Alexandra Harris

Melissa Harrison’s The Given World follows the inhabitants of an English river-valley village over six months, linking Clare’s dying days with a wider sense of environmental and social decline. The novel uses a diverse group portrait rather than a dominant protagonist, giving narrative weight to farmers, labourers, builders, carers and other residents while exploring rural work, grief, superstition and ecological crisis. The review praises Harrison’s refusal to sentimentalise the countryside, her acute portrayals of working men and women, and the novel’s communal ethical vision, though it finds the ominous ecological symbolism occasionally too portentous.

Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings follows Dave Win, a half-Burmese gay actor, from his schooldays in the 1960s through the pandemic, tracing his relationships, artistic life and encounters with prejudice. The novel connects personal memory with changing attitudes toward gay liberation, race and the arts, while centering Dave’s enduring bond with his mother Avril and her partner Esme. Its recurring conflict with Dave’s former schoolmate Giles, who becomes a Tory MP and Brexit minister, adds political resonance. The review praises the novel’s vivid scenes, emotional precision, social comedy and craftsmanship, concluding that it is Hollinghurst’s finest work yet.

Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo follows brothers Ivan and Peter through the disorientation of their father’s death, their age-gap relationships and the emotional consequences of desire, illness and grief. The novel’s chess motif reflects its characters’ unexpected moves and the idea that life’s unsettled middle periods are its true substance. The review praises Rooney’s intimate, formally controlled and increasingly ambitious writing, especially her rendering of Ivan’s neurodiverse experience and the brothers’ contrasting psychological crises, while noting that Peter’s treatment of Sylvia and the novel’s claustrophobic focus on interior feeling can be troubling. Overall, the book is presented as a strange, serious and powerful development in Rooney’s work.

Michael Cunningham’s Day follows a Brooklyn family across one day in 2019, 2020 and 2021, tracing the emotional pressures of marriage, parenthood, lockdown and loss. The review praises Cunningham’s sensitive portrayal of varied forms of domestic love, especially the vivid characterisation of the child Violet and the powerful reassembly of the family after absence. It also highlights the novel’s modernist debts to Virginia Woolf, particularly To the Lighthouse, while finding some of its emotional analysis overextended and an elegiac scene overly derivative.

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital follows six astronauts during a single day and sixteen orbits aboard the International Space Station as they observe Earth and reconsider humanity, beauty and connection. The review praises the novel’s looping structure, rhythmic prose and vision of astronauts as a collective human presence, while acknowledging that its repeated descriptions of celestial beauty can sometimes become excessive. Despite its idealism, the novel is presented as a convincing, hopeful meditation on cooperation and appreciation of the planet.

David Diop’s historical novel imagines the later-life account of French botanist Michel Adanson, who recalls travelling through 18th-century Senegal and becoming obsessed with Maram Seck, an African woman who was abducted into slavery and believed to have returned. The novel combines Senegalese oral storytelling, Wolof language and natural history with reflections on colonial assumptions, ecological destruction and the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade. Its layered narratives explore Adanson’s relationship with his daughter Aglaé and the complicated inheritances of colonial violence. The review praises the book’s imaginative richness, emotional force and lively complexity while noting that its opening section initially makes the novel’s central direction unclear.

Zadie Smith’s historical novel The Fraud interweaves the 1870s Tichborne Claimant trial in Victorian England with the history of Andrew Bogle and slavery on a Jamaican plantation. The review praises Smith’s deft prose, sharp satire and empathetic reconstruction of Eliza Touchet, while highlighting the novel’s links between literary London, colonial violence and the routines of Victorian social life. Its fragmented, multi-stranded structure can create readerly bafflement, but the novel’s hybridity ultimately becomes a source of fascination and moral complexity.

Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea follows Lucy Barton and her former husband, William, as they leave New York for the Maine coast during the early COVID-19 lockdown. The novel explores grief, family relationships, childhood trauma, memory, isolation and the difficulty of sustaining empathy amid political and social division. The review praises Strout’s subtle depiction of pandemic-era disorientation and her layered storytelling, while noting that the recurring connections among her fictional works can sometimes feel self-conscious.

Ross Raisin’s novel follows Anita, a senior London chef whose husband Patrick develops early-onset dementia after years of controlling and unequal behavior. The novel examines the conflict between professional identity and caregiving, alongside difficult questions about duty, choice, freedom and assisted death, shaped by Anita’s earlier experience caring for her mother. The review praises Raisin’s detailed depiction of professional kitchens, work and ordinary complicated lives, while acknowledging that the novel can feel overfull and occasionally laboured.

Elizabeth Lowry’s novel The Chosen imagines the aftermath of Emma Hardy’s death in 1912, when Thomas Hardy discovered the diaries and recollections that revealed her anguish over their failed marriage. The novel explores Hardy’s remorse, Emma’s isolation and thwarted identity, and the ethical costs of artistic absorption without reducing Hardy to a villain or offering a simple moral judgment. Set mainly at Max Gate, it uses multiple perspectives, restrained prose and flashes of gentle wit to depict mourning, domestic labor, family ties and the circumstances that helped produce Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13. The review praises Lowry’s nuanced, carefully judged portrait and its return to the emotional origins of Hardy’s elegies.

Lauren Groff’s Matrix imaginatively reconstructs the largely unknown life of Marie de France as a queer poet, lover and leader who becomes prioress and abbess of a struggling English convent. The novel depicts her transforming the community through work, engineering, agriculture, writing and collective discipline, while questioning whether her female utopia is genuinely liberating or merely an authoritarian system centered on a charismatic leader. The review praises Groff’s energetic prose, wit, historical imagination and nuanced treatment of ambition, creativity and communal life.