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Fiction Uncovered 2013

Fiction Uncovered celebrates some of the best in British fiction. The judges read dozens of novels by writers who are neither debutants nor yet huge award winners, but who have often produced several excellent works of fiction. Here novelist Louise Doughty, Chair of Judges for this year's panel, introduces the Fiction Uncovered 2013 titles.

 

Lucy Caldwell - All the Beggars Riding

All the Beggars Riding is Caldwell's third novel and is about the children of the mistress of a married man who have remained in hiding most of their lives but emerge into the light when their father is killed in helicopter crash in Northern Ireland. Judge Lynne Hatwell called it, 'a jagged, searing and intense perspective on love, loss, the chaos of memory and so much more'.

Get All the Beggars Riding: Kindle | Paperback

 

 

 

Anthony Cartwright - How I Killed Margaret Thatcher

How I Killed Margaret Thatcher is also Cartwright's third novel and is the story of a boy who sees his family's lives devastated by Thatcherism. Courttia Newland said of it: 'While some books capture the spirit of a specific time and place, others paint a broad canvas which speaks of timelessness and exact a relevance all of their own. Cartwright manages both in this masterful exploration. An urgently necessary work'.

Get How I Killed Margaret Thatcher: Kindle | Paperback

 

 

 Niven Govinden - Black Bread White Beer

This is another third novel from a novelist to watch, a bleakly funny but touching and convincing portrait of a young married couple experiencing a miscarriage--but from the husband's point of view, a rarely explored area of an emotive topic. Lynne Hatwell says, 'Amal and Claud struggle to make sense of what has happened to them against a background of assumptions, high expectations and social pressures. This is a fluent, involving and beautifully written novel'.

Get Black Bread White Beer: Kindle | Paperback

 

 

Nikita Lalwani - The Village

Nikita Lalwani was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her first novel, Gifted, and has already been shortlisted for the 2008 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. The Village is set in a model prison in India, set up as a social experiment, where people who have committed murder live in a self-sustaining community. Lalwani has a rare gift for getting inside character in a tough, engaging and often funny read where all your preconceptions will be overturned and no-one is quite how they seem.

Get The Village: Kindle | Paperback

 

 

Nell Leyshon - The Colour of Milk

Nell Leyshon is another prize nominated author--she's been long-listed for the Orange Prize, and shortlisted for the Commonwealth prize. Set in 1830, The Colour of Milk tells the story through the journal of a 14-year-old farm girl. Mary is the youngest of four daughters who has a strong spirit and desire to learn how to read and write. Judge Sandeep Mahal says of it, 'Nell Leyshon has perfectly captured characters of its time and beautiful prose filled with truth, hope and anticipation that makes this novel a pure joy to read'.

Get The Colour of Milk: Kindle | Hardcover

 

 

James Meek - The Heart Broke In

James Meek is the most well known author on this list--The Heart Broke In was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award 2012. He is one of our best novelists; his fat, compulsive, brilliant books have wide ranging narratives that cover world issues as well as the stories at the centre of the human heart. Few novelists writing today have such an acute ear for the nuances of family life and relationships--but Meek never forgets to set his human stories in a social context, making him a supreme contemporary satirist as well storyteller.

Get All the Beggars Riding: Kindle | Paperback

 

 

Amy Sackville - Orkney

Orkney is Amy Sackville's second novel. Set on the island of the title, it concerns the increasingly dark and mysterious relationship between Richard, a 60-year-old English professor and his lovely but elusive young bride. Sandeep Mahal says of it, 'The story unfolds slowly, beginning with excitement and the allure of romance, but the mood changes into something darker. Sackville's skill is in her poetic, lyrical writing, full of rich and emotive feelings, the ebb and flow of the waves and descriptions of the beauty, colours and wildness of the islands'.

Get The Heart Broke In: Kindle | Hardcover

 

 

Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

Rupert Thomson is the author of eight critically acclaimed novels. Secrecy was inspired by the life and work of the eccentric Sicilian wax artist, Gaetano Giulio Zumbo and is a compulsive historical thriller. Courttia Newland calls it, 'A splendorous, dark examination of the artist's mind set in a politically tumultuous Florence where shadowed streets and alleys mask cruelty and beauty in equal measure. Secrecy is a twisted hybrid of fantastical reality, stark and terrifying. Daringly bold and decadent'.

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"Red Moon" by Benjamin Percy

People say to write what you know. I’ve always thought to turn that advice on its head: know what you write. Make every story a research project. If you’re writing about Istanbul, better book a plane ticket.  If you’re writing about a taxidermist, visit a studio where you can clack the glass eyeballs like marbles, stroke your hand along the polyurethane forms, sniff the formaldehyde.  If you’re writing about a mass shooting, then dig through newspaper and magazine and television archives, sure, but also sit down with police, with the families of victims, and take notes.

Library research is valuable, of course, but the best ideas come from the trenches. Walking the streets. Visiting a gun range. Interviewing someone in their smoke-filled living room while they ash a cigarette into a coffee cup and tell you their version of what happened.

There was so much I didn’t know when I sat down to write Red Moon. One of my characters was a politician. One of them a government agent. One a Marine. A brewmaster. A realtor. A pharmacy tech. A researcher who specializes in vaccines and animal-borne pathogens.

I watched documentaries. I read articles and books and blogs. But mostly I talked to people. I got on the phone, dropped my offices, arranged coffee dates. I spent dozens and dozens of hours with researchers at the USDA labs and Iowa State University, asking them about everything: the set up of their labs, the size and responsibilities of their teams, the process of applying for grants, building a vaccination, maneuvering through the gauntlet of bureaucracy and politics.

But mostly I wanted to pin down the slippery science that informs Red Moon. A disease--similar to Mad Cow Disease and Chronic Wasting Disease--leaps out of the wolf population in prehistoric times, mutates in its human host, and today infects roughly ten percent of the population. In reinventing the werewolf myth, I wanted to make this novel not some snarly dreamscape, but a possibility, a believable horror that targeted the anxieties of our times.

--Benjamin Percy

Get Red Moon: Kindle | Hardcover

If You Want To Lose Weight, Eat More! by Zoë Harcombe

We want to be slim more than we want pretty much anything else in the world and yet two thirds of us are overweight and one quarter obese. This doesn’t make sense. We start yet another diet with supreme resolve. We vow that nothing will derail us this time and then muffins are "calling out to be eaten" a few hours later. Why?

I set out to answer this question while experiencing food addiction myself and feeling completely out of control around food. I did a great deal of research during my 20s and discovered three common medical conditions that cause insatiable food cravings. You’ve probably heard of them; you may well have at least one of them, but you are unlikely to have made the connection between, say, water retention or bloating, and your favourite food being bread.

The three conditions are: candida, food intolerance and hypoglycaemia. I studied the original works on each of these ailments and was astonished by the connections between the symptoms and causes of all of them. The ultimate discovery was that one of the most likely causes is calorie controlled dieting.

Thus The Harcombe Diet was born--the perfect diet to overcome the three conditions and to thereby put you back in control of your eating. You really can overcome food addiction. You will reawaken a taste for real, nutritious food and the endless energy and wellbeing that it gives you. The days of lurching from one (sugar led) high to the inevitable (sugar crash) low can be distant memories.

I set out to design a diet to overcome food cravings and to put people back in control of food. The Harcombe Diet does this. I didn’t set out to design a diet that would achieve spectacular weight loss, but this just happens to be the icing on the cake (excuse the pun). The current record is 17lb in 5 days; if you don't lose 7lb in that time, I'll be disappointed.

As my passion is to help people to both lose weight and gain health--there’s even more good news. The three conditions come with many other nasty symptoms. As well as food cravings and weight disappearing, you may find any, or all, of the following clear up on this carefully designed plan: bloating, irritable bowel syndrome, premenstrual tension, headaches, psoriasis, muscle aches, thrush, dandruff, irritability... the list goes on.

The definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. So, if you're ready to try something different, to lose weight and gain health, what are you waiting for? If you feel like your get up and go has got up and gone, you're about to get it back. And all you've got to do is to stop eating less and start eating better.

--Zoë Harcombe

Get The Harcombe Diet 3-step Plan: Kindle | Paperback

Isabelle Grey on "Out of Sight"

The shocking event that forever changes the life of my novel’s central character, Patrick Hinde, may sound like the stuff of urban myth, but such fatal distraction is all too tragically real.

In Out of Sight I wanted to write about how and why people get stuck and fail to change, how we all sometimes forget that repeating destructive behaviour can only damage both others and ourselves. So when, by chance, I came across newspaper reports of two strikingly similar tragic incidents concerning diligent but absent-minded fathers that occurred in France within a couple of weeks of each other in 2008, I knew I had found a story that perfectly dramatized the kind of forgetting I wanted to explore.

In 2011, the same thing happened in Italy to two other equally loving fathers. The pregnant wife of one insisted: "He is not guilty of anything. He is an exemplary father". Patrick Hinde, too, is a devoted husband and a loving and responsible father and, had disaster not struck, he would no doubt have gone on to lead a blameless life; yet, in order to escape his own parents’ unbearable anxiety, he empties his mind even of his precious son.

The novel’s other main character is Leonie Treadwell, the woman who later falls in love with Patrick (who now calls himself Patrice). Although she does not know his past, she realises he is suffering, and that triggers her passionate belief in the redemptive power of love. I also write television drama, so, as a screenwriter, it was an enjoyable challenge to capture how, when such a hidden man speaks, he can genuinely believe himself to be sincere when he talks about events he has "forgotten". And also to reveal the psychological suspense in how Leonie fails to hear--or chooses not to--the inevitable gaps between his words.

I began my story on the south coast in Brighton because, while the sea plays no part in the book’s tragedy, it’s always such a potent reminder that risk and danger remain close beside us. It then moves to France, to a landscape I remembered from my teenage years, a place of warmth and generosity that would echo Leonie’s optimism. And I made Patrick a respected homeopath because I wanted to show that he, too, holds potent beliefs about the possibility of healing and redemption.

Out of Sight contains great sadness, but ultimately it’s a love story. The hopeful naivety of Leonie’s belief may leave her blind-sided, but it’s the only force we possess powerful enough to overcome emotional damage. The book raises difficult questions: when does Patrick’s inability to recover tip over into cowardice and even cruelty? And at what point does Leonie’s refusal to give up on him become foolish? How do we ever know when to give up on the people we love?

 --Isabelle Grey

Get Out of Sight: Kindle | Paperback

"The Back Road" by Rachel Abbott: a Kindle Exclusive

Rachel Abbott is a thrillers writer. Both her novels, Only the Innocent and The Back Road, are featured in this month's selection of 100 Kindle Books: Each £2.99 or less.

One curious phenomenon I’ve experienced since being a writer is that friends and family claim to recognise so many personality traits of characters in my books--and it’s not just my own peculiarities they see, but also those of people we know in common.

In The Back Road there are two sisters, and I’ve been asked more than once whether their relationship is based on mine with my own sister--and if so, which of us is the gentle, smiling but confused and threatened Ellie, and which is the acerbic, defensive and damaged Leo? Or worse, they find a particularly unpleasant character and send me an email asking "is that Geoff?". It’s all rather disturbing for a thriller writer, if truth be told.

Fortunately, that’s not how it works for me. Or at least, not exactly. For a start, I don’t personally know many murderers--as far as I’m aware. On the other hand, I do like to focus strongly on relationships in my books, and the ways in which people deal with circumstances that could potentially confront any one of us. So I’m a hoarder. I witness behaviours and store little nuggets and nuances of the way people react to each other. I’ve always been interested in talking to people and hearing their stories--endless three hour journeys to London and back when I had a proper job were vastly improved by chatting to whomever I happened to be sitting next to. The joy of being a stranger is that people feel they can tell you everything--somehow disregarding the fact that the rest of the carriage can hear every word.

To be fair, I have never used a single one of these scenarios. But many of them have made me think about people’s responses to stress, and how far people would go to protect themselves and their families. Each of my characters ultimately represents a stained-glass window of personality fragments.

When I’m writing a book, I start with the stress point. In Only the Innocent the question I asked myself was "what would it take for a normal, sane woman to commit murder?" then I had to create that woman, and work out not just the how of the murder, but the why--which is so much more important to me. This woman had to commit murder because there was absolutely no other choice. I didn’t want to create a monster. I needed a real person.

The Back Road was more complex. I wanted a small village with a group of people with fairly normal secrets--but then I needed an inciting incident that would blow all deceptions wide open. The key to me was working out how each of the people would react, and who would have to commit murder to survive.

So if you meet me on a train and I’m watching you, it’s nothing personal. I’m just storing ideas that might become one small sliver of my next character.

--Rachel Abbott

Get The Back Road: Kindle

"All That Mullarkey" by Sue Moorcroft

When the title of All That Mullarkey came to me it was one of those slap-the-forehead-in-joy moments that authors adore, an idea that seemed so completely right that nobody could ever possibly want to change it. And so it proved. The title stuck.

But what does All That Mullarkey mean? According to my Oxford Dictionary of Slang malarkey/malarky/mullarkey is tall stories; an online dictionary suggests it's exaggerated or foolish talk and yet another simply states rubbish. So, like much slang, it's a phrase that can mean what you intend it to mean when you use it.

Which set me to pondering over the slang dictionary as I realised I often have my own interpretation: 

Let it all hang out

Dictionary definition: candid speech.

Sue's definition: laid back and cool. "He just lets it all hang out". Or: "Don't worry about your muffin top. It's meant to escape over the top of your jeans, or it wouldn't be a muffin top".

Worse for wear

DD: old and outdated.

SD: drunk. Maybe utilising the British talent for understatement. "Jen's a bit worse for wear"… as you return Jen to her house, pouring her onto the hall floor minus one shoe and two of her false nails.

Old boy

DD: old man.

SD: Ah. If you live in Northamptonshire, England, old boy is a versatile term. It can be interpreted as per the above dictionary definition. But your old boy is your dad or your son (work that one out) … or, erm, male anatomy. Some old boy = a male of unknown identity. A good old boy = a male to be admired. And, my personal favourite, young old boy, which is a youth. Ergo, some young old boy = a young male of unknown identity. "Who told you about the car crash?", "Some young old boy who saw it happen".

Hobson's Choice

DD: rhyming slang for "voice".

SD: to have only one option. Also, a pub in the town where I live. Just saying.

Whacker

DD: a large lie.

SD: a vibrating plate layer. It is! Ask any builder or road worker. It's one of those big thumpy things that flattens bits of ground. If you suffer from migraine, you probably have one in your head.

Freak out

DD: to give way to heightened emotion. Drug-induced hallucinations.

SD: a 1970's dance.

Pogo

DD: an ineffectual or incompetent man.

SD: a 1980's dance.

All That Mullarkey

DD: tall tales; foolish talk; rubbish.

SD: I would tell you. But it would spoil the book for anyone who hasn't read it yet.

 

--Sue Moorcroft

Get All That Mullarkey: Kindle | Paperback

 

"The Gilded Fan" by Christina Courtenay

Christina Courtenay won the Best Historical Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists’ Association in 2012 for her novel Highland Storms. The Kindle edition of her latest novel, The Gilded Fan, is featured in this month's selection of 100 Kindle Books: Each £2.99 or less.

Certain places leave a deep impression on you and if you’re an author this usually means you’ll feel the need to put them in a book at some point.  For me, that place was Japan - a country of infinite facets with a culture that is a truly unique mixture of old and new.

I was lucky enough to live there as a teenager and although adolescents are usually oblivious to their surroundings, Japan got under my skin.  At first I found it all very strange and alien, but as I met its people, learned snatches of the language, tried the food and experienced the customs, I began to feel at home.  So much so that I constantly long to go back, especially this time of year during the sakura or cherry blossom season.  It’s a magical time when whole cities are transformed by blossom-laden trees and you can’t help but be moved and amazed.

I used Japan as part of the setting for two of my novels (The Scarlet Kimono and The Gilded Fan) and although these stories are historical, I drew on my own emotions and experiences to try and capture the essence of this country.  This was made easier because in some respects so little has changed.  Even though Japan is no longer a feudal state, many of the customs still reflect its past.  And there is a wealth of magnificent buildings and sites to visit where days gone by feel as though they happened only yesterday.

Himeji Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is one such and standing at the top of its central tower (tenshu) I found it easy to imagine myself back in the 17th century.  The hordes of tourists who surrounded me faded into the background and my imagination took flight.  The same thing happened at Nijo Castle, which isn’t strictly speaking a castle at all, but the Shogun’s Kyoto residence.  But in Japan you don’t actually need such massive prompts in order to be inspired--everywhere you go, you’ll find aesthetically pleasing touches that make you want to grab pen and paper.

Fortunately the Japanese people are more welcoming to foreigners these days than they were in the 1700s.  In The Gilded Fan, the heroine is forced to flee the country in 1641 in order to escape persecution by the then Shogun and his officials.  Europeans were rare in the Far East; foreign women even more so--in fact, I doubt any of them ever went there, but this is fiction and the question of "what if they had?" spurred me on to imagine what would have happened.

It is fascinating to think that the foreigners (all Dutch, the only Europeans allowed to trade by this time) were mostly confined to a tiny island, Dejima in Nagasaki, and not allowed to set foot on the mainland.  To have come so far and not see the rest would seem unbearable to me, but then I know what they were missing, perhaps they didn’t?

 --Christina Courtenay

Get The Gilded Fan: Kindle | Paperback

 

 

 

Famous Plot Devices That Technology Is Making Obsolete by Andrew Blackman

Everyone recognises the changes that technology has wrought on our hyper-connected 21^st-century lives. But technology has changed fiction, too. Here are some famous plot devices that contemporary fiction writers will soon have to strike from their repertoires in an age of Twitter, Facebook, texting and instant messaging.

1. The letter in the wrong hands

The messenger failing to deliver a letter, or delivering it to the wrong person, has been a favourite plot device for writers from Shakespeare to Ian McEwan. It’s a great way of driving the plot forward by creating misunderstandings or by bringing secrets out into the open. But today’s Romeo would receive a barrage of texts, emails and Facebook pokes from Friar Laurence, making it hard for him not to get the news of Juliet’s faked death.

2. The cut telephone line

This one’s a staple of the horror and thriller genres. There’s something so chilling about the moment a terrified victim picks up the phone to call for help, only to find the intruder has cut the line. Nowadays her first instinct would be to reach into her pocket and call the police on her mobile.

3. The secret diary entry

Diary entries have provided windows into characters’ secret stories and motivations from Wuthering Heights to The Sense of an Ending. But will longhand diaries survive much longer now that people are sharing things online that a decade or two ago they’d only have confided to their closest friends? Can fiction survive if characters have no secrets?

4. The missed connection

In Kerouac’s On the Road, Sal travels all the way from the West Coast to his aunt’s house in New Jersey, only to find that Dean was there two days earlier, but left for San Francisco. Today a few simple texts would accomplish the job much faster (although possibly at the expense of the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being).

5. Immigration as rupture

If in classic narratives the immigrants arrived knowing little about the reality of the land they were entering and having only the occasional letter as their contact with home; in contemporary immigration stories it’s all very different from the sudden rupture, and is likely to get even more different as characters begin to use email, Skype and social media to keep in closer contact with home.

6. Losing touch

In romance novels, the star-crossed lovers often exchange phone numbers, only for the phone number one of them scribbled on a napkin to be mislaid, or left in a pocket and accidentally put through the wash. Now, even if the phone is lost, instead of taking 400 pages for boy to find girl again, it would take approximately 4.7 seconds: Google the person, find their Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter page, message them, done. Not a very promising fictional plot.

#

At some point, every character in contemporary fiction will need to be equipped with a smartphone and a bevy of social media accounts in order to be believable.

But it’s not all bad news. The worlds of Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging, texting and smartphone apps all offer a world of new possibilities for conflict, rage, love and misunderstandings. Detectives can find clues by rifling through suspects’ text-message archives instead of their desk drawers. Characters can shapeshift, reinvent themselves, argue and fall in and out of love without ever meeting in "real life".

It’s a fictional landscape that we are only beginning to explore.

--Andrew Blackman

Get A Virtual Love: Kindle | Paperback

Lindsey Davis on "The Ides of April"

Flavia Albia first appeared as a minor character in The Jupiter Myth when my previous Roman protagonists, Falco and Helena, were visiting Britain. She joined their household, and we have watched her grow from a child, through troubled teenage years; eventually she realised she will always be an outsider in Rome and in Nemesis left home and decided to set up as a private investigator like her adopted father, Falco. Until now she was an interesting member of the large regular cast--but on the sidelines.

Readers may like to consider that I devised Albia over ten years ago--a very long gestation period for a lead character, which is what Albia becomes in her own right in The Ides of April and its planned sequel. Yes, this is a Falco spin-off. I have written 20 novels in my first series, plus Falco: the Official Companion and I crave a change. Writers need to be refreshed and there would be no point slogging away at the same old stuff while I was perhaps growing bored. Who nowadays expects to do the same job, in the same department, for more than 20 years, churning out exactly the same paperwork? I’m a pensioner now and I don’t want to let my writing become the equivalent of stacking supermarket shelves.

It is quite exciting to create a new series. I think a spin-off needs to be strong and distinctive by itself, not some weedy compromise. New readers should be able to start with Albia without any fears that they need to read 20 other books first. She has to leap off the page herself. That said, previous readers are bound to feel a frisson whenever she mentions her parents--this will be fun for them, though should not deter newcomers. Albia speaks of Falco and Helena like any daughter describing her parents, loving them but perhaps with a little disparagement for their maddening eccentricities. You only need to know what she says.

Will they appear in her books? Parents are always keen to take over their children’s lives, Albia would growl. Will she be strong enough to prevent this? Wait and see!

Of course she is very strong indeed. Any investigator has to be. I chose her as my new heroine precisely because she had curiosity, determination, the ability to view people and events with wry detachment--and courage. She grapples with the awkwardness of being a woman in a man’s world, winning over men in the process. In The Ides of April she makes mistakes--and puts them right. She forces the authorities to investigate a crime they prefer to ignore. She solves the crime.

One way I managed to make her strong and individual was to write in the first person, as I had done with Falco. But this time it is Albia’s voice, her opinions, her insecurities, her prejudice, her wit. I hope it is a voice that readers will enjoy.

--Lindsey Davis

Get The Ides of April: Kindle | Hardcover

"How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" by Mohsin Hamid

I am sitting in a hotel room in New York. Or lying, rather, as I'm in bed with my computer on my lap. It is 5:57 am. I flew over from Asia yesterday, and the jet-lag has kicked in: I collapsed into sleep at 10 pm, after a heroic struggle to keep my eyes open as long as I could, and I woke with a start three hours later. Writing is, among other things, a way to pass the time. It is cold out. It is dark. I have time to pass. And so I am writing.

My new novel is called How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. It borrows its title from the genre of self-help books. But it is a novel. Or rather: and it is a novel. It's a straight-up, birth-to-death, poor-boy-makes-(sort-of)-good, gritty, shamelessly romantic love story. It's strange in the way it's built, yes, but it's strange for a reason. As a writer, I've never been interested in experimentation for experimentation's sake. I believe in experimentation for the sake of telling a better story. Telling a story that maybe couldn't have worked in a straighter, straight-jacketed form.

There's a spiritual side to fiction-writing in my view, regardless of whether you believe in a spirit. For my part, I'm speaking utterly secularly here. What I mean is: we're all confronted by the notion that we are mortal, that we will die. So we look for something to make that reality less horrifying. Art, writing, is one way to do it. It's one of my ways of doing it, at least. When I'm writing, my self feels less central to me. I'm beyond myself. I feel... what? Better, maybe. When I don't write for a few months I tend to become increasingly unhappy. My wife often points this out.

The same applies to reading. When I read, I transcend the boundaries of my self. I'm off in other places, engaging with another consciousness, inventing images and characters in my head out of the words I see on a page. I think this is a common occurrence. I think this is something most people experience when they read. Reading is one of the few ways as an adult that we can play extendedly in our imaginations, as we used to do as children.

So novels, it seems to me, are a kind of self-help book. They're self-help for writers. And they're self-help for readers. My new novel is just a little more explicit about this than most. Being explicit gives it a chance to be playful, and tricky, and maybe honest too. Because I'm not doing this alone. I'm doing it with you, the reader. There are two of us dancing this dance.

My job, as I see it, is to make the dance worth your time. Your job is to animate the text, make it come alive for you. If we both do that, then we have fiction. And fiction is magic. Magic that's real.

--Mohsin Hamid

Get How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: Kindle | Hardcover