Recommended fiction 2019

Everybody and their mom gives you reading recommendations. Why shouldn't an internet stranger?

Books

In Our Mad and Furious City - Guy Gunaratne

Gunaratne is a young British writer who came out of nowhere in 2018 and was suddenly on nearly every major prize list – for good reason. This, his debut novel, follows five inner city Londoners for 48 hours as the city threatens to boil over into violence in the wake of a killing. The characters take turns narrating, a format which lets Gunaratne's skills as a ventriloquist shine: each voice is masterfully rendered, distinct from the others, heavy with London street slang that's going to have you consulting Urban Dictionary.

Everything Under - Daisy Johnson

Also a prize list favorite, Everything Under is a swirling, murky novel about a swirling, mirky river. A mother and her daughter live in a houseboat on the Isis, isolated from the world, inventing their own language and – for lack of a better word – religion. The story has a mythical feel to it, in part due to several parallels to the Oedipus epic, and when a laptop made an appearance late in the book I found myself disoriented by the appearance of such a modern, everyday thing.

Such Good Work - Johannes Lichtman

Unlike the other two novels on this list – which have complex storylines and many characters and dense writing – this book is fairly simple in plot, and straightforward in writing. Firmly in the genre of autofiction, Such Good Work follows a Californian guy who moves to Sweden to study, hoping the change of scenery will help him kick a drug addiction. When he arrives, Sweden is having a moment of reckoning: it's in the midst of the influx of Syrian refugees, and, in between scenes featuring the narrator's romances and struggle with drug cravings, the novel asks how conscientious and informed first-worlders can productively confront their own privilege.

Short Stories

Five Stories - Lydia Davis

A collection of Lydia Davis stories is as essential to your nightstand as a lamp and a phone charger. Read a few stories before bed every night; they're short, sometimes only a paragraph or two, but there's a lot packed into a few words. "Fear," one of the stories linked above, is a personal favorite of mine.

Friends - Yours Truly

Sorry for the self-promotion, but I wanted to share this story I wrote a few years ago. A friend told me that my writing always seemed like it was trying to sound clever – which was very true – so this story went way in the other direction, arguably too far. But it's one of the rare pieces of my older writing that doesn't make me whole-body-cringe when I read it now.