8 of the best new books to read this autumn

The way Annie Ernaux writes about desire is so illuminating and brave. I could basically read a shopping list if was written by her and find it “darkly compelling” and “visceral” etcetera. But The Use of Photography (published by Fitzcarraldo and written collaboratively with her former-lover, author and journalist, Marc Marie) really is all these things. 

This book focuses on a the pair’s intense love affair, conducted while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer back in 2003. In alternating chapters, Ernaux and Marie reflect on this passage in ther lives as told through a series of photographs taken at the time depicting the sites and relics of their romance – cast off clothes, the remants of dinner, the vacated bed or sofa. It’s like reading the most private recesses of both writer’s journals. While it’s a slight book in terms of length, it’s fathoms deep in terms of the depth experience it plunges into. (ED)

I started reading Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (published by Penguin) because I came across an extremely negative review which I found so annoying that it made me determined to like it – I’m only halfway through but I’m enjoying it a lot, whether that’s motivated by spite or not. It’s about an American spy, operating under the alias of Sadie, who is hired by a private company to infiltrate an environmentalist group suspected of industrial sabotage. If a likeable protagonist is important to you, you should probably look elsewhere: Sadie is a monster. She is arrogant, cold and relentlessly cynical, but despite that (or maybe because of it), I found her a compelling and often hilarious character, with a neat line in aphorisms:(at one point she says, “Charisma does not originate inside the person called "charismatic." It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.” – I’m not sure if that’s true, but it sounds good.)

The novel works well as a suspenseful spy thriller, but thanks to the inclusion of a series of emails from one of the men whom Sadie is surveilling, there are also a lot of digressions about the Neanderthals, evolutionary history, the climate crisis, the nature of art, peasant revolutions and persecuted minorities in the Medieval age etc, etc. It does sometimes feel like Kushner is simply throwing in a bunch of facts and ideas she finds interesting, but I think it’s within the rights of any novelist to do that — and a lot of it is fascinating. When so much contemporary literary fiction limits its horizons to interiority and small-scale interpersonal drama, Creation Lake is refreshingly ambitious and curious about the world. (JG)

Colored Television is the latest work from acclaimed American author Danzy Senna. In the novel, Jane, an aspiring writer, finds herself living in a palatial LA home as she house-sits for a wealthy friend. It’s an opportunity which gives her ample time to finish her manuscript, but tempted by the prospect of better-paid, more secure work, Jane turns her attention to Hollywood. She wangles a meeting with hotshot producer Hampton Ford who’s looking to commission some new “diverse content”, and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies”. But Jane’s newfound success soon unravels as she begins to realise Hollywood is not all that it’s cracked up to be. (SS)

I love Joan Didion. I love Hollywood lore, stories about people growing up in LA and eccentric showbiz families. And I love Practical Magic. So Griffin Dunne’s new memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club (published by Grove Press UK) feels like it was designed in a lab just for me. And if you love any of those things like I do – then this book is for you too.

Dunne is one of those people who has been surrounded by characters and storytellers all his life. His father was writer Dominick Dunne, his aunt and uncle Joan Didion and John Dunne. Growing up, he went to parties attended by Tennessee Williams and Janis Joplin, Carrie Fisher was his best friend and Harrison Ford was his aunt and uncle’s carpenter. But he himself is just as much a character and storyteller, and the book is full of madcap tales, misadventures and bizarre coincidences which follow Dunne as he attends strict boarding schools, moves to New York to become an actor, navigates the plights that plague his family – alcoholism, mental breakdowns, divorce, secret sexualities – and, vitally, as he deals with the murder of his sister by her abusive boyfriend and subsequent trial. This book made me laugh and cry and it made endless days in a jury duty waiting room bearable. (AP)

I was nervous to start reading Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain (published by Picador), worried it might be too ‘heavy’. It tells the story of an American poet, struck down one day by an annihilating pain which leads to his hospitalisation. As someone who’s lived for art and thought, he’s now forced to reckon with what it means to inhabit a body.

It sounds bleak, but it’s an intensely romantic and life-affirming story about looking death in the eye. For those of us a bit stuck in our own heads or in total denial about our mortality, this novel will reacquaint you with the precarity – and preciousness! – of everything. (ED)

Poor Artists is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It’s a non-fiction book about the contemporary art world and its relation to race, class, housing and capitalism (among other things), but it’s not just a series of opinion pieces — at some points it reads like a memoir and at others like a wildly surrealist novel. It follows a composite character, Quest Talukdar, who is based on the experiences of the authors – Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad – and interviews they conducted with scores of artists.

Like The White Pube – the art criticism site which de la Puente and Muhammad founded together in 2015, Poor Artists is irreverent, provocative and funny. I found it fascinating as someone who knows basically nothing about the art world, but I’d also highly recommend it to anyone who went to art school or works as an artist – I’m sure the experiences it depicts would resonate deeply. (JG)

Shoobz. Shoobeen. Shebeen. The once-Irish term for a speakeasy is sure to evoke a kaleidoscope of memories for any Londoner, conjuring up images of late night offies and early morning escapes, of informal house parties and improvised sound systems. It is precisely this lineage that Dazed 100 alum and interdisciplinary visionary Caleb Femi chronicles in sophomore poetry anthology The Wickedest (published by 4th Estate). Delivered in minute-by-minute snapshots of a party running into the early morning, Femi weaves together text messages, photographs and English sonnets alike in a love letter to the distinctly British social institution that is the shoobz. (SFP)