The latest novel from the wonderful Ozick is a direct response to The Ambassadors, the novel by her literary touchstone, Henry James. The year is 1952, and teacher Bea Nightingale has been despatched to Europe by her hectoring brother in search of her nephew, Julian. Ozick anatomises the experience of foreignness - of country and, more profoundly, of race - in a novel that moves beyond far homage
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The Canadian author’s novel about African-American and Afro-German jazz musicians, whose music is banned under the Nazi regime, revisits the survivors 50 years on to explore themes of betrayal and persecution alongside the joy of music and youth. It made it to the Booker shortlist last year
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Esi Edugyan’s website
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Harding builds on two previous assured and distinctive novels with this portrait of Romania during and after the second world war. A deaf-mute man, traumatised by his wartime experiences, begins to draw the past for a young nurse with whom he shared a childhood connection
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Ann Patchett took the Orange prize for Bel Canto in 2002, and is back this year with a novel that tackles contemporary issues of age, childbearing, corporate involvement in healthcare and our collective responsibility for our planet’s wildernesses. Pharmacologist Marina Singh travels to the Amazonian jungle in search of a vanished colleague, and encounters Professor Annick Swenson, engaged in research into why local tribal women are able to bear children into their 70s. Fraught and intriguing
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Ten years in the writing, this poetic yet muscular American debut revisits the siege of Troy to show the human side of the demigod warrior Achilles. It’s told from the point of view of his lover, Patroclus (whose death in the Iliad is the spur for Achilles to rejoin the battle). Our reviewer called it 'a deeply affecting version of the Achilles story: a fully three-dimensional man – a son, a father, husband and lover – now exists where a superhero previously stood and fought'
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After the bleak intensity of Enright’s Booker winner novel The Gathering, her next, a story of love and betrayal set in Dublin’s boom years, is giddy on Sauvignon Blanc, sex and success. But like the economic bubble, this dizzy rush can't last. What makes this story - sentimental in outline, commonplace in details - remarkable is the voice of Gina, our 21st-century seductress and narrator. Where once the price of transgression in Ireland would have been scandal and shame now it is property.
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