Booker nominated novels in this week’s Literary Fiction reviews: THE DISAPPEARERS by
THE DISAPPEARERS by Marlon James (Hamish Hamilton £20, 640pp)
Could this Jamaica-set, Booker-nominated novel see James win the coveted prize a second time?
It would be a deserved triumph if so. The Disappearers packs a punch on every single one of its 600-plus pages, up to and including its last, as we follow a group of gay men in 1980s Kingston attempting to stage an openly queer play.
Murderous homophobia is, however, commonplace, and one night of senseless violence changes the troupe’s lives for ever.
A revenge plot forms the loose arc, with James’s masterful narrative shapeshifting through journal entries, interview transcripts, letters and even a chorus comprising the voices of the attackers themselves.
It’s an epic, virtuosic, propulsive performance, alternately hilarious and viscerally horrifying, that returns throughout to the acts of erasure perpetrated against, and forced upon, the men at its heart.
SUNRISE by Téa Obreht (W&N £22, 336pp)
The acclaimed Obreht’s fourth novel is a matryoshka doll-style affair of nested tales, all focusing on the one-horse town of Sunrise, Wyoming. Our introduction to the place comes via nanny Nina, who stumbles across the now-abandoned settlement following a plane crash.
We also meet Coll, a young man committed to breathing life back into Sunrise with his historical re-enactments, and Anton Vargas, the turn-of-the-century gunslinger at the centre of the town’s legend – or, at least, the version of him that’s been preserved in fiction.
This novel has twists, turns, jump scares, murder mysteries, a possible curse and, framing it all, Nina’s gripping fight for survival. As always with Obreht, the first-rate storytelling is braided with serious themes, too, not least who inherits the past, and who gets to tell its stories.
AGNES LIVES! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton (Viking £14.99, 256pp)
Don’t be fooled by the title: when we meet Ivy League-educated Manhattanite Agnes Maurer on a September day in 2014, she’s firmly in the grip of a death wish.
In fact, her sole aim over the 24 hours that this blackly comic novel spans is to find someone to kill her. Unfortunately, her barista, her boss, and her narcissistic film director boyfriend all disappoint, resulting in an increasingly bloody, exhilaratingly unhinged escalation.
There’s a touch of Yesteryear meets American Psycho about Agnes’s Instagram-obsessed existence. And while she prides herself on manipulating the patriarchy, she’s also the victim of breezily dismissed but shocking misogyny and abuse: someone for whom pretence has become a necessary strategy to wrest back power.
Propelled by Agnes’s manic inner monologue and ravenous hunger for connection, this is a sharp, bitter blast.