Books in the Media: Susan Choi's new novel declared a Booker Prize contender
This week Susan Choi’s latest offering beguiled critics while novelist Benjamin Wood found favour in the Sunday Times.
Choi’s Flashlight (Jonathan Cape) “has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold”, wrote the Guardian’s Beejay Silcox, who selected the novel as the book of the day. Choi’s sixth novel, which follows 10-year-old Louisa and her parents, “reckons with the lies that undo families and underpin empires”. Silcox continued: “Like the best of those early-00s novels, Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger. Choi confronts a chapter of North Korean history that American fiction has barely touched.” The Financial Times’ Catherine Taylor found that Flashlight “takes a little-known and appalling aspect of Japanese-Korean history and fashions it into a rich generational saga that teems with intelligence, curiosity and, in terms of reading, sheer pleasure”. Taylor also called it a “capacious work of such emotional force and controlled style that it surely cannot be overlooked by this year’s Booker judges”.
The Sunday Times’ Johanna Thomas-Corr declared Wood “one of the finest British novelists of his generation, but you’ve probably never heard of him”. She continued: “The 44-year-old author from Stockport has written five psychologically suspenseful books with stories that are so unique and specific, it feels like they must come directly from real life.” Wood’s latest novel Seascraper (Viking) follows “frustrated folk musician” and “cart shanker” Thomas Flett whose life is disturbed when a Hollywood director comes to his seaside town looking to shoot a film. The result is a “fiercely atmospheric novel that engages the senses”, wrote Thomas-Corr.
Bea Martinez-Gatell’s “crunchy new history of fangirling told through six sexy cases – Lord Byron, Franz Liszt, Valentino, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and The Beatles” was picked by Ceci Browning at the Times. Swoon: Fangirls, Their Idols and the Counterculture of Female Lust – From Byron to the Beatles (Biteback) “strives to prove that the trembling fangirl, reduced to ‘a stock character in the textbooks of fame’, has for hundreds of years had more influence that that stereotype allows”. Browning concluded: “In gathering together six defining moments of popular culture and making evident women’s collective strength, Martinez-Gatell makes a convincing case that these fangirls were the trailblazers and tastemakers of their generations, not simply a flock of bleating sheep.”
The Women Are Not Fine: The Dark History of a Poisonous Sisterhood (Brazen) by journalist Hope Reese is a “compelling new book… which tells the story of a group of Hungarian women who killed at least 101 people – possibly many more – between 1910 and 1929”. The Telegraph’s Violet Moller added that the women of Nagyrév’ “killed for a reason and mostly as a last resort”. Moller characterised Nagyrév’ as a region “rife with alcoholism, misogyny and domestic abuse, significantly worsened by the First World War”. Reese “also draws some fruitful parallels with today’s world,” the review continued. “As with the Nagyrév women… a history of abuse is rarely considered relevant in cases where a woman has murdered her partner.” The Women Are Not Fine was called both a “brutal story” and one that is “not morally clear-cut".
