After The New Yorker’s recent list of 20 Best American Writers Under 40, I’m pleased I won’t have to wait until 2013 for Granta’s next list of “Best Young British Novelists”. The Telegraph has already published an intriguing list of Britain’s Best 20 Novelists Under 40. Zadie Smith is obviously on it, but the other writers are less well-known and I’m especially thrilled that Adam Foulds, David Szalay, and Patrick Neate are included.
Adam Foulds was the youngest author on last year’s shortlist for the Booker Prize and his acclaimed second novel, THE QUICKENING MAZE, is the most intense, graceful, intelligent yet understated, and deeply moving historical novel I’ve read since Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. THE QUICKENING MAZE is now published in the US as a Penguin paperback original and I doubt it happens very often that a paperback novel by a young English writer is given a three-page review by James Wood in The New Yorker. The review begins, “It has been a while since I have read a book as richly sown with beauty as Adam Foulds’ novel THE QUICKENING MAZE. It is a remarkable work, remarkable for the precision and vitality of its perceptions and for the successful intricacy of its prose.” I cannot link to the complete New Yorker review, but you can read an abstract here and I’ll gladly email the pdf of it to anyone who asks me for it. There is also a great review in The Washington Post: “Foulds conveys the profound loneliness of mental illness, the anxiety of being at least partially aware of one’s own peculiarity.” So far foreign rights to THE QUICKENING MAZE are sold to publishers in The Netherlands, Portugal, Israel, Czech Republic, China, and Egypt.
David Szalay’s perceptive, sensitive, darkly humorous writing is very much on my mind this spring and summer as I begin submitting his new manuscript, a contemporary London love story, which is currently titled “March” and will be published by Jonathan Cape in March 2011. Everyone at United Agents and everyone at Jonathan Cape who has read it, beginning with David Szalay’s editor, Dan Franklin, has declared it a masterpiece. Meanwhile, the Vintage paperback of David Szalay’s acclaimed second novel, THE INNOCENT, is being published on August 5th and Waterstones has picked him for a special promotion as “The Next Big Thing”. The Sunday Times review of THE INNOCENT said, “This is a slim book, but Szalay packs it with skilfully condensed detail…Still in his mid-thirties, Szalay will surely soon be adding more prizes to his Betty Trask [which he won for his debut novel, London and the Southeast].” So far David Szalay’s only foreign publisher is Keter in Israel.
Patrick Neate’s most recent novel, JERUSALEM, is the most illuminating, original, entertaining, imaginative yet hard-hitting novel I’ve read about contemporary England and Africa. Penguin has just published a new paperback edition along with new editions of Patrick’s acclaimed first two novels, Twelve Bar Blues (Winner of the 2001 Whitbread Prize) and Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko. So far the only foreign rights to JERUSALEM are sold to the French publisher, Intervalles. I will keep trying to convince others across Europe to translate this brilliant novel that William Boyd picked as one of his favourite novels of 2009 and Irvine Welsh praised as “The most though-provoking novel of the year. An utterly essential read.”
