Like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping or Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga has the merit of not living up to the promise of its title.
Contemporary fiction
Fatima Daas’s The Last One is an autobiographical novel that presents an original and complex exploration of identity. A portrait of the protagonist, also called Fatima Daas, emerges through a series of vignettes that jump across time but take us ultimately from her childhood to her twenty-ninth birthday.
Missouri Williams’s debut novel, The Doloriad, is a wild and wholly original contribution to the growing genre of climate fiction. With its rich prose, dark humour and unsettling concentration on the very worst aspects of humankind, it’s a novel that is likely to split opinion.