However, the fact is that readers expecting a series of whodunits had come to the wrong place, because I am a proponent of the notion that a mystery does not have to include a crime—indeed, I’ve always viewed it as the archetypal journey through chaos to resolution. But that doesn’t help the PR pros to pitch a novel or indeed booksellers and librarians to shelve it—and it plays havoc with reviewers. Does this go to the Crime critic? The Historical Novel expert? Or the … well, fill in the gap. Within the literary form that we tag “mystery” you will read some of the finest fiction on the subject of the environment, the machinations of government, immigration, treatment of refugees, poverty, international conflict—and so many more subjects from writers who have done stellar homework or who are already experts in their field but have chosen fiction to touch upon universal truths rather than be restricted by hard-wired facts. Perhaps noted historian Simon Schama was onto something when he said in his series, The History of Now, “It’s not always politicians, but artists, musicians and writers who rouse us from indifference and become the true agents of change.” That works as long as we also remember that as novelists of whatever stripe, we are in the entertainment industry.
From Circe to Medusa via Persephone, Electra and the women of Troy, it seems there are few characters from Greek mythology left who haven’t been the subject of a feminist retelling in recent years. This year, the world of such reimaginings is expanding beyond the Greeks – although there is a clutch of those retellings, too – with the publication of books about Julia from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (Katherine Bradley’s The Sisterhood), Rosaline from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons) and Morgan le Fay from Arthurian legend (Sophie Keetch’s Morgan Is My Name).
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Looking at the number of books still to come – from Bea Fitzgerald’s Girl, Goddess, Queen to Jennifer Saint’s Atalanta – and those that have been released in the last couple of years, it seems there’s no end to these retellings. But are we close to reaching saturation point? And if a story is simply being retold, is there any creativity involved?
Ceramic cookie jars — those flamboyant crockeries topped with ornate finials — first brought art into the heart of American homes decades ago. Becoming a prominent kitchenware item by the 1950s, around the introduction of premade cookie dough, cookie jars remained popular well into the 1990s. But even after being sidelined as seasonal holiday decor, broad adoration for ceramic cookie jars has never fully disappeared. “The idea of a cookie jar is familiar and it feels nostalgic,” says Mae. “But also, it’s new and fresh and contemporary.”
The narrative pleasures of “Flux” lie less in the big reveals than in watching Chong knit together genre tropes from sci-fi movies, speculative fiction and thrillers to tell a story about how what we remember can imprison us — and why freedom may lie within.
When the American war machine withdrew from Vietnam, it left a lot behind. It left a military debacle so mismanaged it became a common metaphor for disaster. It left years of fighting that saw tens of thousands of servicemen killed, and millions more Vietnamese citizens. The new novel "Dust Child" shifts the focus away from the battlefield, looking instead at what was lost on a much more intimate scale.
If still life is a background of lustrous dark space against which shines life, Doty uses this composition to show how memory illuminates certain people and objects while allowing others to recede.