Five Books left to choose from the 2023 long list
Little Boy by John Smith - Boiler House Press
‘He began to understand that his present life was not a life at all, but something that had to be endured before a life could commence. It was as though he was before a window, and could see life, but could not touch it. What he needed, he thought, was to be given the opportunity to live. For he would do great things, he thought, when he had the opportunity.’
It is 1935 and a small boy is found in a mine in what is known as the Belgian Congo. It is a time of ferment; nefarious forces are at play. Against this backdrop, the boy’s discovery draws the attention of men of distinction across the globe – scientists, politicians and army men. Soon enough a race begins to bring the boy into safe custody. After a tortuous journey by train through the continent of Africa, the boy travels by ship to New York, where he is taken into the care of the United States Army. From here our diminutive hero will become swept up in a narrative not of his own making, a narrative that will lead him into the heart of one of the most devastating events of the twentieth century. Audacious in its conceit, thrillingly readable and profoundly humane, Little Boy is a novel of science and politics, of men and war, of compassion and becoming. In prose of baffled grace, it weaves a path through some of the darkest moments in our collective history -- moments all too depressingly reminiscent of the here and now. Its ending will leave you, like its protagonist, suspended in mid-air, stunned by the awful things that men have put forth into the world.
"Little Boy is an extraordinary novel, audacious and poignant and superbly well-written. It imagines the unimaginable, finds innocence in awfulness. This is what the literary novel is capable of, and so rarely pulls off." -- Andrew Cowan, author of Your Fault. "Bold, audacious, written with surgical precision, quiet lyricism and incredible assurance. This novel hurt my feelings and made me think deeply. As Little Boy says, 'All the time he had spent in institutions, sheltered from the world, when in reality there was no greater threat to him than the institutions themselves.'" -- Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti. -- John Smith lives in Australia. Little Boy is their first book.
The Doloriad by Missouri Williams - Dead Ink Books
In the wake of a mysterious environmental cataclysm that has wiped out the rest of humankind, a family descended from incest cling to existence on the edges of a ruined city. The family is mercilessly ruled by The Matriarch who dreams of starting humanity over. Her children and the children they have with one another aren’t so sure. Surrounded by the silent forest and the dead suburbs, they feel closer to the ruined world than to their parents. Nevertheless, they scavenge supplies, collect fuel, plant seeds, and attempt to cultivate the poisoned earth, brutalizing and caring for one another in equal measure.
When The Matriarch dreams of another group of survivors she sends away one of her daughters, the legless Dolores, as a marriage offering. Her return triggers the breakdown of The Matriarch’s fragile order and the control she wields over their sprawling family begins to weaken. The children seize their chance to escape with terrible and lasting consequences.
Missouri Williams’s debut novel is a blazingly original document of depravity and salvation. Gothic and strange, moving and disquieting, The Doloriad stares down humanity’s unbreakable commitment to life for better or worse.
Still Life by Zoe Wicomb - Peninsula Press
An inventive and genre-bending new novel from a master of the form, exploring the legacy of past exploitation and present-day authorship: who should be remembered and who should tell their story.
Still Life juggles with our perception of time and reality as Wicomb tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet and abolitionist Thomas Pringle. In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the writer summons the spectre of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave whose History Pringle had once published, along with Hinza, his adopted black South African son.
As these voices vie for control over the text and the lines between life-writing and fiction-making begin to blur, a third voice enters the chorus: Virginia Woolf’s very own Sir Nicholas Green, self-regarding poet and character from Orlando. Their adventures through time and space, from Victorian South Africa and London to the author’s desk in Glasgow in the present day, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.
Praise for Still Life
'An extraordinary writer… seductive, brilliant, and precious… her talent glitters.' – Toni Morrison
My Dead Book: A Novel by Nate Lippens - Pilot Press
My Dead Book is a novel composed of nonlinear vignettes and fragments about a queer man approaching his fiftieth birthday who is haunted by insomnia and his past. In the dead of night, he remembers his friends who died in the late 1980s and 1990s, his years as a teenage throwaway and sex worker, and ruminates on working class survival, queer aging, AIDS, and whether he has outlived his place in the world.
“What a blistering book—with My Dead Book, Nate Lippens has created something truly fucking great. It's as if the storied stars of Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side' overshot Manhattan and wound up in Wisconsin, broke and blue with cold and depressed beyond belief by the thought that this nowhere is now home. It's a bitter pill, but I love bitterness, and who doesn't love pills?”
— Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot
“There’s no doubt to this book. You’d think that was a flaw but it’s been burned away. My Dead Book is not short though it is brief. It’s loving, bittersweet, and actually courageous because it tells a story that is slightly unbearable because it’s all secret, awful hard bad secrets and funny as hell. Nate’s balancing act works because the heart of it (this novel) is true even though it’s often heartless. It’s simple. He knows what things are worth. When you need the sea or a bird they’re there like they never were before.”
— Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow