LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION

Ben Lerner

I came to realise that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

Adam Gordon is a young, American poet adrift in the Spanish city of Madrid. After bluffing his way into his international fellowship, he struggles to make friends, find love and write poetry. Leaving the Atocha Station is written with crisp rhythm and dark humour. There is more feeling than plot in this debut. The prose is a meditation on the possibility of genuine expression in art wrapped in the inner monologue of a detached, conflicted twenty-something.

ASSEMBLY

Natasha Brown

Penned by Cambridge-graduate Natasha Brown and condensed into a slim 112 pages. Our narrator, a woman of Jamaican descent prepares to spend the weekend at her boyfriends’ old money family estate. Through fragmented prose, we are guided through detached descriptions of socio-economic hierarchy, common-wealth and what it means to join the upper percentile as a black British woman.

WE THE ANIMALS

Justin Torres

A taut and focused book, Justin Torres’ We the Animals is clever and spare. Written as a series of small connected short stories, we follow three brothers isolated by circumstance. Their frustrations, fears and joy become our own. There is a fierce, frenetic feeling within Torres’ writing. Description is magical, experience is gut wrenching. This is indeed a Darling.

THE SYMPATHIZER

Viet Thanh Nguyen

My mother was native, my father was foreign, and strangers and acquaintances had enjoyed reminding me of this ever since my childhood, spitting on me and calling me bastard, although sometimes, for variety, they called me bastard before they spit on me.

The Sympathizer is our narrator, an American, non-combat South Vietnamese military man who is in secret, a mole working for the Viet Cong. The prose is our narrators’ written confession, penned for his jailers. If that isn’t enough reason to pick up this debut, it’s also happens to be a 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner, so there’s that.