sufi master, is known for his six-book spiritual epic The Masnavi and thousands of other ecstatic poems. In his panoramic biography, Gooch traces Rumi’s steps from Vakhsh, in present day Tajikistan, where he was born in 1207, to Samarkand and to Syria, where Rumi studied at Damascus and Aleppo in his 20s, and to Konya, in Turkey, where Rumi spent the last 50 years of his life. He makes vivid the turmoil of the times – the sieges of Genghis Khan – and the upheaval when Rumi, a traditional Muslim preacher and scholar, met the wandering mystic Shams of Tabriz in 1244. Rumi’s outpouring of poetry began when Shams disappeared three years later. The secret? Gooch translates thus: “Explanations make many things clear/but only love is clear in silence.” (Credit: Harper)
Sheila Kohler, Once We Were Sisters
South African-born novelist Kohler digs into her past for a searing and intimate memoir about love turned deadly. It’s a personal story that has inspired her fiction, including her novels Becoming Jane Eyre and Love Child. She and her sister Maxine were raised on an estate in Johannesburg until her father’s death, then sent to boarding school. Both married and became mothers at a young age. Kohler moved to Paris, then the US; Maxine stayed in South Africa. Kohler sensed her sister’s marriage was difficult. But she was shocked by Maxine’s death in her late 30s when her husband ran the car off the road. When she tried to investigate, she was discouraged by her family. Her powerful story gives a sharp contrast between a sister’s lasting love and the ways society protects a violent man. (Credit: Penguin)
Juan Rulfo, The Golden Cockerel and Other Writings
Mexican master Rulfo’s innovative 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, which influenced Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, has been credited with ushering in ‘the Latin American Boom’ in literature during the 1960s and ‘70s. The Golden Cockerel, Rulfo’s second novel, was originally written in the 1950s as a film script with Marquez and Carlos Fuentes. Rulfo sets his story in the cockfighting rings, cantinas and gambling halls of post-Revolutionary central Mexico. The novel portrays village life as a combination of hardship and celebration. This first English translation by Douglas J Weatherford is being published in collaboration with the Juan Rulfo Foundation in Mexico to honour the 100th anniversary of Rulfo’s birth and kick off a series of international events to reintroduce Rulfo to readers. (Credit: Deep Vellum)
Roxane Gay, Difficult Women
Gay brings the powerful voice that flows through her work as a novelist and cultural critic to the 21 short stories in her first collection. Some explore the intimate process of pushing through fear and pain to survival to strength. In I Will Follow You, she writes of two sisters who endure unspeakable abuse in childhood and how they protect each other as adults; in I am a Knife, of a woman whose losses sharpen her. Other stories delve into the nuances of sexual attraction and vulnerability: in La Negra Blanca a mixed-race student putting herself through university as a stripper finds herself the target of a stalker. Gay’s “difficult women” are unforgettable. (Grove Press)
Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
From the Man Booker shortlisted author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist comes a spare novel that speaks to a current global crisis, a “time of migration”. In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, civil war descends. Nadia and Saeed meet as students; violence speeds up their relationship. His mother is killed, Nadia moves into Saeed’s home. His father asks her to see him to safety. They join other refugees, paying for access to mysterious “doors” to safer places. Through one door they arrive on a beach in Mykonos; through another, a London mansion. The accumulation of refugees brings the city to chaos. When Nadia suggests they try a new door, to the city of Marin on the Pacific Coast, a melancholy Saeed agrees. Hamid’s new novel is raw, poetic, and frighteningly prescient. (Credit: Riverhead)
Cara Hoffman, Running
Hoffman’s dark and dynamic new novel is set in Athens in 1988. Three young rebels – Bridey, Jasper and Milo – share the crumbling top floor of a falling-down hotel in the red light district. They get their rooms free and a small fee working as ‘runners’, luring tourists to the low-rent hotel. It seems a carefree life, but there are downsides: robberies, beatings, hunger. When Irish-born Declan moves in, it becomes clear he’s trained to kill. “Fearing Declan was like fearing the air,” Bridey muses. Hoffman unwinds her precisely calibrated plot through shifting narratives – Bridey in the 1980s, Milo in the present day – resulting in an unsettling and scintillating novel. (Credit: Simon & Schuster)
Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible
Key characters mentioned in Strout’s best-selling novel My Name Is Lucy Barton are central to this companion novel-in-stories set in Lucy’s hometown, Amgash, Illinois. There’s Tommy, the high school janitor, who senses Lucy’s vulnerability and revels in her later success as a writer. Some of Lucy’s classmates stay (one becomes a guidance counselor). Others move on – Carol, who was mean to her, shows up at her book signing in Houston to say she’s “proud”. Seventeen years after leaving home, Lucy comes back to Amgash for an impromptu visit to brother Paul and her sister Vicky – an afternoon that leaves all three siblings shaken. Strout’s clear-sighted, deft stories are shot through with unexpected moments of truth. (Credit: Random House)
Richard Ford, Between Them
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Ford offers remembrances of his father and mother in this elegantly written and thoughtful memoir. He recalls his father Parker, a traveling salesman with a “leaning-forward sweetness”, and his mother, pretty, lively, irreverent Edna, who was on the road with his dad for 15 years, until she became pregnant with their only child. Parker has his first heart attack at 43, and is gone by the time Ford is in his teens, leaving the son to speculate that he’d never become a writer had his father survived and shaped his life. “I was one person, raised by two very different people,” he writes, “each with a separate perspective to impress upon me…” It’s a wistful, wise and loving portrait. (Credit: Ecco)
Min Jin Lee, Pachinko
This immersive novel follows four generations of a Korean family from 1910, when Japan annexed Korea, through most of the 20th Century. An aging fisherman and his wife run a boarding house in a village near the port city of Busan. Their only surviving son, who has a cleft palate and twisted foot, is married at last. When his teenage daughter Sunja becomes pregnant by a visiting businessman, a kind pastor marries her and takes her to Osaka. After he dies, Sunja’s grit and hard work keep the family afloat during the tough war years. Her elder son makes it into Waseda University. Her younger son thrives by running pachinko parlours, where gamblers play machines in a game similar to pinball. But their future is shadowed by past secrets and betrayals. (Credit: Grand Central)
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (The Sympathizer) sets most of the stories in his first collection in the Vietnamese immigrant communities in California. A ghost writer brutalized during her family’s escape from Vietnam by boat is visited by the spectre of the brother who tried to protect her. A schoolboy whose parents run the New Saigon Market in San Jose witnesses his mother’s struggle to put the past behind her. A professor and his wife who made it to safety by boat decades earlier are caught in a web of confusion as she realizes his mind is wandering – he calls her by another woman’s name – while he writes in his journal, “she may not know who she is anymore.” Nguyen’s characters are haunted by the past, struggling to envision a future. (Credit: Grove Press)
■The 10 best books of 2016
From novels spanning centuries to a history of existentialism, Jane Ciabattari chooses the best titles the year had to offer.
10. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
“Separated sisters,” Gyasi writes, “are like a woman and her reflection doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.” In her artfully written first novel, Gyasi follows two half-sisters born of the same mother on Africa’s Gold Coast. Effia, who is born in 1744 in Fanteland, marries the British governor of Cape Coast Castle; her son Quey is educated in England. Her sister Esi, the daughter of an Asante leader, survives the horrors of the castle’s slave dungeon and the Middle Passage. Esi’s daughter Ness ends up on an Alabama plantation. Gyasi creates an unforgettable cast of characters as she follows seven generations of this family through the dislocations and continuing repercussions of slavery on both continents. (Credit: Knopf)
9. Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café
Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Raymond Aron drink apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse in Paris in 1933. Aron is excited about phenomenology, a new concept coming out of Berlin. “If you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” he says. Thus begins Bakewell’s idiosyncratic At the Existentialist Café, a book as refreshingly original as her award-winning How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. She tracks the growth of Existentialism through the work of Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and others, and shows how its emphasis on authenticity and freedom are relevant today. (Credit: Other Press)
8. Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
Shirley Jackson was best known for literary suspense in the tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and Henry James. Her 1948 story The Lottery is a horror classic, as are her novels The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). But Jackson’s unique contribution, writes Franklin, was “her primary focus” on the lives of her generation of women who were raised in the mid 20th Century. Franklin tracks Jackson’s mythmaking life from her girlhood in a northern Californian suburb through her marriage to literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, with whom she had four children. They met at Syracuse University, where he began a lifetime of infidelities. “Their sometimes tortured intimacy reverberates seismically through her work,” writes Franklin, who gives equal weight to Jackson’s life and work in this groundbreaking new biography. (Credit: Liveright)
7. Liz Moore, The Unseen World
The intellectual excitement of the dawning computer era is the backdrop to Moore’s story of Ada Sibelius and her single dad David, who heads a computer science lab at a prestigious Boston university. Ada is homeschooled by her dad, and by age 12, she is working with him and his team on an early virtual reality program called Elixir. When David’s mind begins to unravel from Alzheimer’s, his colleague Diana becomes Ada’s guardian. As Diana sorts out legal issues, she discovers that David is not who he has said he is. Ada grows up to be a pioneering computer scientist herself. Haunted by her father’s past, she searches his origins, following clues in his hidden computer file. Moore captures the powerful ties between father and daughter as she unspools a string of compelling scientific and personal mysteries. (Credit: Norton)
6. Ben H Winters, Underground Airlines
Winters’ timely new work of speculative fiction is set in an alternative US: Lincoln never became president, the Civil War never happened, and there are still slaves in the certain states. His narrator is a 40-year-old former slave, free since he was 14, who works as a slave hunter – a clandestine operative for the US Marshall service. He investigates a team of northerners who work on the Underground Airlines – “grabbing people up and hustling them to freedom”. He remains free as long as he pursues his job as a bounty hunter. On the trail of a runaway called Jackdaw, he is challenged to his core. Winters, an Edgar award winner, has crafted a fast-moving thriller with a contemporary ethical framework. (Credit: Mulholland Books)
5. Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things
Cole shows a breathtaking range in his splendid new collection of 55 essays. He begins with pilgrimages to Leukerbad in Switzerland, where James Baldwin wrote his 1953 essay Stranger in the Village about being black in an all-white village, and to WG Sebald’s grave at St Andrew’s church in Framingham Earl in the UK: “There he is… the teacher I never knew.” He writes of President Obama, Boko Haram, Virginia Woolf, how Google Earth is changing art and the “white saviour industrial complex”. Cole, who was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, raised in Lagos and teaches at Bard College in New York, is the photography critic for The New York Times Magazine and a frequent contributor to The Guardian and The New Yorker. His cultural criticism is filled with surprising connections and intelligent provocations. (Credit: Random House)
4. Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone
Imagine Me Gone is a powerful story of loss and love. Margaret, a recent Smith College graduate, moves to London in the 1960s and marries John, a reserved and troubled British man whose mind, she learns, “goes into a sort of hibernation” at times, requiring a hospital stay. Haslett follows the arc of their family, as he traces how John’s eventual suicide affects Margaret and each of their three children over several decades. Their youngest son Alec becomes a control freak. Celia, the responsible one, moves to California, marries and has a child. They both worry about the oldest, Michael, who inherits the mental illness his father calls “the beast”. We’ve come to know intimately the joys and struggles of each member of this troubled family by its heart-wrenching conclusion. (Credit: Little, Brown)
3. Ann Patchett, Commonwealth
Patchett, winner of the 2001 Orange Prize for Bel Canto, opens her brilliantly structured new novel with a christening party for Fix and Beverly Keating’s second daughter, Franny. An uninvited guest – a Los Angeles deputy district attorney named Bert Cousins – shows up with a bottle of gin. Within hours, he has kissed Beverly. Patchett follows the consequences of this impulsive act over half a century, as two marriages end, and six children are left adrift, shuttling among parents. The children share a tragic secret, a summer adventure leads to one boy’s death. In her twenties, Franny shares this story with her lover, an award-winning author who uses it to write a novel that becomes a film. Betrayals and forgiveness are at the centre of this complex and memorable family drama. (Credit: Harper)
2. CE Morgan, The Sport of Kings
Morgan’s ambitious and epic tale of a racehorse bred to win the Triple Crown of elite US thoroughbred contests spans several centuries. Hard-bitten Henry Forge is descended from a man who settled Forge Run Farm in Kentucky after traveling through the Cumberland Gap from Virginia with a slave and a Naragansett Pacer he’d raised from a colt. Henry and his daughter Henrietta pin their hopes on Hellsmouth, an aptly named temperamental filly. They hire Allmon Shaughnessey, a young black man with a knack for taming skittish champions, to help them. Morgan’s scope is Faulknerian, her language hypnotic as she immerses us in the stories of these three characters, and the legacies and passions that overwhelm them. The finale of this Kirkus Prize winner is breathtaking and tragic. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
1. Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others
Spiotta raises questions about truth, reality and how the digital world is affecting us all in her mesmerising new novel. Meadow, who claims as a teenager to have had a months-long tryst with Orson Welles, and her best friend Carrie are raised in the shadow of Hollywood. Both become film-makers. Meadow’s first film, an eight-hour video of her boyfriend, wins a jury prize, and she draws further acclaim for a 1992 documentary called Kent State: Recovered. Carrie creates features with a genre twist, and her comedies win Golden Globe nominations. Meadow’s penchant for documenting ambiguity and raw emotion draws her into telling the story of Jelly, a woman who seduces powerful men through phone conversations. Mid-career, Meadow stops making films – and only Carrie knows why. An innovative and provocative stunner. (Credit: Scribner)
/ by Copyright © 2017 BBC. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites