Blake Morrison

Luke Kennard’s Black Bag spans several genres while not belonging to any of them. It’s not quite a campus novel but has things to say about what it’s like to teach at a university. It’s not quite a satire on the theatre world but says more about acting than Rachel Cusk does in her latest novel, Life of M. It’s not a surreal parable but the central bag image is as haunting as Kafka’s Metamorphosis. 

Strout’s characters live in sociable communities, mostly small coastal towns, where everyone knows everyone else’s business. They gossip, reminisce, pontificate, form unlikely friendships, fall out with or in love with one another. Yet they feel alone, disregarded and misunderstood. They don’t understand others, either, even those closest to them.

It can’t have been hard for Susan Choi to hit on the title of her novel, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Flashlights show the way; they expose dark corners; in the right hands they’re a servant of truth, in the wrong hands a tool of oppression. Flashlight has a question to ask: did the drowned man really drown? The answer isn’t easy to find.

The crux of Daniel Kehlmann’s Director is whether it’s weakness or necessity that makes G.W. Pabst compromise. On the one hand, he’s disgusted by swastikas and Hitler salutes; on the other, his need to make films overrides other considerations. Defending himself against his wife’s accusation that he has been bought off too easily by the Reich, he says: ‘The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in.’

Beyond Gurnah’s postcolonial perspective is an understanding of the trauma all people suffer when they’re sundered from what they know. His own uprooting came at the age of eighteen, when he flew with his brother from Zanzibar to the UK on a tourist visa and, in due course, made his home here, not returning to visit Zanzibar for seventeen years.