Grown Ups by Marian Keyes:  

A new year, maybe time to try something new.   Four years ago, my wife suggested I try one of Marian Keyes books.  She pointed me in the paper direction of Rachel's Holiday, her second book and then I have been slowly obsessed.  She is a writer with a moral purpose, but with a light, comic tone and an absolute master of the laborious plate spinning of novels that sometimes span hundreds of pages.  A sequel to that first book Again, Rachel is published this month.  However, if you would like to make a start, try her last novel Grown Ups.  

In many ways, it is a fantasy 2020 published as we saw the start of Covid and all the things that we saw taken away from us.  The Casey's run a chain of independent grocers and spend that missing year on holiday, at a festival and a truly awful murder mystery weekend with their blended families.    At a family party, one member suffers a concussion and a lifetime's worth of unhappiness, mental health problems, infidelity and general unhappiness come tumbling across the kitchen table.  

That is a huge scope for any writer and I've said, she's in control.  The novel starts with the inciting incident and works backwards, with the last third working through the emotional carnage.  It ends on an uncertain, yet satisfying note.  No-one is particularly happy, but at least they are honest about their dissatisfaction.  And in one case, one character achieves a transitory form of happiness on their own terms.  

This is Nell, young, restless and socially conscious. Married to an older man (a former cycling champion), step mum to his children from a previous relationship.  Nell is possibly one of the few times I've had a crush on a fictional character in a book.  It's Nell, or Ashley in Iain Banks' The Crow Road. Maybe that is a trigger for me, big, bold novels about family secrets. 

Anyway, this is a comic novel achieved through hard graft and great skill.  In many ways, Marian Keyes is an underrated writer and it's a literary mystery as to why.  Her books have been translated into over thirty languages - that is over thirty years, fifteen novels, two collections of non-fiction and a cookery book.  She deals with human issues in a warm, comic way.  Another writer of a different gender or country (she's Irish) would be lauded for that grace and body of work.  The Walsh's in particular, who feature in six of her novels are a wonderful creation.  Putting the fun into dysfunctional, but never with authorial snobbery or judgemental polemic.  Again, Rachel sees Rachel Walsh working in the rehab she attended in Rachel's Holiday.  

I'd start there and work around.  She's a writer you'll discover and become slowly obsessed with.  In uncertain times, warm your soul with a new, literary discovery.   

 The Peripheral:  

Ah, 2022.  The year of George Jetson's birth, which will make those of us of a certain vintage feel old.  It's also forty years since an American science fiction writer called William Gibson needed a term for a fourth-dimension created by a network of computers and called it "Cyberspace".  

It'll never catch on.  

His work has been eulogised, derided and "paid homage to" over four decades (I'm looking in your direction The Matrix and Inception).  His books are epically cool, a Kubrickian remove from their narrative, but with a real moral purpose and chapters like hot shots of espresso.

Later this year, we'll see an Amazon Prime series of his 2014 novel The Peripheral.  Adaptations of his works are rare, but look elsewhere on everyone's favourite parcel delivery service for the teeth-grindingly awful Johnny Mnemonic.  The Peripheral is perhaps the most accessible of his books, but it appears to have acquired a curiously timely status.

It's a novel across two time zones: a pre-apocalyptic mid- 2020's, before an event called "The Jackpot" wipes out 80% of humanity: a tsunami of war, political instabilities, global warming and pandemics. 

I know, sounds far-fetched.  

The other is a mid-23rd century, where science has thankfully solved all of our problems.  London is ruled by a monarchy, but in reality, AI makes the big decisions and Russian gangsters have the money.  Thankfully, there is a something to take your mind off things.  There's a Victorian cosplay zone with both robot street urchins and prostitution.  If that's not your bag, Time Travel (called Continua) is possible by the manipulation of data, creating an alternate reality called a "stub".  

Video games tester Flynne Fisher sees a murder in a game which, in reality takes place some two centuries hence.  Fixer Wilf Netherton becomes involved in a plot to manipulate the past, to suit the needs of a greedy future.

Like most of his oeuvre, it's a caper with the eponymous McGuffin.  Here: a robot, which can house the consciousness of a living being.    It's involving, imaginative and slick piece of work.  Most of Gibson's books come in trilogies, Agency is set in the same universe - with a Continua enthusiast called Vespasian creating a world on the brink of nuclear war. The finally book in this trilogy is, as yet unwritten.   

And so, later this year we'll see a much-delayed series of The Peripheral.  Some eight years after the publication of the novel, not helped by a mid-production shutdown due to Covid.  This is a level of irony that even Alanis Morrisette would shy away from. Production finished in November.  No trailers, no photos, but an IMDB listing with actors. Yes, it actually exists.

Hopefully, this will lead to his work receiving more praise and more curious readers.  Go to BBC Sounds to hear him on Desert Island Discs, or discussing his debut Neuromancer on World Book Club. His elongated drawl of a voice has addictive, mesmerising qualities.  He is a prime example of a novelist as both a visionary and an idealist; who sees technology as both saviour and satan.  To quote him nineteen years ago, "The future is here.  It's just not widely distributed yet."