Archives: Political fiction entriesTTTT

‘The Ministry of Truth is now tightening its grip by the hour,’ comments one character in Edward St. Aubyn’s new book, a state-of-the-nation novel that brilliantly uses the conventions of farce, satire and social critique to evoke a nation drifting indifferently into chaos. Written in riotously creative language, St. Aubyn’s portrait of the family and its sharp-edged sketches of various institutions of British life are often very, very funny and always penetrating; but they are also at times moving, especially when they relate to mental health. Parallel Lines, which never seems parochial despite its apparently insular metropolitan setting, reinvents the so-called Hampstead novel with formal verve and political vitality.

Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel

The interconnectedness of water and human experience are beautifully expressed in Elif Shafak’s epic century-spanning novel, taking in Nineveh and London, the Thames and the Tigris, Gilgamesh and Dickens. This is truly ambitious and profound writing, in which a number of political and moral questions, about religion, heritage, imperialism and the climate, are elegantly raised and explored.

Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel

Twenty-one voices from a small town in Ireland come together to paint a picture of a community in all its complexity: after the economic crisis, there are dark undercurrents of criminality moving through to fill the gaps left by a lack of jobs and hope. But there is also tenderness and beauty. All of life is here, and the way ordinary lives are shaped by forces outside of their control is powerfully evoked.

Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel

This cleverly conceived, inventively written political fable proves propulsively readable. Dedicated to ‘all the people who lose their lives trying to reach a safer shore,’ The Accidental Immigrants centres on a British couple living on an island in the Mediterranean that, as the Far Right rises, find themselves first disconcerted but then displaced and torn apart by increasingly totalitarian state policies and policing. McMillan’s characters might inhabit a Looking-Glass universe, but in reading this incisive critique of anti-immigration politics we stare straight back at ourselves. This humane, sensitive novel is insidiously shocking; and it looks set to become even more politically relevant given recent electoral results in the UK, Europe and the US.

Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel

In his fictional account of the affair between ageing British prime minister H.H. Asquith and the vivacious young aristocrat Venetia Stanley during the summer of 1914, Robert Harris brings one of the most consequential chapters of modern history to life. Precipice spins a riveting drama around Asquith’s surviving letters to his lover, in which he details his romantic yearnings alongside top-secret intelligence as Europe hurtles headlong into world war one. In doing so, the novel – with great deftness and wit – explores the extent to which political power is shaped by the personal lives of those who wield it.

Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel

Don’t be fooled by The Harrow’s seeming simplicity or by its uncluttered directness. It is a thriller and whodunit, yes. But it is also a novel rousingly elevated beyond its genre by a greater purpose, its analysis of council politics and the inevitable – but sad and irretrievable – loss of local journalism.

Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel

Nobody in current British politics – Left or Right, Righteous or Heartless, selfish or selfless – escapes from Natasha Brown’s short but weighty Universality unscathed. This is a smart, uncompromising novel from a talented, intrepid writer. All while being an gripping thriller, too.

Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel

The lives of four interconnected women – their loves, their ambitions, their disappointments, their traumas – are scrutinised in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s dazzling fourth novel. Set across three continents and a sprawling cast of characters, Dream Count is a polyphonic work that engages with a range of charged themes, from the diaspora experience to sexual assault and the politics of female bodies. It is rigorously, bracingly contemporary – and yet it has a timelessness that characterises all great fiction.

Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel

The magisterial craft of James lies in its combination of biting humour and a page-turning plot, with ruminations on sovereignty and Voltaire along the way. Everett stays close, if not true, to the dangerous journeys of Huckleberry Finn, and draws on titans of post-Reconstruction African American writing to bring Jim to the foreground of the story. As we keep pace with our charismatic narrator, Twain’s tale of friendship on the run is converted into a larger history of collective freedom won through close encounters with the great American outdoors and its jealous, violent gatekeepers.

Collins fuses history and invention with utmost care and creativity in a book that imagines the thinking, reading, working, politically active lives of the women who came before Malcolm X. Capacious in scope, Ocean Stirrings spans two centuries, taking us from Grenada to Canada to the USA, considering African inheritance and the European power. Yet it’s also a work of stillness and close attention. It makes space for the story of a girl in a Grenadian classroom, reading Byron, reading Cowper, asking questions of the world, given courage by her teachers and her mother to make her own decisions. With a deep sense of purpose and not a hint of literary showiness, Collins brings together many voices, from eighteenth-century English letter-writers to Black rights orators, and she honours the rich Grenadian creole, now largely lost, with a new life here on the page.

Alexandra Harris, Chair of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel 2024

A formal masterpiece, Blackouts creates its own zone beyond the story it tells: a redacted history of queer sexology via an intergenerational deathbed dialogue. This intricate collage of record and remembrance is held together by poetry, art, photography, and institutional documents, and hinges its political world-building on the pleasures to be had in this compilation. In exquisite prose, Torres shows how choosing another inheritance might alter a future that seems inexorable.

 

Everything is connected in this teeming, gripping, horrifying panorama of British society. In the tradition of Fielding, Dickens, and Orwell himself, the novelist gets everywhere: slipping into the Old Bailey, inviting himself to the polo, sharing a Mayfair magnum while taking notes. And, true to that tradition, Caledonian Road is absolutely contemporary: it gets to work in a world of branding and media spin, of hacking and cover-ups. It asks where the money is coming from, and who knows what, and how chasms of inequality are widening between people passing on the same London pavement.

Alexandra Harris, Chair of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel 2024

A novel that handles trauma with honesty and care. There is no sugar-coating with virtue or easy beauty here. This is a story that employs a cleanly cinematic gaze to observe the plain disintegration of a family through a pattern of social circumstance, addiction and prejudice, egged on by the ruthlessness of 90s tabloid journalism – to give us a portrayal of a society both fractured and hopeful.

Ross Raisin, Orwell Prize for Political Fiction judge 2024

An obliquely political and beautifully strange narrative in which the message is never in your face – rather, diffused from above in a way that is at once mesmerizing and troubling. This is a novel that asks questions about an earth lined with its own human markings of war, industry, climate change; written with such a delicate touch that it is only afterwards that you understand the activating power of the book you’ve just held in your hands.

Ross Raisin, Orwell Prize for Political Fiction judge 2024

An exuberant novel about power and how it is exercised, The Future Future provides a historical, anachronism-defying narrative centred on Celine and her intimate friends in revolutionary Paris. Continually shifting registers, it traverses an extraordinary fictional universe that is somehow also grounded, coherent and compelling. At times abstract and philosophical, this acutely observed novel is warm, smart, and (to adopt its own idiom) ‘super contemporary’.

Simon Okotie, Orwell Prize judge 2024

It’s 1895. Amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gives birth to the child of the man who raped her – and who she has also been forced to marry. Unbroken, she determines to change her name; and her life, alongside it.

1902. Romaine Brooks sails for Capri. She has barely enough money for the ferry, nothing for lunch; her paintbrushes are bald and clotted… But she is sure she can sell a painting – and is fervent in her belief that the island is detached from all fates she has previously suffered.

In 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: I want to make life fuller – and fuller. Told in a series of cascading vignettes, featuring a multitude of voices, After Sappho is Selby Wynn Schwartz’s joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th century as they battle for control over their lives; for liberation and for justice.

Sarah Bernhard – Colette – Eleanora Duse – Lina Poletti – Josephine Baker – Virginia Woolf… these are just a few of the women (some famous, others hitherto unsung) sharing the pages of a novel as fierce as it is luminous. Lush and poetic; furious and funny; in After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz has created a novel that celebrates the women and trailblazers of the past and also offers hope for our present, and our futures.