The violent attack on Salman Rushdie in August 2022 affirmed the enduring importance of fiction: we need novels in order to challenge, to empathise, to think freely. The publication of Rushdie’s 13th novel Victory City (Jonathan Cape, February), a magical realist feminist tale that spans 250 years, demonstrates the vital role the imagination plays in working ourselves out of a troubled world.
Politics runs throughout the year’s fiction. Diana Evans follows her bestselling Ordinary People with A House for Alice (Chatto & Windus, April), set in the shadow of Grenfell Tower. The poet Em Strang draws on a decade working in Scottish prisons in Quinn (Oneworld, March), which explores male violence, while caregiving and housing precarity are major themes in The Long Form by Kate Briggs (Fitzcarraldo, April). In Shalash the Iraqi (translated by Luke Leafgren, And Other Stories, May), an anonymous Iraqi citizen satirises the US-UK occupation of their home country. Sandra Newman retells George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from a feminist perspective in Julia (Granta, October), while Emily Wilson follows her 2017 translation of Homer’s Odyssey – the first into English by a woman – with The Iliad (WW Norton, September).
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