Adam Mars-Jones

Katherine Mansfield's​ wonderfully wrong-headed criticism of E.M. Forster was that he was a dab hand at warming the pot, ‘but there ain’t going to be no tea.’ Readers of Hernan Diaz’s new novel get their first sniff of a tea bag about halfway through the book’s 400-odd pages. Trust is made up of four sections, the first presented as a complete novel (Bonds...

Gay men beginning to act on their desires in the 1950s faced any number of difficulties and dangers but could benefit from a certain invisibility. Their status was unspeakable, but at least it was unspoken. Middle-class men might live in a world of hints about being different, or sensitive, or musical, rather than face outright abuse. Working-class men might or might not encounter rejection: friends calling for the miner’s son Tom Wakefield at his family home in Cannock in the early 1950s might be told that ‘our Tom’s down by the canal, trying his luck.’ Shuggie Bain, Damian Barr and Eddy Bellegueule are all labelled faggot, homo, poof, queer, jessy and so on, creatures that have no characteristics other than debasement, long before they have a chance to condense an identity around their actual desires. The young Barr is aware that Logan’s violence has a deeper purpose: ‘He knows I’m different and sets about making me hate myself before I know myself.’ James in Young Mungo understands that if his inner life becomes known he will lose access to it: ‘They would have a hundred names for him before he had a name for himself.’

Benjamin Labatut​’s When We Cease to Understand the World is a skein of non-fiction stories or narrative essays unified by their subject matter, the mostly 20th-century breakthroughs in physics and chemistry that shook both those disciplines and the wider world. (The judges of last year’s International Booker Prize, who shortlisted the book, must have concluded that the...

Good​ health connects us with the world, illness forces us back onto ourselves. When Gloria Goltz, the title character of Atticus Lish’s second novel, The War for Gloria, in her early forties, clever, unfulfilled and the mother of a teenager, is diagnosed with the degenerative illness ALS, her life shrinks. Meanwhile her son Corey, who is fifteen when she is diagnosed, both acts as her...

The appetite​ for an authoritative portrait of the new South Africa was both catered to and resisted by J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning Disgrace, in which a narrative of disintegration and one of reconstruction were superimposed on each other, leaving it to the reader to decide which was the lower layer. (The last page might clinch it.) Twenty years later, Damon Galgut’s The...