Christmas is an Open Book with the Year's Finest Fiction

Superb fiction gifting from the giants of the genre. [Christmas is an open book] Dear Reader, It’s a futile task to reduce what has been an outstanding year for fiction down to a handful of select titles. Any twelve months that manages to contain new work from the likes of [Zadie Smith], [Rose Tremain], [JM Coetzee] and [Sebastian Barry] must be regarded as unique, and that’s before even beginning to acknowledge the new voices now taking centre stage – the extraordinary [Sarah Perry], bringing gothic terror to the marshes with our Waterstones Book of the Year [The Essex Serpent]; [Colson Whitehead], perhaps, for his devastating tale of slaving atrocity [The Underground Railroad], or [Naomi Alderman]’s cool but visceral take on gender dominance in the speculative fiction of [The Power]. But with gifting in mind, and fiction gifting at that, we’ve settled on eight novels that deserve a considered place under the tree. [Nutshell] First, the return of a grandmaster. From [The Cement Garden] on, [Ian McEwan] has forged a sequence of literary landscapes so vivid they live on long after the book has been closed. The unforgettable game of consequence in [Atonement], say, or [On Chesil Beach]’s sad vignette of what was never meant to be. [Nutshell] is an audacious triumph of imagination, a thriller of a kind famously told in utero, a ‘consciously late, deliberately elegiac, masterpiece, a calling together of everything McEwan has learned and knows about his art,’ as The Guardian had it. Only a writer of McEwan’s prowess could take such a reduced vantage point and transform it into such a witty, bleak panopticon of our human condition: a storming performance. [Find out more] [Autumn] [Ali Smith] meanwhile continues with the blazing form she established with her 2015 Baileys Prize-bagging [How to Be Both]. [Autumn] is her bang up-to-date flourish of a novel (the first in a proposed seasonal sequence) that manages to both effortlessly surmise a Britain dazzled by the headlights of the EU referendum and a touching, complex tale of unconditional affection between two people aged many years apart. ‘I looked up at one point when I was reading, and realised that the time of the novel had just overtaken real-world time. It’s a brilliant and unsettling conceit, leaving you marvelling that writing this good could have come so fast.’ – The Financial Times [Find out more] [The Noise of Time] Five years have passed since [Julian Barnes] enjoyed Man Booker-winning triumph with [The Sense of an Ending], his elegant meditation on past deeds. Expectation then for this year’s [The Noise of Time] was unusually intense, fuelled by speculation over where Barnes would go next. As it was, our destination was unveiled as Stalin-era Russia and our protagonist the hopelessly-compromised Dmitri Shostakovich, a man suspended between his need to make great art and his fear of his Communist suppressors. What could in lesser hands have been rendered as a strange, potted biography becomes a resolutely gripping portrait of an artist at war with himself, compelled by the system to confront his own weaknesses to purchase advantage. ‘[The Noise of Time] doesn’t just tell the composer’s story,’ commented The New York Times, ‘it presumes to channel him.’ [Find out more] [The Dark Flood Rises] Over some five decades, [Margaret Drabble] has sculpted a defiant narrative niche, mirroring the times and its mores. [The Dark Flood Rises] – her first novel since 2013’s [Pure Gold Baby] – is a long, cool take on age and the passing of youthful needs and desires. Francesca Stubbs, the tale’s central character, is the ultimate pragmatist, an intelligent woman in her seventies resigned to routine and unreflective doing: in her friends we see a spectrum of choices around how we choose to live out our last. In the book’s sometimes apocalyptic fears and distanced yearnings, you feel Drabble is giving voice to a generation enlightened by self-awareness but resigned to time’s passing. [Find out more] [Hag-Seed] [Margaret Atwood]’s [Hag-Seed] is the fourth in Penguin’s transatlantic Hogarth Shakespeare series, a sequence of commissions to reimagine and reinterpret key texts from the playwright’s canon. As brilliantly inventive as you’d expect from the author of [The Heart Goes Last] and [The Handmaid’s Tale], Atwood takes the core of [The Tempest] and translates it to the confines of a male prison, restaging the play-within-a-play form of the original into a production of [The Tempest] itself. In Atwood’s hands, the novel gleefully dances around its source, plucking themes and character to craft an absorbing tale of revenge and the politics of imprisonment. [Find out more] [Mothering Sunday] Like [Julian Barnes], some time has passed since we were last treated to the writing of [Graham Swift], but the author of the superlative [Last Orders] resurfaced earlier in the year with [Mothering Sunday]. Brief and very adult, this concise novella is really the story of transformation, charting by turns how pleasure can often turn to darkness, but still ultimately attain a kind of genesis. We know almost from the outset what is to become of the young couple at the story’s heart, but Swift’s genius lies in its longueurs and those very tensions around what is to come. ‘[Mothering Sunday] is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly.’ – The Guardian [Find out more] [The Evenings] [The Evenings] is a novel that struck up intrigue seemingly from the moment its translation – a mere 70 years overdue – found publication at the beginning of November. Written in the immediate, dread-filled shadow of the Second World War by the prominent Dutch author [Gerard Reve], only now can we revel in this mordantly-funny depiction of one man’s private hell: his quest to fill the final ten, achingly-empty evenings of 1946, more often than not confined to the parental prison that is his family’s tiny, tired Amsterdam flat. The devil of course is in the detail, and every point of intense hatred – the repetition, the exhausted familial interchanges, the disgust at the futility of his own predicament – is presented with fabulous accuracy. There is far more going on than that – although effectively unmentioned, the post-apocalyptic brooding of the war still hangs heavy – but [The Evenings] reads as fresh and as acerbic as the day it was written. [Find out more] [The Muse] Our last selection in this all too brief potpourri is a source of particular pride for Waterstones. Back in 2014, a certain debut caught our eye as a pitch-perfect gem, a historical novel that lightly wore its 17th Century trappings and presented an enchanting tale of a wedding gift that could seemingly shape the future. By December, [Jessie Burton]’s [The Miniaturist] was awarded our Waterstones Book of the Year, shattering sales records and soaring on to become one of the most beloved novels of recent times. Now Jessie Burton returns with [The Muse], her equally-accomplished tale of two lives, split by years, but bound by a common destiny. The parallel settings (London of the late sixties; southern Spain at the outset of the civil war) provide Burton with all the scope she needs to spin her story of seduction, obsession and love, triggered by a mysterious painting that opens a doorway to the past. ‘As a study of female creativity, it triumphs… Burton’s muse, in whatever form it may take, is clearly in fine fettle.’ – The Guardian [Find out more] For every book here there could be a hundred others, but there’s no doubt that the calibre of an [Ian McEwan] or an [Ali Smith] certainly sets the bar: there’s no doubt that 2016 has been something of an embarrassment of riches. With all best wishes, Your friends at Waterstones [Facebook] [Twitter] [Instagram] [YouTube] [View email online]. 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