Great Novels of the Twenty-First Century
This is less a list than a series of recommendations; it is unranked and serves as a jumping off point into the fabulous world of twenty-first century fiction. Some of the authors are well-known, others may surprise you. Each book has been lovingly hand-picked by a Mercurius editor/contributor. No doubt the list contains glaring omissions. But perhaps that doesn’t matter.
If you like this list, you could also check out our list of Great Albums of the 2010s.
Richard Capener edits Hem Press and the Reviews section of Mercurius. He has also published several poetry collections. Here are his recommendations.
Not Blessed
by Harold Abromowitz
This slim novel retells the same scene for 28 chapters. Where Queneau’s Exercises in Style is a formal experiment, Abromowitz’s narrative repetitions are all together more haunting. There is a boy, a policeman, a village… Each rewrite amends voice and place, slightly shaping meaning to create a palpable threat that can never be explained. (Published by Les Figues Press.)
The Book of Naseeb
by Khaled Hakim
The story of an idealistic heroin dealer who dreams of fitting the victims of war in Afghanistan with artificial limbs makes Hakim’s debut novel sound like either a shaggy dog story or a brand of contemporary realism. It’s something else entirely. Set on a cosmic scale, it might be how Finnegan’s Wake would have read if Joyce’s cultural backdrop was Islam instead of Christianity. Language is turned to rubble then pieced back together to form jarred, exuberant narratives, showing how the novel can still be innovative and confrontational. (Published by Penned in the Margins).
Changing
by Lily Hoang
A translation of the I Ching by an author who doesn’t speak or read Chinese (and isn’t Chinese) in which fairytale, memoir and prose poetry weave and blend. In so doing, the book can never stop questioning the personal and cultural narratives brought to a text: a divination that reflects readers back to themselves through the words of a writer othered from her source material. (Published by Fairy Tale Review).
LA MEDUSA
by Vanessa Place
Inspired by the mythic figure’s head of snakes, LA MEDUSA is a sprawling, multi-plot, multi-form reimagining of Ulysses with Los Angeles as Dublin. The novel starts, Every epic begins with a look in the mirror, reminding the reader - as Medusa would turn to stone on seeing her reflection - that here is a city that can’t recognise itself even as the author forces it to, hinting at the found language projects Place would go on to get into trouble for. Make no mistake, LA MEDUSA is as dazzling, profound, beautiful, fun and funny as it is boring, offensive, annoying and deeply upsetting, a representation of the city with all its glamour, shadows and shades. (Published by University of Alabama Press).
The Baudelaire Fractal
by Lisa Robertson
Hazel Brown wakes up one morning to realise she’s authored the works of Charles Baudelaire, giving way to chapters locked in a pattern of rooms, reveries and sexual encounters. It’s difficult not to think about Life: A User’s Manual, a novel contained to a block of apartments at one point in time, but, where Perec’s novel acts as literary chess, The Baudelaire Fractal’s restraint bolsters its sense of the erotic, repetition like roleplay, as Robertson constructs sentences and contorts thoughts that express inner-experiences readers may have embodied but never had language for. (Published by Coach House Press).
Andrea Mason’s debut novel The Cremation Project was shortlisted for the inaugural Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize and longlisted for the Dzanc Books Fiction Prize. She edits Mercurius’s Fiction section. Here are her recommendations.
Everyone is Watching
by Megan Bradbury
I love that this novel is about New York. I love that it’s written (largely) about and through art. I love that it includes insert pages which act as monuments to quintessential New York artworks, including Splitting by one of my favourite artists, Gordon Matta-Clark. I love that it includes urban planning. I love that Bradbury reimagines New York City for me. Narrated through the voices of four iconic New York figures: artist Robert Mapplethorpe, writer Edmund White, urban planner Robert Moses and poet Walt Whitman, and through four different time zones, the whole coalesces seamlessly in the mesmerism of a newly and differently generated New York. (Published by Picador).
A Line Made by Walking
by Sara Baume
I love that this novel is written through art. The title is from a Richard Long piece, which refers to a desire line trodden in a stretch of grass. I love that each chapter is titled by animal, from an art project that the protagonist, Frankie, is undertaking, in which she photographs road kill. In the novel Frankie is just out of art school, and is living through an interim moment at her recently deceased grandmother’s house, trying to get a sense of herself. Regularly throughout the novel Frankie plays a memory game, recalling artworks triggered by a specific word generated within the narrative. For instance: “Works about Flight, I test myself: Yves Klein, 1960.” Within the novel Baume’s protagonist is testing out her own desire lines, about her chosen path to be an artist, and she takes us along in that journey alongside her. (Published by Windmill Books).
We Are Made of Diamond Stuff
by Isabel Waidner
I love the sheer audaciousness of the language. Every word is like a sculpture, it feels material and voluminous in your mouth and mind. I love the chapter titles which create a narrative in their own right. I love the use of parentheses, caps lock, star icons, hashtags, and other creative punctuations: “Eyes (o o), nose (v), mouth (_)”. I love the specific references: Poker Stars, Paddy Power, Styrofoam, B. S. Johnson, Boeing-Sikorsky Comanche. I love the humour: “The polar bears are novelists (infantry soldiers)”. I love the juxtapositions “Kitchen? Yes (dying inside)”. I love that it deals with class, especially class, race, queerness, and immigration status. I love that it is relatable and that it puts me through the wringer. (Published by Peninsular Press.)
Children of Paradise
by Camilla Grudova
I love that this novel is written through film, with each chapter titled by a film, name of director and date. The protagonist, Holly, undergoes initiation into a job at the enigmatic independent Edinburgh cinema, Paradise, where the close-knit crew don’t just work at the cinema, they inhabit its every wall, door and popcorn machine. Through Midnight Cowboy, The Seven Samurai, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Spirit of the Beehive, Taxi Driver, Teorema, The Ghoul, La Bête Humaine, A Matter of Life and Death, Nights of Cabiria, Return to Oz, Fanny and Alexander, Ms. 45, Popcorn, Babes in Toyland, Don’t Look Now, Phantom of the Paradise, Heathers, Rosemary’s Baby, The Last Picture Show, The Red Shoes and Death in Venice, Grudova narrates a range of psychic and psychotropic landscapes and experiences, in which we sniff out all corners of the cinema in all its viscerality: “shit on one of the cinema seats”, “clumps of human hair” in the toilets, as well as its eccentric regular customers, and eventually the various apartments and beds of Holly’s co-workers. The book is a film odyssey. At the end of a shift the Paradise gang take over the screen and settle in with popcorn. At each other’s apartments they do the same. Holly buys a secondhand TV and spends hours watching DVDs and videos, in order to catch up with their film literacy. As well as films and popcorn and shit and dust there is romance and death and the intrusion of capitalism and heartbreak. (Published by Atlantic Books).
Men and Apparitions
by Lynne Tillman
I love that this novel includes photos. I love that it’s a meditation on the value of photographs, as much as it’s a novel. I love that it’s fragmentary, divided into short titled sections rather than chapters; it can be read chronologically and equally it would reward dipping in. This novel sets up questions. I like that. I’m ready to re-read. (Published by Peninsula Press).
Sam Coll’s debut novel The Abode of Fancy was selected as a Guardian Book of the Day. Here are his recommendations.
The Book of Illusions
by Paul Auster
The glory of Paul Auster's The Book Of Illusions is that it reads like a ghost story without ghosts, or a tale where the main character (Hector Mann, a forgotten silent screen comedian) is only 'onscreen', as it were, for a mere two or three pages. And yet his presence dominates the proceedings.
The rest of the time we follow the progress of David Zimmer, a bereaved professor turned silent film enthusiast (Mann's onscreen antics were the first thing that made him laugh since losing his wife and children in an airplane crash), who is fated to suffer only another (and arguably trebly bitter) bereavement as the story unfolds (no spoilers here!). It is a shattering and haunting book, not without some laugh-out-loud light relief (the forensic way Auster describes fictitious silent films is itself a tour-de-force), and, as an odd added bonus, it will send you for comfort to the glum yet welcoming arms of Chateaubriand and his Memoirs From Beyond The Tomb/Memoirs Of A Dead Man. Highly and warmly recommended.
Me Cheeta
by James Lever
Me Cheeta may not technically count as a novel - I always find it stacked in the supposedly or purportedly nonfiction 'Film' section of bookshops - but the fact that so much true cine-history is told from the point of view of an onscreen ape should give one pause, and compel one to applaud the writer for the ingenuity of his ananthromorphic ventriloquism that sustains so many amusing pages. A hilarious look at Tarzan's celluloid history as recounted by his chimpanzee companion, the book is both wildly funny and oddly moving - the final encounter between a decrepit Johnny Weissmuller and his former simian sidekick is particularly heart-breaking. Check it out, chumps (or do we mean 'chimps?')!
Thomas Helm has published two poetry collections and edits Mercurius. Here are his recommendations.
When I Sing, Mountains Dance
by Irene Sola (translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem)
Sola is very much a poet’s novelist. What make her debut novel so glorious is her singing lyricism and gorgeous polyphony of voices. We are told about the death of a poet from the perspective of a thunderstorm; the fear of the chase from the perspective of a deer; what it means to dwell in time from the perspective of a mountain (“my slumber is so great that it slips beneath the seas”). Yet these are no mere stylistic devices or literary games; connecting the different voices is a tragic story spanning generations and poignant meditations on the nature of violence, of humanity against nature, of humanity against humanity, and of the peculiarities of fate, of grief and transformation. (Published by Granta).
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel)
It could have been another Murakami novel, but I ended up choosing this one for its sheer weirdness and inventiveness. Captivating from start to finish, Kafka on the Shore follows the trials and tribulations of a young boy running from home and of a simple old man who can talk to cats. Both of them may inadvertently be responsible for the same murder. Or perhaps not. All the distinctive hallmarks of a Murakami odyssey-epic are on display here: weird yet relatable characters; strange, paranormal dimensions that reach into the ordinary; noir-esque disillusion with the modern world; a fabulous attention to detail. (Published by Vintage).
Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants
by Mathias Enard (translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell)
With the US and her allies’ recent disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the threat of extremist Islam throbbing continuously in the airwaves, it can be all too easy to slip into the primitive “us and them” narratives that have hung over East-West relations since at least the time of the crusades. Enard asks the fantastical question: What if Michelangelo travelled to Constantinople/Istanbul to build a bridge for the Sultan? The obvious theme of building bridges aside, Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants is not a political or a polemical book. This poetic tale of the Florentine’s adventures is told through letters, diary entries, objects, and a dazzling array of perspectives, and never once stoops to having a cut-and-dried message. (Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.)
Mordew
by Alex Pheby
Although Pheby’s fantasy novel comes in at over 600 pages (100 pages of which are, intimidatingly perhaps, a glossary), its pace rarely relents. I zipped through this wild book in a couple of days and am about to order the sequel. Its central conceit resonates with our times: God has been murdered and his murderers have built a city over and out of his corpse. Confused slum-boy Nathan Treeves must learn how to use his in-born power before he is lost amid the magical filth and crippling poverty of a grossly unequal city ruled by a cruel and deceptive master. The gothic delirium of his journey is rendered in achingly lyrical prose. (Published by Galley Beggar Press).
Flights
by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft)
It would be hard to talk about great 21st novelists without mentioning Nobel-prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. Perhaps not strictly a “novel”, Flights is a strange anthology of stories that is able to cover seemingly disparate topics, such as dissection practices in the seventeenth century and the mysterious disappearance of a wife and child in the twentieth century, while somehow also crafting a whole around ideas such as fluidity, mobility, and illusoriness. I was gripped early on by a description of a river being like a “needle inserted into my formerly safe and stable surroundings ... This needle went all the way through, marking a vertical third dimension: so pierced, the landscape of my childhood world turned out to be nothing more than a toy made out of rubber from which all the air was escaping, with a hiss”. (Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.)