Francis Spufford, Manish Chauhan and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments
I’ve been reading a very short book by Claire Baglin, translated by Jordan Stump, On the Clock. Set on the edge of somewhere in Brittany, all run-down blocks, dual carriageways and drive-in eateries, it’s a dark, sometimes funny story of a working-class family and a young woman starting work in a fast-food restaurant. Through a few short scenes we get a real insight into the quotidian soullessness of the work.
It’s a quick read, but although there isn’t much to celebrate in the anomie, or the false bonhomie, of the workplace, it’s full of compassion and heart. By keeping her focus so very narrow, Baglin has more to say about today’s world than a much longer story might. The two protagonists and their precarious lives feel very real. It has the touch of a handheld film: raw, immediate and with something important to say.
The best things I’ve read lately have been Melissa Harrison’s The Given World, nearly but not quite published yet, a novel which is both an elegy for the death of the English countryside and also a beautiful demonstration of how a piece of realist literary fiction can subtly borrow from the fantastic, weaving in threads of the mythic and the unearthly that enrich the this-worldly sense the book is making. Conversely, but adjacently, I’ve just read Kit Whitfield’s All the Hollow of the Sky, an out-and-out fantasy novel by a former star of British SFF, now gloriously returned, which demonstrates how immense emotional intelligence enriches and grounds a wholly magical story, set in an enchanted counterpart to the English countryside. Kind of bookends to each other, really.
