6 new voices

There's a world of new authors offering a fresh perspective on life as we think we know it. We turn the spotlight on six of the brightest new fiction stars published in the last few years in the English language. These writers are as diverse and exciting as the world they write about, a talented generation that's recently burst on to the literary scene.

Kiley Reid

This 35-year-old American novelist's debut novel, Such a Fun Age (2019), was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.

The novel mixes humour with a critique of the modern-day white American quest for wokeness. The satirical style shows the reader the raw truth that lies beneath the veil of fiction. Emira Tucker is a 25-year-old black babysitter and Alix, her upper-middle-class boss, works as an influencer.

Alix's obsessive fascination with Emira is both amusing and self-serving. Alix wants to forge a more progressive image of herself while remaining at a remove from Emira's concerns, like the fact that she's about to lose access to her parents' health insurance.

Reid spent six years babysitting the children of well-to-do Manhattan families, and the reader can't help but feel the closeness to the author's lived experiences in this humorous and thought-provoking book.

Moses McKenzie

An Olive Grove in Ends (2022) is the debut novel of this 24-year-old English writer. McKenzie presents the reader with a poor black British community in inner-city Bristol. Here, law and order, crime, religion, gentrification and tradition create a dynamic mix.

The protagonist, Sayon, the son of an African-Caribbean pastor, makes a living from drug dealing and hopes one day to make enough money to buy a house in the affluent Bristol neighbourhood of Clifton. However, after stabbing a rival drug dealer, Sayon feels this dream slipping away.

This novel shines the spotlight on the failings of the British education system and the way in which dreams of social mobility often remain unrealizable for the underprivileged in society.

Isaac Fitzgerald

Isaac Fitzgerald is the bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (2022). It would be fair to say that he's seen a lot in his life - from growing up in a Boston homeless shelter to smuggling medical supplies into Southeast Asia. And the journey so far has involved many twists and turns. Even Fitzgerald's birth, which he describes as "a mistake in human form, a bomb aimed perfectly to blow up both my parents' lives", was a surprising twist in the road for his devout Catholic parents, who were given living proof of their extramarital affair in the form of Fitzgerald.

The book is a memoir in the form of 12 essays, combining inherited and invented stories that Fitzgerald uses to explore his demons. This is a refreshingly raw inspection of male emotional insecurity and pain.

Raven Leilani

The US writer's debut novel, Luster (2020), is described by her mentor and former tutor, Zadie Smith, as "brutal - and brilliant". It follows Edie, a 23-year-old black artist trying to make ends meet on her pay at a New York publisher.

Edie begins a relationship with Eric Walker, a well-off middle-aged man in an open marriage. She moves in with Eric, his wife, Rebecca, and their adopted black daughter - a bizarre situation that gives rise to a critique of contemporary racial and sexual politics.

Coming from a family of black artists from the Bronx, Leilani blends racial struggles with the preoccupations of the young modern-day artist in this bold book. She uses the microcosm of a dysfunctional living arrangement to focus on bigger issues.

Sunyi Dean

Born in Texas and raised in Hong Kong, Sunyi Dean lives in Yorkshire, where she writes fantasy fiction. Her first novel, The Book Eaters (2022) - which intertwines family dynamics, social constraints and a fantasy world - is about a secret clan of people who consume books instead of food and are able to remember the contents of every book they have ever eaten.

The taste of the printed material changes depending on the book's contents: romance novels, for example, are sweet snacks, while detective novels have a peppery taste. Devon, a female member of the clan brought up on a conservative diet of fairy tales and fables, is at a loss when she discovers that her son has been born with a hunger unlike her own or that of her family - an appetite for human minds.

Joseph Han

Joseph Han's Nuclear Family (2022) is set in the months prior to the 2018 false missile alert in Hawaii. At the heart of it is a family like Han's: a Korean-American family based in Hawaii.

The family-owned restaurant has just received a visit from US restaurateur Guy Fieri and is attracting new interest. Then, an event turns everything upside down. While he's teaching English in Korea, Jacob, the Chos' eldest son, runs across the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea. This stunt is caught on video, which goes viral and creates suspicion around the family. But they do not yet know that Jacob is possessed by the phantom of his dead grandfather, and that Jacob's stunt is in fact the wish of his ancestor rather than his own.

By merging humour and unresolved trauma, Han's first novel deals with the ancestral healing process that many immigrants are confronted with for years after relocating to another country.