Ten World Class Fiction Writers I Have Discovered Since I have been Blogging

 

I have been blogging for a little over nine years now, but I have been an avid reader of world fiction for over forty years. I had read most of the world’s great authors before I started blogging, so they are not included here. However I have discovered many new authors and some existing ones I hadn’t read before then. Some have been featured on other sites. Here are ten I consider the best of the new finds.

Note: I discovered Irene Nemirovsky and Hans Fallada just before I started blogging, so they are not included.

Here goes.

Elena Ferrante – Elena Ferrante has pretty much taken over the world. Her 4-volume Neapolitan Novels will stand as one of the landmarks of Italian literature, and I’ve also read some of her excellent previous work now too. I expect the Neapolitan Novels are quite autobiographical, but she definitely captures what it must have been like growing up in Naples, Italy.

Yan Lianke – I’m only two novels in to Yan Lianke’s work, but I can tell his work will last. I see him as the great political novelist of our time. His ‘The Four Books’ captures the dislocation and devastating results on the Chinese people of the Great Leap Forward started by Chairman Mao Zedong. Lianke is now in my ‘Must Read’ category.

Amor Towles – Amor Towles is the last thing you would expect from the United States today, a smart, stylish elegant charming writer. Both of his novels ‘Rules of Civility’ and ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ are winners.

Georges Simenon – I never read Georges Simenon in the past because I thought he was a detective genre novelist. Then I discovered his romans durs, and now I am hooked. This French writer deals with the gritty side of life, tacky nasty people, and terrible acts. I find that Georges Simenon has more insight into the way men and women misbehave than just about any other writer.

Aminatta Forna – Forna’s Croatian novel ‘The Hired Man’ is written in the style of Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ where the sins and conflicts of the past come back to subtly haunt the people of today. Forna’s newest novel ‘Happiness’ about urban foxes in modern-day London captures more than just what is happening on the surface and achieves a depth missing from many novels.

Sofi Oksanen – Finland and Estonia are pretty much twin countries, and Sofi Oksanen has roots in both of them. Both of the novels I have read of Oksanen’s, ‘When the Doves Disappeared’ and ‘Purge’, have taken place in Estonia. Both of these novels have characters and an intensity that makes them superior reads.

Luis Alberto Urrea – I have only read the one novel, ‘The House of Broken Angels’, but it is one of the most affectionate humorous family portraits I have ever read. Old man Big Angel gathers the family for his one last big birthday party before he dies. Like any occasion when we have not seen many of our relatives for a long time, we think back on these people and what they were like when they and we were young.

Viet Thanh Nguyen – Watch for this guy, because he has written two thoroughly wonderful works of fiction. ‘The Sympathizer’ tells the story of the Vietnam War from the victors’ point of view which we in the losing US rarely get to see or hear. ‘The Refugees’ is a fine collection of stories about the Vietnam refugees’ experience in the United States.

Tove Jansson – Tove Jansson was another Finnish writer who wrote both children’s books and adult novels and stories. The wonderful NYBR Classics series has brought back many great authors, and Tove Jansson is one of them. The simple language and dramatic events, especially in ‘The True Deceiver’, make her work outstanding.

Karen Russell – On no other novel have I lavished such paroxysms of delight as I have on Karen Russell’s ‘Swamplandia’. Afterwards I read a collection of Russell’s stories that was somewhat a disappointment, so now I’m wondering was ‘Swamplandia’ really that good? Sometimes a novel will just sweep you off your feet.

 

I could also have mentioned Jon McGregor, Lauren Groff, Lawrence Osborne, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Anthony Doerr, etc. etc.