Literary – Studying the Human Condition

Aldous Huxley has spent much of his intellectual power conceiving of utopic societies, seeing before him the heights humanity could one day reach, before promptly tearing them down and exposed their impossible flaws. In his last novel, Island, he tells the story of a journalist, Will Farnaby, who shipwrecks on the island of Pala, whose inhabitants have formed a bizarre and yet seemingly-idyllic society. Nevertheless, the threat of the outside world always looms large.

Mary Beth Keane writes the sort of fiction which digs a little deeper than your typical thrillers and mysteries, often exploring some of the greyer areas in our lives. In The Half Moon, she tells us the story of Malcolm and Jess Gephardt, a couple faced with a rather uncertain future, one where their dreams and life aspirations might be extinguished for good.

Haruki Murakami is no stranger to exploring the slices of reality which exist somewhere between truth and imagination, to the point where I suspect he came out from one of them. In his recent novel, Killing Commendatore, he tells the story of an unnamed portrait painter who, upon finding a magnificent painting in an attic, embarks on a strange journey of self-discovery, one which blurs the thin line between fiction and reality and shows him a world hidden in plain sight.

Bob Van Laerhoven is the type of author whose works tend to defy traditional classification, more often than not merging elements from a number of different genres. In Alejandro's Lie he tells a story part Noir, part historical fiction, and part human drama, following the story of the titular Alejandro, a broken musician desperately searching for meaning while living in a fictitious South-American dictatorship.

Gabriel Krauze is one of the few people who truly managed to escape life among the gangs of London, and in his first published novel, titled Who They Was, he takes us to the heart of a culture long-hidden in the shadows. It tells the story of Gabriel, a university student learning about English literature by day, and a member of London's gang-ridden underworld by night, known to most as Snoopz.

Patricia Engel has become a celebrated and respected voice in immigrant literature, consistently relating her moving and educative experiences through her novels. Most recently, she published Infinite Country, chronicling the long, winding and turbulent fates of five members making up a family of Colombian immigrants.

Daniel Mason enjoys taking his readers on grand trips through time and around the world, doing so once again in his novel The Winter Soldier. Taking us to Vienna in 1914, the story follows a young medical student, Lucius, who dreams of becoming a battlefield surgeon. Instead, he finds himself sent to a remote mountain outpost ravaged by typhus, with only a single nurse remaining. Facing an hour darker and more desperate than he could have ever expected, Lucius is forced to make decisions bound to change the lives of all those touched by his presence.

Alan Moore may have established his reputation largely through timeless comic books such as Watchmen, but he has also proven himself to be a novelist with no equal, namely through his 2016 work titled Jerusalem. In it, we are taken on an exploration of the madness, brilliancy, decay and degeneracy which has seeped over the years into the town of Northampton in the United Kingdom, taking a close look at the lives of its denizens, forgotten to the rest of the world.

Sally Rooney has taken little time in becoming a distinguished figure in the realm of books with her debut novel Conversations with Friends in 2017, and only a year later she came back with another brilliant story titled Normal People. To put it simply, it follows two young students as they walk parallel paths over the years and learn the hard way about the complexities of friendship, love, family, and life as a whole in general.

Chloe Benjamin has erupted onto the literary scene with her first novel, The Anatomy of Dreams, and has decided to delve further into the realms of unique and thought-provoking literature in her second book, The Immortalists. In it, we are introduced to four children who are all given a prophecy by a travelling mystic who could allegedly reveal to people the day they would die. As the years go on we witness them growing up and living out the strange and curious fates they were all assigned.

Though Stanislaw Kapuscinski (pen name Stan I.S. Law) only truly began his writing efforts after retirement, he has already established himself as a philosophical powerhouse in the science-fiction genre. Though he did publish many books in this short period of time, it could be argued that what really catapulted him to new literary heights was the Avatar trilogy. Containing all the trademarks of his unique and off-beat style, the first book in the series, titled The Avatar Syndrome, follows the life of Anne as she grows from a baby into a fully-fledged adult, all while having contend with some curiously unusual challenges and harbouring some extraordinary talents.

Writers often make their best works when life pushes them to by exigent circumstances, and Michael Chabon was powerfully moved by the many touching stories his grandfather revealed to him on his deathbed, so much that it inspired him to novelize his life story. Which parts of the story are reality and fiction? Perhaps we'll never know, but that one vagueness opens the doors for us to witness a life as extraordinary and absurd as it is ultimately believable, one that can teach us a whole lot more than most factual biographies could ever hope to.