Well, here we are, 400 up. The number of blows in the title of François Truffaut’s 1959 directorial debut, the runs Brian Lara took off England 20 years ago in Antigua to register the highest individual score in Test cricket, and the number of miles without a word until you smile in Big Country’s Fields of Fire.
Numbers are arbitrary, of course, but a nice round pair of zeroes are always a decent landmark to take stock of what has gone before and look forward to the future.
What has gone before in these pages was the countdown from 20 to 11 in the bumper “best books since Brexit” list we began last week. That leaves only the top 10 books drawn from the last eight years from a New European perspective to present for your winking approval or violent disagreement.
If you missed last week’s instalment, these are books chosen and graded on quality with an emphasis on Europe but are not necessarily about Europe or by European writers. Fiction and non-fiction are represented here in a selection inevitably subjective in its nature, but even with meticulous objectivity would never have included The Plot by Nadine Dorries.
So without further ado let’s begin the countdown of the top 10 New European books since the Brexit referendum of June 2016.
10. MAYFLIES by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber & Faber, £9.99).
There are few more astute writers in Britain today than Andrew O’Hagan, versatile enough to produce outstanding reportage and essays and some extraordinary fiction. His latest novel, Caledonian Road, an epic snapshot of contemporary Britain, might have merited a place in this list, but instead I’ve plumped for his brilliant 2020 novel Mayflies.
Based on a childhood friend of O’Hagan who died of cancer, this is the best literary depiction of male friendship you will ever read. Swinging between a life-defining visit to a Manchester music festival in the 1980s and the modern day, Mayflies evokes a turning point in the popular cultural history of Britain, the joyous, flawed immortality of youth and the devastation of grief and loss. An absolute masterpiece.
9. THUNDERCLAP by Laura Cumming (Vintage, £12.99)
Subtitled “a memoir of art, life and sudden death”, Laura Cumming’s 2023 Thunderclap is a masterclass in narrative non-fiction. The core of the book is Cumming’s exploration of the life of the enigmatic Dutch golden age artist Carel Fabritius, who was among those killed when the Delft gunpowder store exploded and took half the city with it in 1654.
Cumming coaxes Fabritius out of the scant documentary evidence that survived him and restores his place among the great artists of the age while also reflecting on the life of, and her relationship with, her own artist father. Thunderclap is also a lesson in how one artist and even one painting can change the way we look at the world.
8. THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Colson Whitehead (Fleet, £8.99)
Published in the UK in August 2016, Colson Whitehead’s masterpiece just qualifies for this round-up and was also a vital lifeline as we simmered among the embers of the referendum explosion that tumultuous summer.
The winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for that year’s Booker, Whitehead’s tale of Cora and Caesar’s escape north from a hellish Georgia slave plantation was by turns harrowing and uplifting, portraying the best and worst of humanity.
The magical realist touch of having an actual rather than metaphorical underground railroad was a risky device but Whitehead is too good a writer to misfire in a work as important as this, which he had worked on for 15 years.
7. DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99)
When Fitzcarraldo published the English translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead in 2018 it coincided with her previous book Flights winning the Man International Booker Prize and the Polish writer scooping the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was no more than she deserved as one of the most fascinating and consistently excellent writers working in Europe today.
Drive Your Plow… is an existential murder mystery centred on an old woman in rural Poland looking for her missing dogs that expands into a wide-ranging meditation on life itself. One senses there is still much more to come from one of our continent’s most original voices who has a remarkable ability never to write two books that are remotely similar.
6. THE PASSENGER by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, trans. Phillip Boehm (Pushkin Press, £14.99)
The New European was among the first to champion this outstanding book, whose 27-year-old author was among hundreds drowned in the 1942 torpedoing off the Azores of a ship taking displaced refugees from Australia to Britain. Boschwitz had written The Passenger in four weeks in 1938, appalled by the savagery of Kristallnacht and its aftermath. It was published in Britain the following year under a pseudonym, but would not be published in Germany until 2018.
The Pushkin Press’s new translation appeared in 2021 and the story of wealthy Jewish entrepreneur Otto Silbermann fleeing his home and trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities by zigzagging across Germany on a succession of trains to nowhere became an unlikely but deserved bestseller. “Even a thief on the run with his loot has a smirk on his face,” reflects Silbermann, “while all I have is fear.”
5. DREAMLAND by Rosa Rankin-Gee (Scribner, £8.99)
East Kent found itself reluctantly on the frontline during and after Brexit, yet despite that focus the region was still left sidelined and struggling. The false promises of Brexit seduced many there, and the consequences are devastating.
Rosa Rankin-Gee’s 2021 novel took us to a dystopian, climate change-ruined Britain in which the region had also been left to its own devices against rising sea levels. At 16, Margate resident Chance is coming of age as the world around her crumbles, literally and figuratively. Yet when she falls in love with Franky, a middle-class volunteer with a humanitarian aid organisation, another life seems possible against the odds.
Heartbreaking and heartfelt, yet ultimately uplifting, Dreamland is a brilliant and frightening glimpse of a plausible future.
4. WE ARE TOGETHER BECAUSE by Kerry Andrew (Atlantic, £16.99)
Kerry Andrew’s masterful We Are Together Because, published earlier this year, imagines the end of the world not as a massive conflagration or the result of a virulent pandemic but as something quiet, almost enigmatic, a gradual erasure rather than a dramatic denouement.
Andrew’s story of four siblings awaiting the arrival of their father at his holiday home in rural France as the world viewed through their phones and tablets suddenly goes quiet is utterly gripping and absorbing, its believable characters already dealing with life traumas before the world started to end without having the courtesy to warn them. Andrew is a gifted musician as well as a superb writer, and their innate sense of rhythm underpins their prose as well as adding music to exquisite depictions of the world they create. Just a wonderful book.
3. THE ROOSTER HOUSE by Victoria Belim (Virago, £10.99)
Victoria Belim’s magical memoir of her Ukrainian family was written before the Russian invasion of February 2022 and published last summer when her nation made news across the world. Even before Putin’s tanks rolled in, Ukraine was processing more residual trauma than most nations, not least thanks to the Holodomor famine of the early 1930s when millions starved to death as a result of Soviet agricultural policy.
Kyiv-born Belim had left Ukraine in 1994 aged 15, leaving with her mother for a new life in Chicago. She relocated to Brussels as an adult but it took until the tumultuous political events of 2014 before she felt a tangible pull of home. She travelled to visit her grandmother in rural Ukraine and began researching the family history, uncovering long-repressed secrets, forgotten heroism and hushed-up acts of state terror.
“The stories of painful events turn into black holes that devour everything around them,” Belim writes. “The traumas can’t be seen but the gravity surrounding them becomes so strong that it absorbs everything in their proximity.” A beautifully written and profoundly moving book.
2. GREAT CIRCLE by Maggie Shipstead (Penguin, £9.99)
Some novels experiment with form, structure and language. They push stylistic boundaries to challenge the reader, forcing them to follow an idiosyncratic route through a complex narrative. Some novels, meanwhile, are a good, old-fashioned yarn, a gripping story brilliantly told.
This is certainly true of Maggie Shipstead’s epic Great Circle, published in 2021. The narrative centres around an American pilot named Marian Graves who, shortly after the second world war, disappears during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe via both poles – the great circle of the title. The book tells Marian’s story with a parallel narrative in the present about a Hollywood starlet brought down by the tabloids commencing a rebuild of her career by playing Marian in a low-budget biopic.
Great Circle is an ambitious novel of immense scope and scale that covers much of the globe from Alaska to Antarctica, from minor Aleutian islands to Hawaii, Hampshire to Sweden, featuring characters so vividly realised living lives so convincing I was checking Wikipedia to see if they were real. An incredible novel and a monumental achievement.
1. BORDER by Kapka Kassabova (Granta, £9.99)
Since the explosion in the popularity of travel writing in the 2000s, it feels as if everywhere in Europe has received some kind of literary treatment from itinerant authors, some genuinely insightful and enlightening, others trite, dull and patronising. Either way, finding unexplored corners of our continent and writing about them in a way that brings their world vividly to life is a bigger challenge than it’s ever been, but in her remarkable 2017 book Border Kapka Kassabova produced one of the best travel narratives of any era, let alone the post-Brexit one.
The Bulgarian-born author visited the region where the borders of Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey meet, embedding herself in the area and meeting a range of people with a range of stories and a range of opinions. It’s a region of tensions – not least since 340,000 Turks were expelled from Bulgaria during the 1980s – mythology, superstition, rumour, conflict, folklore and people with more in common than the borders dividing them might suggest.
This is a book of ghosts, lost empires, fire-walkers, treasure hunters, soothsayers, refugees and komshulak, a Turkish word that means neighbourliness and cohabiting in harmony. “Europe is where you are not afraid,” a Kurdish refugee tells the author. “That’s freedom. And that’s home.” And that’s why the utterly bewitching Border is my selection as the best book published since Brexit.
