Creative Publishing

Evaristo shared the prize with the year’s biggest book by far: Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel The Testaments (Chatto), which combines Aunt Lydia’s sly perspective on the theocratic regime – its brutal birth and her ambiguous role at the heart of it – with more action-adventure strands about the two young women seeking to bring it down. Fan-pleaser, literary curio, a fascinating example of the interplay between written fiction and TV: the book is all three, with Atwood’s musings on power and the patterns of history as incisive as ever.

If history felt like a hall of mirrors in 2019, and current affairs a car crash, then Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything (Hamish Hamilton) – the riddling story of one man, two time zones and two car accidents – was the novel to read. In the late 80s, Saul goes to East Berlin to study; in the recent past, he faces up to the rest of his life. Skewering different forms of totalitarianism – from the state, to the family, to the strictures of the male gaze – Levy explodes conventional narrative to explore the individual’s place and culpability within history. It’s one of the most unusual and rewarding novels of this or any year.

Halliday’s début arrived in February, dangling bait: a roman à clef starring an aging and unchaste Philip Roth. That’s the first half of the novel. In the second half, Amar, a Muslim-American economist, is detained at Heathrow Airport. A slim valedictory coda binds the two sections together. The complementary stories ping images off each other as Halliday raises volatile questions about imagination and its blind spots, about power, about the love of work and the work of love. Her book is a pleasure rush with a long half-life.

“Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant, and she’s on fire these days … Winter follows on the heels of Autumn—naturally. But aside from an exquisitely subtle link, the two books share concerns rather than characters or storylines and can be read separately. Their point of connection, so understated it’s easy to miss, demonstrates yet again Smith’s skill at revealing surprising relationships between seemingly disparate narrative threads … You can trust Smith to snow us once again with her uncanny ability to combine brainy playfulness with depth, topicality with timelessness, and complexity with accessibility while delivering an impassioned defense of human decency and art.”

–Heller McAlpin