October 2024 books

What’s new and good to read this month? Dan Coombes has a look at what’s on offer from publishers in October and chooses Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, The Great When: A Long London Novel by Alan Moore and Gliff by Ali Smith.

Our Evenings – Alan Hollinghurst

Well, I feel old. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line Of Beauty – one of the greatest novels of life and love in Eighties Britain ever written – has been pretty much everywhere since I became a bookseller, and it’s now two decades old. Blimey.  Anyone else who remembers this marvellous Booker Prize winner should be happy to know that Mr. Hollinghurst has a new novel just out, and it’s great.

Charting two intertwined yet divergent lives from student days to twilight years, this is a lovely, funny and moving read.

Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles’ envy and violence.

As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys’ careers will diverge dramatically: Dave, a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician.

Our Evenings is Dave Win’s own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security.

Images: Our evenings front cover, Author Alan Hollinghurst

The Great When: A Long London Novel – Alan Moore

Let’s get this out of the way first – Alan Moore is an odd sausage, and his books are usually divisive, really strange, a bit obtuse and… well, unlike pretty much anything you’ve read before.

But the other thing it’s physically impossible to review Alan Moore without mentioning is that he wrote Watchmen, the greatest comic book of all time, the first ever to win a Hugo award and the only one to make it into the Times’ 100 Greatest Novels list, so as intensely unhinged as his books can be, he’s also a bit of a legend and a genius.

The Great When is one of those books about fantastical alternate worlds meeting our own, strange books and sort-of-real occult, folkloric strangeness that these days comes under a cool-sounding subgenre that I can’t quite remember at the moment, but fortunately it’s also the kind of thing you’ll probably know from reading the blurb if you’re going to like or not, so at least that saves me having to Google it.

The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital is Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen-year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist.

It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How? Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings.

But this other, magical London must remain a secret: if Dennis cannot find a way to return this book to where it belongs, he risks bizarre and disastrous repercussions, such as his body being turned inside out (or worse).

So begins a journey delving deep into the city’s occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers – some from legend, some all too real, and all with plans of their own. Soon Dennis finds himself at the centre of an explosive series of events that may alter and endanger both Londons forever.

Images: The Great When front cover, Author Alan Moore

Gliff – Ali Smith

One of the best things about quite a lot of the world a being an absolutely ghastly bin fire of frequently terrifying proportions (happy rapidly encroaching holiday season, everyone) is that we get some really good dystopian fiction out of it.

Multi-award winning literary powerhouse, author of the Seasons Quartet, How To Be Both and The Accidental brings us her take on the culmination of… well, where we might just be heading, and what might come after…

It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world. What would that actually be like? In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take? And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?

Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it’s a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.

Images: Gliff front cover, Author Ali Smith