The best fiction to read this year
Despite the doomsters, novels continue to thrive. From Julian Barnes to Leïla Slimani, this will be a great 12 months…
ByFiction reviews
Discover the best contemporary literature with the New Statesman’s expert reviews. From debut novels to short stories and literary veterans, get inspired here.
Joy Williams and humanity’s ultimate failure
The author’s new collection of short stories is haunted by animals – and by our failed stewardship of the natural…
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DH Lawrence and the superiority of fiction
The Goldsmiths Prize Lecture on 100 years of the writer’s seminal essay “Why the Novel Matters”
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In the autumn of Salman Rushdie
The author’s late style in The Eleventh Hour, his new collection of fiction, reveals a venerable writer displaced by time
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Jeanette Winterson’s thousand and one yawns
The author’s latest novel blandly reimagines the Arabian Nights tales
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Klaus Kinski, wrath of god
Benjamin Myers’ new novel follows the actor trailing both chaos and charisma in one infamous theatre production about Christ
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Jon Fosse’s war on convention
In his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize, the Norwegian author heads a radical counter-movement in publishing that spurns…
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Thomas Pynchon’s lasting triumph
His latest novel borrows too freely from his previous work. But what work it has been
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The manosphere’s literary muscle men
Two novels explore the crippling solitude of a pair of ripped English professors
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Ian McEwan and fiction’s problem with climate change
In What We Can Know, Britain has sunk beneath the waves – but literature remains buoyant
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RF Kuang’s descent into the abyss
The American author’s sixth novel struggles to satirise chronic illness and pain.
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Art in the wreckage of Gaza
Does satire ever belong in a war-zone?
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The Great Men of history 2.0
Alexander Starritt’s new novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, attempts to cast Big Tech’s leaders as Olympians shaping our age – but…
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Sayaka Murata’s strange new world
Her latest novel, Vanishing World, is a surprisingly fearful book, one which conflates biological essentialism with what is good and…
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The romantasy infatuation
The best-selling genre in publishing combines magical worlds, steamy sex and unfortunate prose.
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Fang Fang’s acts of resistance
The Chinese author’s controversial novels are powerful narratives of patriarchal violence.
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Edward St Aubyn’s comedy of horrors
The Patrick Melrose novels and his other works are clearly by the same writer – but produce wildly different results.
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Solvej Balle’s day without end
In this Danish novel, a woman stuck in a repeating time loop is forced to consider the very fundamentals of…
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Samuel Beckett’s art of reduction
In The Unnamable, the writer’s prose was stripped to the bone – and the bone itself boiled white.
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Katie Kitamura’s study of social dynamics
The novelist coolly examines how we interact with each other in a deeply unsettling story of reversals and doubles.
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