As a child of the ’90s, it is now my turn to watch teenagers and younger adults run wild with the fashions of my youth. The school two blocks from my house is full of skaters in baggy cargo pants, kids with tiny backpacks and crop tops, and, god help me, low-cut jeans. On TikTok, they’re just posting footage of high schools in the ’90s as “vibes.” It’s fine, such is the way of aging. But the dream of the ’90s is not just alive in clothing; It’s back with a vengeance in food, too.
What if the Spanish conquest happened in reverse? This is the premise of Laurent Binet’s newest novel Civilizations, out last month in English translation by Sam Taylor, a centuries-spanning epic that posits a world in which the Incan Empire colonizes Spain. Getting there requires fewer counterfactuals than you might imagine: in Binet’s telling, all it takes is a small band of Vikings from Leif Eriksen’s Newfoundland colony wandering south after a murderous dispute.
The Booker-shortlisted 2015 novel His Bloody Project employed a range of narrative techniques to prod at the truth surrounding a murder in a 19th-century Scottish crofting community. Graeme Macrae Burnet’s concern was not so much with who committed the crime – we know that from the outset – but with the moral ambiguity inherent in assigning blame. His new novel, Case Study, is different in tone, though an interest in exploring complex psychological dramas through intricate narrative structures takes centre stage once again.
People eat animals. I sometimes do. I eat sardines that are packed side by side. I forget about their swimming when I do this.