Sunjeev Sahota is starting to look like a natural Booker author: he was shortlisted in 2015 for his last novel, The Year of the Runaways (and it won a clutch of other awards), and two years before that was named one of Granta magazine’s 20 Best Young British Novelists.
China Room (Harvill Secker, £16.99) bolts two narratives together. The first, and more satisfying, is in 1929 when Mehar, a young bride in Punjab, is busy trying to work out who her husband is: the marriage was arranged, and he comes to her only at night, under cover of darkness. She knows it's one of three brothers – "she has the right to be married to a good man – the specific man doesn't matter" – and she pieces together the clues. When she thinks she's worked it out, she experiences a sexual awakening that will lead only to trouble.
Meanwhile – or rather, 70 years later – Mehar’s great-grandson, the son of shopkeepers in England, is travelling to India to stay with relatives while he goes cold turkey from his heroin addiction. “I was sitting awkwardly . . . in a way that hid the undersides of my forearms.” The two stories share correspondences – illicit romance, arranged marriage – but they don’t chime enough to feel like part of a larger whole.
Nonetheless, China Room is elegantly written, affecting and even in places exciting. It seems like a fine, if slight, story of tradition battling change, but it’s doubtful whether that’s enough for it to progress from longlist to shortlist.
The dark horse of the Booker longlist is a slim novel published by a tiny independent press to resounding silence until it was picked up by the Booker judges. Author Karen Jennings follows fellow South Africans Nadine Gordimer, JM Coetzee and Damon Galgut into a harsh, dry fictional world that balances between allegory and realism. (Invoking Gordimer and Coetzee does not mean I think Jennings will win the Nobel Prize, unless she does.)
At the heart of An Island (Holland House Books, £9.99) is Samuel, a man who has retreated from the world to become a lighthouse keeper off the coast of an African country. When a man washes up on the shore – not dead, despite Samuel's hopes – he has to cope with the new visitor, while memories cast him back to his old country. We get a stark, effective portrayal of the cycle of despair visited upon the country's people: first by colonising forces, then by the freedom-fighter turned dictator who overthrows them.
An Island is a book with not much optimism in its vision of doubtful loyalties, self-regard and political futility, but which pulls the reader along with a sense of increasing menace as the past leaks into the present, all described in plain, unfussy language. It doesn’t have the richness or depth of some of the best longlisted titles – Galgut, Cusk, Ishiguro – but it’s a pleasant surprise to see it there.
Last year's Booker judges went overboard by filling almost two-thirds of the longlist with debut novels; this year's panel has been more restrained: just two out of the 13 titles are first novels. One of them, The Sweetness of Water (Tinder Press, £18.99) by Nathan Harris, has attracted the attention of Oprah and Obama – the twin peaks of celebrity literary endorsement in the US – and exhibits both the strengths and limitations of a debut.
In the fictional American southern town of Old Ox just after the civil war, two freed slaves, Prentiss and Landry, encounter a white man facing secret troubles. This isn’t the expected tale of racial tension and violence, or not quite – or not quite yet. It takes in surprising turns including same-sex relationships, which emphasise the scale of Harris’s ambition.
Yet the telling of the story does little justice to the themes. It’s written in a generic American historical lit-fic register, riddled with words such as “lambency” and “nary”, and sentimental renderings such as “the shred of hope felt like salvation” and “sometimes – just sometimes – hope was enough”. (There is an infinite amount of hope in this book, but not for us.) It reaches far in its content, but doesn’t try hard enough to tell this new story in a new way.
It is, in other words, the literary version of a glossy Netflix series: there’s nothing wrong with it, exactly, and we shouldn’t really expect more from a debut. But we should expect more from what is, we’re assured, one of the 13 best English language novels of the year.
Like China Room, The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed (Viking, £14.99) is another third novel, inspired by history, by one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, but where that book is skimpy, this one is full-bodied and full-blooded.
We’re in multiracial Cardiff in 1952, where Somalis, Jews, Jamaicans, Nigerians, Russians and Welsh live side by side – not always harmoniously – just as Princess Elizabeth is about to take the British throne. But the brutal murder of a local Jewish shopkeeper, Violet Volacki, turns the spotlight on 29-year-old Somali Mahmood Mattan.
Mattan, self-loathing, unemployed and getting into trouble since the breakdown of his marriage to Laura, is an easy mark for the police to focus their investigation on. Mohamed keeps things lively by switching between viewpoints and forms – including a tense court transcript – and even her minor characters, such as Berlin the bar owner, have dialogue that sparks and lights up the page.
The Fortune Men is both the story of an indelible miscarriage of justice – a newspaper report at the end pushes home that the core of this fiction is real – and a portrait of a country coming to terms with its multicultural changes, written with clarity and elegance. It’s not perfect: the policeman at the centre of Mattan’s investigation is a cardboard baddie, and Mohamed’s interest in Mattan’s backstory robs a fascinating narrative of drive. But overall this novel is a satisfying achievement: it’s perhaps a stretch to place it with Andrea Levy’s superb Small Island, but we’re in that ballpark.
