Whatever your thoughts may be regarding yesterday's British election results, I'll confess that my Brexit perspective has been heavily influenced by BrexLit, a genre that "offers escape as well as insight: an opportunity to understand the nuances of Britain's decision to leave the EU in a fictional world where, possibly, no such vote has ever taken place," as Donna Ferguson wrote in the Guardian.
For example, I loved the first three novels of Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet, including, most recently, Spring (Pantheon, $25.95). They're definitely on my BrexLit gift-giving list, along with these great reads for the post-election holiday season:
In The Wall (Norton, $25.95), John Lanchester imagines a not-so-distant future in which England has literally enclosed its borders. Ordinary citizens like the narrator must "do their bit" for two years as guards to keep out, well, everybody ("It is frightening but also in its way a little bit freeing. No choice--everything about the wall means you have no choice."). Until you do.
"Darkness was a long time coming," Sarah Moss writes in Ghost Wall (FSG, $22), an extraordinary feat of storytelling that somehow finds a way to be fiercely relevant and contemporary without ever entering the 21st century. A Guardian reviewer said Moss "appears to collapse layers of history, to render skin and knife and rope identical across millennia."
Robert Harris re-imagines the Dark Ages in The Second Sleep (Knopf, $26.95), his speculative take on humankind's seemingly contradictory, yet eternally consistent, twin appetites for self-destruction and reinvention. ("One does not burn knowledge. One hides knowledge--one keeps it close.")
And then we have Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré (Viking, $29), a master at tailoring the world's complexity to fit the perilously thin frame of one individual's conscience and character. ("Brexit had long been a red rag to me. I am European born and bred.... All the same, I had qualms about giving him the answer he was demanding.")
Give the gift of BrexLit this year. --Robert Gray, contributing editor