BBC Culture Article: The Most Overlooked Recent Novels

In Cameron Laux’s article for BBC Culture  eight acclaimed authors reveal their favourite hidden gems outside the literary canon.

Sometimes we need to nudge our reading off the beaten track – and this list aims to do that. All of the books here mess with, or transcend, the idea of genre in impressive ways – arguably to their cost, because if marketing departments can’t get a firm grip on them, they fall through the cracks of a book-selling system that often hinges on pigeon-holing. These titles are idiosyncratic – and, it could be said, underrated – and their authors have each picked a book or two that they regard as overlooked masterpieces. It’s time to find some hidden gems beyond the literary canon. – Cameron Laux

Laux’s writers include Jeff VanderMeer, Esi Edugyan, Max Porter, Helen DeWitt, Brian Catling, Marlon James , Steven Erikson, and Tade Thompson. I am thrilled that “All the Fabulous Beasts” has been recommended by Tade, author of “The Murders of Molly Southbourne” and the Arthur C. Clarke Award winning “Rosewater”.

Buy Tade Thompson’s work from Amazon UK, Amazon US, and Waterstones.

Buy “All the Fabulous Beasts” direct from Undertow Publications. Also available from Amazon UK, Amazon US, and Waterstones.

 

 

 

Review in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine

Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949, is the award-winning imonthly SF magazine which is the original publisher of SF classics like Stephen King’s Dark Tower, Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. I am blown away that the lastest issue (March/April 2020) contains a review of my novella, Ormshadow, by Elizabeth Hand. Yes, ELIZABETH HAND.

Like Alan Garner’s Alderley Edge novels, Ormeshadow draws much of its power from Sharma’s understanding of how landscape shapes us as surely as it shapes the myths we tell about it. Like Garner, Sharma is a Cheshire native, though the topography she maps in Ormeshadow seems more like that of West Penwith, in Cornwall, and Great Orme is a real place in Wales. I am fond of quoting Melville on this sort of thing: “It is not down on any map. True places never are.” Ormeshadow also made me think of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, especially The Grey King, as well as “Hamlet” and Wuthering Heights, and her unsparing depiction of life in a rural village brought to mind Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project.  – Elizabeth Hand.

Read the full review here.