First, I want to highlight the fantastic work done by independent publishers. Over the past few years, and facing increasingly difficult challenges, they have consistently produced some of the best and most interesting fiction around.
Ashley Stokes’ Gigantic (Unsung Stories) tells the tale of Kevin Stubbs and the Gigantopithecus Intelligence Team (GIT) as they attempt to prove or disprove the existence of a Bigfoot in Sutton. Kevin is a very funny narrator, and in its mix of true believers and sceptics it’s like an episode of X-Files transported to Surrey (and I mean peak X-Files, not the awful later episodes). The Dig Street Festival by Chris Walsh (Louise Walters Books) follows the comic misfortunes of a trio of misfits in the fictional London Borough of Leytonstow as they battle their boss, landlord, and social hardship to organise an ‘urban love revolution’.
A couple of years ago Bluemoose published Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession, which deservedly became a word-of-mouth success. Hession’s follow-up, Panenka, is a similarly engaging story about a man whose life was changed irrevocably when he missed a penalty for his team by attempting a ‘panenka’, a delicate chipped shot that leaves the kicker embarrassingly exposed if executed badly (some successful examples can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4c7Ypx89Rs). Even if you aren’t into football at all, there’s much to enjoy here: like Leonard and Hungry Paul, it’s a poignant story of love and loss.
Cold New Climate by Isobel Wohl was the first publication from a brand new publisher, Weatherglass Books. On the surface it’s a story of New York relationships, but there is a disturbing undercurrent running through it that eventually breaks out into one of the most disturbing endings I’ve read in a long time. The online literary magazine Storgy have recently branched out into publishing books, and I very much enjoyed Parade by Michael Graves, a Florida-set novel of faith, sex and drugs.
I read fewer short stories than I meant to this year, but my two favourite collections were Nicholas Royle’s London Gothic (Confingo) and Percival Everett’s Damned If I Do (Influx). Royle’s is the first of a planned series exploring the mysterious corners of different cities, with Manchester and Paris to come. The opening story of Everett’s collection, ‘The Fix’, is especially brilliant. A stranger is taken in by the owner of a sandwich shop and proceeds to fix broken items brought to him by people in the neighbourhood. His abilities soon exceed the merely practical, however, and come to seem increasingly miraculous, with tragic consequences.
I also loved the debut collection by Rhiannon Lewis, I Am The Mask Maker, published by the indie Victorina Press. They also published the wonderful new novella by Amanda Huggins, Crossing the Lines, based on her Costa-shortlisted story ‘Red’.
Fly on the Wall Press is a not-for-profit publisher based in Manchester, producing short stories and poetry that engage with political and social issues. This year they published a season of Fly on the Wall Shorts – six outstanding stories featuring pigs, tigers and Powerpoints among many other rich things. These are great examples of something that’s unfortunately all too rare: short stories published in single pamphlets. Nightjar Press (https://nightjarpress.weebly.com) also do sterling work in this area with their ongoing series of uncanny tales, while new kid on the block Seventy2One (https://massiveoverheads.com/seventy2one-books/) are planning to publish chapbooks amongst other things, but I’d love to see more.
I also read some great books from the big publishers. The first two novels I bought when the bookshops reopened post-lockdown were both exceptional. Emma Stonex’s The Lamplighters (Picador) is based on a true story: in 1900 the three keepers of a lighthouse on the Flannan Isles in the Outer Hebrides disappeared without trace. Stonex transports the story to 1970s Cornwall and weaves a haunting mystery around the three men, and the women they have left behind. Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan (Heinemann) is set at different periods during the twentieth century in an Edinburgh tenement building, whose inhabitants include a Beat poet, a psychic and the devil’s daughter. A fantastically strange novel that had me hooked.
Like most people, I didn’t travel far on my holidays, but I took two books with me that transported me to Newfoundland and Berlin. New Girl in Little Cove by Damhnait Monaghan (HarperCollins) charts the trials and tribulations of a teacher who moves from Toronto to a Catholic school in Newfoundland and struggles to integrate into the local community. But what is she running away from? Calla Henkel’s Other People’s Clothes (Sceptre) also has fish-out-water characters, with two American art students renting a magnificent apartment in Berlin from a crime writer, who may or may not have sinister plans for them.
Zoë Folbigg’s fourth novel The Night We Met (Aria) is her best yet – a tragic romance filled with warmth and humour. Last but definitely not least is Iron Annie (Bloomsbury), the debut novel by Luke Cassidy, a riotous story of love and drug running in Ireland and England.
Ian Critchley 