Making the list

• Published date: 30 October 2021
• Publication title: Mix, The

SECOND PLACE

Rachel Cusk

Faber & Faber

THE SWEETNESS OF WATER

Nathan Harrison

Tinder PressKLARA AND THE SUN

Kazuo Ishiguro

Faber & Faber

AN ISLAND

Karen Jennings

Holland House Books

A TOWN CALLED SOLACE

Mary Lawson

Chatto & Windus

CHINA ROOM

Sunjeev Sahota

Harvill Secker

LIGHT PERPETUAL

Francis Spufford

Faber & Faber

A PASSAGE NORTH

Anuk Arudpragasam

Granta Books

THE PROMISE

Damon Galgut

Chatto & Windus

THE FORTUNE MEN

Nadifa Mohamed

Viking

NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS

Patricia Lockwood

Bloomsbury

BEWILDERMENT

Richard Powers

Hutchinson Heinemann

GREAT CIRCLE

Maggie Shipstead

Doubleday

A pervading sense of impending doom hangs over Second Place.

From the first line, where our narrator writes about meeting the devil on a Parisian train, we are thrown into a world of vague menaces and strange figures.

The plot, such as there is one, centres on our narrator, M, and her husband Tony, who live on a marsh in an unnamed country. They frequently invite artists, writers, and other creatives to come and stay at another house on their property, the titular second place.

But when M invites L, an artist whose work had a transformative effect on her as a younger woman, her world is thrown into disarray.

Cusk writes with a dreamy, sometimes frustratingly introspective gaze, which bogged down the early stages of the book.

Many of the characters also had me grinding my teeth. The story takes the form of letters from M to a mysterious correspondent, Jeffers. In them, she is obsessive and needy, desperate to see herself reflected in the eyes of the artist she so admires.

The artist in question alternates between cruelly misogynistic and a pitiable man in the throes of a mid-life crisis.

The supporting characters are much more likeable, from the endearingly loyal Tony to M’s independent 20-something daughter Justine.

Both come into their own at the ending but the book suffers from being too heavily influenced by Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos.

Cusk says her story owes a debt to it, but for readers who have not read the 1932 memoir, many of the allusions to it will simply be confusing.

Set in a Southern town just after the end of the Civil War, the tensions between Confederate and Unionist, local and outsider, slaver and enslaved, form the novel’s heavy backdrop.

It is the story of a white family suffocating under the weight of words unspoken; and of two brothers, former slaves, seeking freedom in this new world.

It is a relationship whose tentative movement from transactional to personal is overshadowed by an act of violence that binds them together as it splits them apart, generating a metaphorical, and literal, fire that both erases the existing structure of their lives and creates space for renewal.

Harris successfully evokes the rhythms and cadences of 19th century America and captures the brutality of slavery and hierarchical dynamics of small-town life disconcertingly well.

His characters reflect the diversity of responses that must surely have accompanied the Reconstruction, and their stories show the enduring effects of casual cruelty and small kindnesses on individuals and communities.

That said, the black characters are not developed as fully as I would have liked and the novel ends with a vision of racial reconciliation that left me unconvinced.

Indeed, were it not written by a person of colour, the story as a whole would smack of virtue signalling, if not full-on white-saviour complex.

My ambivalence is not shared by many other reviewers, however, who have described it as lyrical and moving.

In this seemingly simple work, Artificial Friends (AFs) sit in a storefront, basking in the sun.

One such, a B2 model named Klara, is particularly insightful regarding interactions.

She radiates empathy, desiring to improve the world around her.

AFs can be matched as friends for young people. Klara and the ailing Josie are duly paired, and from then on Klara must learn to read Josie and her needs.

Her mother is an anxious individual, as are other adults in this unstable community.

We do not yet know why Josie is sick, or to what extent AFs must mimic...