tove-ditlevsen

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen review – confessions of a literary outsider

The Danish writer reflects on success, addiction and divorces in three volumes of compulsive autofiction: Childhood, Youth and Dependency

tove-ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen. Photograph: Per Pejstrup/Press Association Images

For the four decades after the outbreak of the second world war, Tove Ditlevsen was one of Denmark’s most famous and extravagantly tortured writers, whose many identities – dreamy working-class misfit, ruthlessly focused artist, ambivalent wife and mother, literary outsider and drug addict – were constantly at war.

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Tiger by Polly Clark review – passionate tale of the wild under threat

In the three years since Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement berated literature for its failure to rise to the challenge of climate breakdown, fiction writers have made up for lost time. Indeed cli-fi, once a subset of science fiction, has been so quickly subsumed by realism that its days as a self-contained genre may be numbered.

The mass extinction of species has taken longer to percolate. While threatened ecosystems have sparked an explosion of powerful, elegiac non-fiction by Helen Macdonald, George Monbiot, Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane, Katharine Norbury and others, novels about wildlife have stuck largely to their traditional habitat of the children’s and young adult shelves.

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Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates

Time travel stories are seldom really about time, or travel, and Joyce Carol Oates’ 46th novel is no exception. Audacious, chilling and darkly playful, her thought experiment about belonging and otherness is quick to ignite, but admirably slow to reveal the full extent of its dystopian proposition.

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The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan review – mermaids and mysteries on a Scottish island

Emotionally, an island is always more than a land-mass surrounded by water. As metaphors, islands can denote freedom, imprisonment and everything in between, while as backdrops, they invite extravagant experiment. When it comes to the latter, Kirsty Logan has form. Her debut novel The Gracekeepers, an environmental fairytale set in a lush, futuristic waterscape, won wide acclaim and comparisons to Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Emily St John Mandel.

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America City by Chris Beckett review – dark vision of our future

The Arthur C Clarke winner’s dystopia is set in a future US ravaged by climate change and war

providence-mountains-fountain-peak-mojave-desert

The signposts have been around for decades, and the territory is increasingly well mapped. So while the past may be a foreign country, the future is an increasingly familiar one – in which we continue to be alarmingly ourselves.

In this vivid and disturbing climate-change novel, Chris Beckett, winner of the Arthur C Clarke award, compellingly illustrates the consequences of our species’ fatal hard-wiring. Though a knight’s move away from his acclaimed sci-fi trilogy Dark Eden, Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden, his new work shares a preoccupation with the survival and evolution of societies in inhospitable worlds.

No Dominion by Louise Welsh – a deeply satisfying conclusion

According to futurologists, a baby born today will live to 100. But what do they know? In her Plague Times trilogy, Louise Welsh trashes such blithe predictions, setting the grim reaper to work in a not unlikely near-future scenario: a flu-like epidemic ravaging the world’s population and leaving survivors plunged into chaos.

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Under a Pole Star by Stef Penney – foul play and doomed love in the Arctic

Unforgiving landscapes have served Stef Penney well: she first depicted them to heart-catching effect in her Costa-winning debut The Tenderness of Wolves, a historical adventure of abduction and quest, cultural assimilation and domination set in the Canadian wilderness. A meticulously researched drama set among British Gypsies, The Invisible Ones, followed. In the stately, glittering iceberg that is Under a Pole Star she returns to the north with a tale of foul play and doomed love.

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The Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine

Now out in English, Leine’s astonishing, hallucinatory journey into the frozen heart of Denmark’s colonial darkness is inspired by events during the reign of the mad Danish king, Christian VII.

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Slade House by David Mitchell

“Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by MC Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever,” observes a spooked member of a university’s paranormal society in David Mitchell’s manically ingenious new novel, Slade House. It’s hard not to read the assessment as the author’s compressed verdict on his own Halloween-timed offering, but the book is much more besides.

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Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick de Witt – a comic tale with a touching protagonist

One of the great joys of comic fiction is that it can do anything it wants. It can explore the sexual possibilities of a giant salami, provoke empathy with a merciless killer, or throw the English language into a blender and make it taste like high gastronomy despite the weird colour and the lumps – or perhaps because of them.

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