Literary Fiction: these are the most stylishly written recent releases

I’ve been reading the following mainstream fiction recent releases (or new in the UK at least), focusing on which books are the best-written, i.e. pay most attention to prose style, and gave each a mark out of ten.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch 9

The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell 4

Every Rising Sun by Jamila Ahmed 2

Caret by Adam Mars-Jones 8

The Well of Saint Nobody by Neil Jordan 5

Bliss & Blunder by Victoria Gosling 4

Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue 4

The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright 6

The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks 6

Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain 7

The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut 8

North Woods by Daniel Mason 8

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff 7

The Variations by Patrick Langley 9

The Glutton by AK Blakemore 7

Here’s the opening to Prophet Song:

> The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window looking out onto the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whisper. Tired now, the day almost behind her, all that still has to be done before bed and the children settled in the living room, this feeling of rest for a moment by the glass. Watching the darkening garden and the wish to be at one with this darkness, to step outside and lie down with it, to lie with the fallen leaves and let the night pass over, to wake then with the dawn and rise renewed with the morning come. But the knocking. She hears it pass into thought, the sharp, insistent rapping, each knock possessed so fully of the knocker she begins to frown. Then Bailey too is knocking on the glass door to the kitchen, he calls out to her, Mam, pointing to the hallway without lifting his eyes from the screen. Eilish finds her body moving towards the hall with the baby in her arms, she opens the front door and two men are standing before the porch glass almost faceless in the dark. She turns on the porch light and the men are known in an instant from how they are stood, the night-cold air suspiring it seems as she slides open the patio door, the suburban quiet, the rain falling almost unspoken onto St Laurence Street, upon the black car parked in front of the house. How the men seem to carry the feeling of the night. She watches them from within her own protective feeling, the young man on the left is asking if her husband is home and there is something in the way he looks at her, the remote yet scrutinising eyes that make it seem as though he is trying to seize hold of something within her. In a blink she has sought up and down the street, seeing a lone walker with a dog under an umbrella, the willows nodding to the rain, the strobings of a large TV screen in the Zajacs’ house across the street. She checks herself then, almost laughing, this universal reflex of guilt when the police call to your door. Ben begins to squirm in her arms and the older plainclothesman to her right is watching the child, his face seems to soften and so she addresses herself to him. She knows he too is a father, such things are always known, that other fellow is much too young, too neat and hard-boned, she begins to speak aware of a sudden falter in her voice.

—————–
I’m not sure if linking to my criteria for ‘well-written prose’ is allowed by group rules, so I won’t do so. But here’s a sample:

>Expect a high tolerance for literary showing-off. Jean Toomer, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, mid-career Cormac McCarthy, Patricia Lockwood, Megan Abbott, James Ellroy, The Red Riding Quartet, The Vorrh Trilogy, William Gibson, Consider the Lobster, The War Against Cliché – none of these seem to us guilty of overwriting.

>You can also expect the picks to feature some mix of inventiveness, virtuosity, energy, authority, clarity, precision, concision, richness, tonal complexity, musicality, and that elusive quality generally known as charm or charisma.

>Expect less tolerance for sentences that feel too second-guessed, whose writers seem frightened at the prospect of seeming to show off, or of writing with a strong and clearly human voice. This kind of prose, the Replicant Voice, features frustratingly often in prize-nominated and rave-reviewed publications.

If stylish prose matters to you, do please let me know if I’ve missed any especially well-written recent lit fiction releases, and I’ll have a look at them. We prose snobs need to stick together…

by AnotherBlueRoseCase