Edna O’Brien on her sofa, Joseph O’Connor in his garden, Seamus Heaney surrounded by books … British photographer Steve Pyke on capturing the greats of Irish literature
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© Photograph: Steve Pyke
© Photograph: Steve Pyke
© Photograph: Steve Pyke
The author of The Employees goes back to 17th-century Denmark for an intensely poetic portrait of everyday sorcery and female solidarity
On 26 June 1621, in Copenhagen, a woman was beheaded – which was unusual, but only in the manner of her death. According to one historian, during the years 1617 to 1625, in Denmark a “witch” was burned every five days. The first time this happens in Danish author Olga Ravn’s fourth novel, the condemned woman is “tied to the ladder, and the ladder pushed into the bonfire”. Her daughter watches as she falls, her eye “so strangely orange from within. And then in the heat it explodes.”
The child is watched, in turn, by a wax doll who sees everything: everything in this scene, and everything everywhere, through all space and all the time since it was fashioned. It sees the worms burrowing through the soil in which it is buried; the streets of the world in which it was made. It inhabits the bodies that walked those streets: “And I was in the king’s ear, and I was in the king’s mouth, and I was in the king’s loose tooth and in the quicksilver of his liver, and did hear.”
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© Photograph: Marie Hald/The Observer
© Photograph: Marie Hald/The Observer
© Photograph: Marie Hald/The Observer
As the author publishes a new story collection, we rate the work that made his name – from his dazzling Booker winner to an account of the 2022 attack that nearly killed him
“It makes me want to hide behind the furniture,” Rushdie now says of his debut. It’s a science fiction story, more or less, but also indicative of the sort of writer Rushdie would become: garrulous, playful, energetic. The tale of an immortal Indian who travels to a mysterious island, it’s messy but charming, and the sense of writing as performance is already here. (Rushdie’s first choice of career was acting, and he honed his skill in snappy lines when working in an advertising agency.) Not a great book, but one that shows a great writer finding his voice, and a fascinating beginning to a stellar career.
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© Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images
© Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images
© Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images
A student navigates troubled relationships at age 19 and 25, as he comes to terms with mental health difficulties
“The best way to make sense of life,” Derek Owusu believes, “is to write about it.” His semi-autobiographical debut, That Reminds Me, was an attempt to understand how he came to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder: a condition marked, among other things, by intense emotions, self-destructive impulses, fear of abandonment, black-and-white thinking, and an unstable sense of self. The novel, written in an elliptical and densely poetic style, offered an illuminating, if harrowing, account of alienation, addiction and self-harm, through the story of K, an alter ego whose early childhood, like Owusu’s, was spent in foster care. It won Owusu the Desmond Elliott prize in 2020, and announced him as an idiosyncratic talent; in 2023, he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.
Owusu now turns again to the subject of BPD, this time exploring the complexities and contradictions of living with the condition. His narrator, Marcus, is 25 when the book opens. An English literature student of Ghanaian heritage, he is at a speed dating event when he meets San. San is strikingly beautiful, and she grabs his attention right away: “So, yes, I was in love again, losing balance, stumbling towards an earlier phase of my life.”
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© Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
© Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
© Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
Toxic male behaviour of David Szalay’s protagonist reflects real-world concerns about a ‘crisis of masculinity’
In the immediate aftermath of David Szalay’s book Flesh winning the Booker prize, one feature of the novel stood out: how often the protagonist utters the word “OK”.
The 500 times István grunts out the response is part of a sparse prose style through which the British-Hungarian Szalay gives the reader few insights into the inner workings of a man whose fortunes rise and fall.
Flesh by David Szalay (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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© Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
© Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
© Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
The Vienna-based ‘father of neurodiversity’ was ahead of his time in his work but was also implicated in the Third Reich’s crimes. My novel set out to explore these contradictions
In 2015, I decided to write a novel about Dr Hans Asperger, who worked at the University Children’s Hospital in Vienna during the second world war. My interest was sparked by two nonfiction books: NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently by Steve Silberman and In a Different Key: The Story of Autism by John Donvan and Caren Zucker.
Reading these stories told about Asperger, you would have thought they were talking about two different people. To Silberman, Asperger was a compassionate and original thinker, whereas Donvan and Zucker depict him as an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. For a historical novelist, widely differing accounts of the same person are gold dust, and I began to dig deeper.
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© Photograph: Brandstaetter Images/Getty Images
© Photograph: Brandstaetter Images/Getty Images
© Photograph: Brandstaetter Images/Getty Images
The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery; The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr; The Good Nazi by Samir Machado de Machado; Bluff by Francine Toon; The Token by Sharon Bolton
The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery (Viking, £16.99)
The first novel for adults by award-winning children’s author Montgomery is a locked-room mystery set in 1910 on a remote tidal island off the Cornish coast. At Tithe Hall, Lord Conrad Stockingham-Welt is busy instructing his servants to prepare for the apocalyptic disaster he believes will be triggered by the imminent passage of Halley’s comet. The labyrinthine house is a nest of secrets and grudges, harboured by both staff and family members, who include an irascible and splendidly foul-mouthed maiden aunt, Decima. When Lord Conrad is discovered in his sealed study, killed by a crossbow bolt to the eye, she co-opts a new footman to help her find the culprit. With plenty of twists, red herrings and a blundering police officer, this is a terrific start to a series that promises to be a lot of fun.
© Photograph: Helen Dixon/Alamy
© Photograph: Helen Dixon/Alamy
© Photograph: Helen Dixon/Alamy
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi lead the Saltburn writer-director’s Charli xcx-soundtracked take on Emily Brontë’s novel, referred to as ‘the greatest love story of all time’
Emerald Fennell’s vision for Wuthering Heights is coming into focus.
The first full-length trailer for the Saltburn writer-director’s already controversial adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel sketches out an epic love story – “the greatest love story of all time”, according to a title card – beyond the erotic visuals of the first trailer.
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© Photograph: YouTube
© Photograph: YouTube
© Photograph: YouTube
The writer, who was born in a refugee camp in Germany after the war, won the Wodehouse prize for comic writing for her debut A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
The British-Ukrainian novelist Marina Lewycka, best known for her comic debut A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, has died aged 79 from a degenerative brain condition, her agent has confirmed.
Lewycka’s fiction often drew on her Ukrainian heritage and her family’s experiences as refugees. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, published in 2005 when she was 58, became an unexpected international bestseller and was translated into 35 languages. It won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic writing, was longlisted for the Man Booker and shortlisted for the Orange prize for fiction.
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© Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian
© Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian
© Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian
The world of 1970s Italian cinema is the glossy backdrop for an elegantly wrought but shallow novel
“Ugliness,” noted Pier Paolo Pasolini, “is never completely depressing or repulsive. It contains within it an allegory of hunger and pain, its history is our history, the history of Fascism … It is tragic, but immediate, and for this reason, full of life.” For Pasolini, ugliness was its own kind of truth, such that Rome could lay no claim to being the most beautiful city in the world “if it were not, at the same time, the ugliest”. For some, though, that truth risked becoming “unseeable”. The gaze of the touristic voyeur, said Pasolini, skimmed over slums for the poor “filled with illness, violence, crime, and prostitution”, “convinced of the extraneousness and untimeliness of this sub-proletarian, underdeveloped world”.
Olivia Laing’s second novel, The Silver Book, is a work preoccupied with beauty. Set in the world of Italian cinema in 1974, the book overflows with extravagant film sets, feasts, dazzling costumes. Even Pasolini himself, cruising around in his Alfa Romeo, oozes charisma and allure. But as Pasolini made clear, beauty without its opposite can only ever be incomplete.
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© Photograph: Bridgeman Images
© Photograph: Bridgeman Images
© Photograph: Bridgeman Images
This sprawling tale of college kids who summon evil with lifelong consequences is a fantastic read
Six oddball but doughty kids fall into the path of a vast and terrible supernatural evil which has come into our world from the outer limits of darkness. They must spend their lifetimes battling it, facing horror after horror in the process.
This is the plot, roughly, of Stephen King’s novel It (his best; no arguments). It is also the plot, roughly, of King’s son Joe Hill’s new horror doorstopper, in which six friends summon the ancient, infinitely malicious dragon King Sorrow from the Long Dark to help them defeat some baddies. Needless to say, their supernatural ritual backfires.
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© Photograph: Chad Luibl
© Photograph: Chad Luibl
© Photograph: Chad Luibl
Levy’s work was ‘ahead of her time’ and speaks to current debate around feminism, LGBTQ+ literature and Jewish identity, say researchers
For one of Victorian literature’s most distinctive voices, who was once hailed as a genius by Oscar Wilde, very little has been known about Amy Levy for more than a century.
But audiences will now have the opportunity to become more deeply acquainted with a writer whose pioneering work explored women’s independence, Jewish identity and same-sex desire.
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© Photograph: Cambridge University Library
© Photograph: Cambridge University Library
© Photograph: Cambridge University Library
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