The book I’vere commended most this year – and had the most enthusiastic feedback about – is Paul Murray’s tragicomedy, The Bee Sting. A leap forward from his previous novel, 2010’s Skippy Dies, this story of an Irish family’s tribulations told from four points of view wields perspective with flair, and combines freewheeling hilarity with savage irony, surprise reveals and generations-deep sadness.
There was a long-awaited return to fiction from 2013’s Booker winner Eleanor Catton. In , idealistic guerrilla gardeners in New Zealand run up against a ruthless billionaire. This is a propulsive, stylishly written thriller responding to the, which sets a gently comic portrait of 19th-century literary London, and a real-life trial that stirred up passionate emotions around class and identity, against harrowing testimony from a slave plantation. It links Jamaican and British history, and offers a timely, quizzical reflection of our current age of globalisation and hypocrisy. Nigerian-American author Teju Cole’s is deeply engaged with the horrors of colonialism, using autofiction for an up-to-the-minute study of how ideas around art, value and trauma are inflected by historical knowledge.
