Fiction Uncovered 2012
Welcome to Fiction Uncovered, the promotion which celebrates the best of contemporary British fiction. The 2012 selection of eight titles will be announced on 23rd May 2012, 19:00h.
From the Blog
15th May 2012
Romesh Gunesekera on English in the Second Elizabethan Age
Romesh Gunesekera, the Sri Lanka-born British author of four novels, including his debut Reef (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction Prize, belongs to a post-Rushdie generation of writers working in a new global English. In the piece below, originally written for the 2012 Royal Society of…
2nd May 2012
Literary Death Match at Land of Kings Festival
An invitation from Literary Death Match: Celebrating the hippest hottest neighbourhood in London town, May 4th marks Literary Death Match’s first love-in with Land of Kings Festival in the stunning surrounds of Dalston’s Arcola Theatre. Presented by Fiction Uncovered and sponsored by Picador, it’s a perfect setting for electrifying the audience with word-play genius, laughter and wonderment. We have an inimitable quadruplet of…
30th April 2012
May events at The Bloomsbury Institute
Fiction Uncovered is excited to share news of Bloomsbury’s splendid events offerings for May. A Granta ‘Britain’ Special with Lawrence Norfolk, Esther Freud and Andrea Stuart Granta launches its Britain issue at the Bloomsbury Institute with a night of reading and conversation with Andrea Stuart, Lawrence Norfolk and Esther Freud. From the legacy of the sugar…
23rd April 2012
Twenty-First Century British Fiction Symposium at Birkbeck, May 11-12
Who are the voices of British fiction today and how are they changing the way we read?
Latest in Review
The White Lie
We learn in the very first line of The White Lie that the narrator, Michael Salter, is ‘dead, that much I know for sure’. His death is the novel’s focus and, as the story unfurls, the events surrounding it grow thick with secrets and motives, layer after layer of possible truths and probable lies. Michael…
Summer
Tom Darling’s second novel, Summer, is the story of teenage Grace Hooper and her nine-year-old brother Billy, who arrive on their grandfather’s farm as orphans, their parents having been killed in an accident on holiday. School will not begin again for several months; until then, the children face a summer in an environment far removed…
2nd May 2012
Fiction Uncovered by…Luke Brown, Senior Editor and Publicist at Tindal Street Press
Gwendoline Riley’s debut novel Cold Water was published in 2002, when she was 22 or 23, and which I first read at the same age. She publishes very slim novels, one every few years, with female narrators who work in bars in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, write novels, fall and fail to fall in love with musicians…
Heartland
Bizarrely, there seems to have been a recent resurgence in the cricketing novel – Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman, Jennie Walker’s 24 for 3 – but football is still underexposed in the fictional landscape. Anthony Cartwright’s novel Heartland takes for its structure two games: the England-Argentina first round match in the 2002 World Cup,…
16th April 2012
Fiction Uncovered by… Bianca Leggett
Malcolm Bradbury’s gravestone is engraved with words the author used to describe one of his own characters: ‘Warm and generous, famous and friendly, witty and wise’. It’s an apt description of a man who during his career became one of the friendliest giants on the British literary scene, pouring his prodigious energies not only into…