Why contemporary-set novels matter – Heartland by Anthony Cartwright

 

After the recent Booker shortlist, dominated by historical fiction, you could be forgiven for thinking novels dealing with contemporary life in the UK aren’t being published.

But they are: and this week, when Nick Griffin appears on Question Time, one of the year’s best novels is being thrust into the spotlight by its topical relevance.

Heartland by Anthony Cartwright follows an election campaign in 2002, in which the BNP look increasingly likely to take over Labour Councillor Jim’s seat. It’s a passionate, page-turning examination of national identity. It dramatises the difficulties communities face in adapting to life in a Britain that has lost its traditional industries and become unmoored from the narratives that used to give it meaning. With its imaginative sympathy and thrilling plot, Heartland is fiction of the most satisfying kind.

We know that there is readership for intelligent, ambitious fiction about how we live now – and this week there is plenty of opportunity to hear about Anthony Cartwright and Heartland in the media. Anthony Cartwright is appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row on Friday 23 October at 7pm – and next week Heartland is read for two weeks as BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’ – from 26 October to 6 November.

Anthony Cartwright is also blogging tomorrow about Heartland and how he came to write it on http://www.guardian.co.uk/books

‘Cartwright’s patient, attentive storytelling shines a glowing light on areas of our common experience that the English novel usually consigns to darkness. A writer with a wonderful ear for dialect and an unblinking sense of Britain as it is today’ - Jonathan Coe