Guy Ware - Böcker

‘Fleshing out the shadowy metaphysical hints of Beckett’s novels, this intellectual romp is the best debut I have read in years’ Nicholas Lezard, The GuardianMonday lunchtime: a bank is being robbed. The gunmen tell everyone to get down on the floor, but an old man refuses. Behind him in the queue is Rada Kalenkova, an investigator for the Office of Assessment, recording everything she sees. Shots are fired and a woman is killed. Or maybe two. But Rada ignores the murders and pursues the old man instead.Nothing about the robbery or the putative killings makes sense. The robbers might be police. The bank manager denies anyone was hurt, despite the blood on the walls. Every subsequent enquiry leads towards Edward Likker, a renowned fixer. But Likker is dead.The Fat of Fed Beasts is an ambitious literary mix of existential uncertainty, murder, bureaucracy, unreliable father figures and disaffected policemen. It asks why we do what we do, whether it matters, and what, if anything, our lives are worth. And it’s funny.‘Ware has an uncluttered prose style and a willingness to stretch the boundaries of fiction. His sensibility is finely tuned to those grey areas of experience where identities shift, where people forget who they really are. No other writer springs to mind as a ready comparison to Ware: already he has defined a unique thematic territory.’ Aiden O’Reilly, The Short Review

Holly Stanton’s grandfather was a spy. In Berlin in September 1939; in Norway when the Germans invaded. Sailed back to Orkney by a brave Norwegian, whose family was killed in retaliation. And he kept a diary.Holly has always known that. It’s the family story. But when her father finally passes on a transcript of the diary, she finds the ‘brave Norwegian’ has a name. He is real. But why was a spy writing a diary at all? Part war-time thriller, part exploration of the ethics of story-telling, Reconciliation slips between Occupied Norway and Cambridge, London and the Highlands during the Iraq War and its aftermath.Based on truth but laced with errors and lies, as each layer of the story peels away, we discover just how easily we have been misled. Stories always lie, but sometimes they are the only truth we have. Reconciliation is a clever, exciting and – ironically – honest account of its own bad faith.

This is what a bad day looks like: a day when something happens.Robert Exley works for the Faculty: he spends his life making sure that nothing ever happens. In counter-terrorism, that’s your job. His wife worked there, too. She’s been dead for years, but somehow she’s never far away. Now their bookish son is leaving home. He writes an encrypted journal Exley feels obliged to decode, to read the things they cannot talk about. When Exley takes on a colleague’s case, it leads to a flat full of explosives, guns and cash. The trouble is, it’s the wrong flat. And when Exley finds a man in an orange jumpsuit shackled to the floor deep beneath the Faculty’s offices, everything he thinks he knows turns inside out. Mixing Beckett and St Augustine, prison diaries, Japanese Go and Greek tragedy, The Faculty of Indifference is a profoundly black comedy about torture, boredom, suicide and love. Trapped in the moment between an intolerable past and so much worse to come, Exley finds there’s nothing he can do but live.

Guy Ware's new novel charts a course from the 1930s onwards through the fragmentary memories of the 85 year-old Charlie, whose identical twin brother JJ has recently died. Sons of a working-class Communist family, growing up in the radical Peckham Experiment and orphaned by the Blitz, the twins emerge from the war keen to build the New Jerusalem. In 1968, JJ’s ideals are rocked by the fatal collapse of a tower block his council and Charlie’s development company have built. When the entire estate is demolished in 1986 JJ retires, apparently defeated. Now he is dead and Charlie, preparing for the funeral, relives their history, their family and their politics. It’s a story of how we got to where we are today told in a voice – opinionated, witty, garrulous, indignant, guilty, deluded and, as the night wears on, increasingly drunken – that sucks us in to both the idealism and the corruption it depicts, leaving us wondering just where we stand.

Denis Klamm, feckless scion of two former Leaders, returns to the Island for his father’s funeral, only to find it sinking. Or the sea rising – it depends what you believe. Either way, they’re all going to drown – unless the young, idealistic and newly-elected Leader, Jessica King, really is the saviour long foretold by Our Island Story.But Jessica is only Leader because Ari Spencer, the special advisor’s special advisor, has made it so. She wants solutions; Ari offers schemes. She wants to solve the climate crisis, house the homeless and bring justice for the victims of police brutality in a decade-old incident that Ari, for reasons of his own, would rather nobody looked at too closely. Or at all.While Denis falls under Jessica’s spell and sets out to make the sort of grand romantic gesture guaranteed to attract attention, Ari hatches a plot to pit conspiracy theory against myth, unleashing a maelstrom of populism, ambition, religion, treachery, lawlessness, old wounds and new battles – along with the less familiar forces of love and grief. It won’t save the Island, but it might just save his skin.The result sweeps cynical politicians and bureaucrats, corrupt policemen, ambitious clerics, former Soviet taxi drivers and would-be poets into a riotous, brutal and surprisingly touching black comedy about our refusal to face reality, even – especially – when it’s about to kill us.

A woman with a successful career in child protection is floored by her husband’s sudden death; a retired civil servant smothers his wife, but can’t go through with their pact; a teacher fleeing a disastrous school trip finds himself – literally – in a dark wood.Pascal famously said we shall die alone. But there are always others left behind to grieve, to cheer, to feel guilt, relief or laughter, because we are human, whether we like it or not. In these stories, a dozen characters find at least a dozen ways to live by facing death – their own or that of those they love – in familiar worlds shot through with a strange absurdity.A man with cancer is employed to smoke by a character from a novel who may never have existed; an historian finds a love he hopes will last beyond the grave, even if it isn’t his; a former judge dispenses justice in a prison camp; a randomly-selected Prime Minister confronts the biggest life-or-death decision she – or anyone – will ever have to take.A Day Like Any Other explores death – natural, assisted, promised and unexpected – with compassion, wit, a steady gaze and a desire to confront the challenge we mostly prefer to avoid: why live at all? It is the perfect collection for anyone who’s going to die one day.