Salman Rushdie's Victory City: Stellar Author

Salman Rushdie's Victory City

'Stellar Author'

 an occasional series of posts on 

Kitchen Table Writers

Copyright New Yorker

Salman Rushdie was born in 1947 in what is now Mumbai, India, but is also a British-American citizen. One might say he's a citizen of the world, being a writer whose novels are  allegorical examinations of historical and philosophical issues. He achieves these heights by using magical realism, non-linear narratives and surreal but very believible characters. There is always a dark, yet gentle strain of humor, and a dramatic, exhuberant, unconstrained prose style. Rushdie has never muted what he wants to say about sensitive religious and political subjects, and as a direct result of this, he barely escaped with his life in New York in 2023.

I first encountered him when Midnight's Children came out in 1981 and immediatey won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize  and the Booker Prize. It was also awarded the special Booker of Bookers prize in 1993, and the Best of the Booker in 2008. It was so well recieved, it's been called 

Copyright  Sky News

a watershed in the post-independence development of the Indian English novel,  and in the 80s subsequenty became known as 'post-Rushdie'. The story moves back and forwards in time, but is focused on the children born in India at midnight on the moment of its independence. In it he employs inherited myths, and generates new myths as it traces the story of these children. 

Having loved Midnight's Children, which was his second novel, I couldn't wait to read The Satanic Verses when it came out in 1988. This is the story of two Muslims confused by the temptations of the west. The first returns to his cultural roots. The other, intellectually unable to return to the faith, finally kills himself. I loved it. One of its themes is the way immegrants are treated in the UK and another looks at the very foundations of Islam.  

As I read, it was being burnt. Despite the fact, that to me, a westener, I couldn't see any content that seemed to denounce or critique the faith of Islam, Muslims had many issues with the book, including the story, the title, and some of the names used. In December 1988, around 7,000 Muslims in Bolton held a peaceful protest where they burnt a copy of the book. The Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran, announced a Fatwa was on 14th February 1989.

Could Rushdie have expected this reaction? 

Writers stick out their necks. By the nature of being able, especially via fictional works, to say anything about anything, they constantly fall foul of current morals, ethics and the law. Of course, it’s wise not to be disrespectful, especially without researching and understanding your chosen subject. On the other hand, remaining neutral and inoffensive generally results in bland, insubstantial writing. 

An attempt at a private prosecution to get The Satanic Verses banned was unsuccessful, in fact, the Home Office announced it would not allow any further blasphemy prosecutions. 

Martin Amis, who interviewed Rushdie, suggests… a Fatwa is at once a death sentence and a life sentence. In his own phrase, Rushdie is firmly ‘handcuffed to history’. He is neither a god nor a devil; he is just a writer – comical and protean, ironical and ardent…I bought an evening paper. Its banner headline read: EXECUTE RUSHDIE ORDERS THE AYATOLLAH. Salman had disappeared into the world of block caps. He had vanished into the front page…His uniqueness is the measure of his stoicism. Because no one else – certainly no other writer – could have survived so well…. Amis interviewed Salman in September of the same year, at a Mystery Location…‘When I first heard the news, I thought: I’m a dead man. You know: that’s it. One day. Two days’… (Visiting Mrs Nabokov, Penguin Books 1993  pg 172) 

After a failed assassination attempt  in 1989, Rushdie began came out of hiding and soon became a central figure in debates on free speech and censorship. In 2007 he received a knighthood for services to literature and by then, was in public more and more. 

On 12 August 2022, he was about to start a lecture in New York, when man rushed onto the stage and stabbed him repeatedly, including in the face, neck and abdomen. Rushdie was airlifted to a trauma centre  and underwent surgery. Only one day later, he was taken off the ventilator and was able to speak. He had lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand but survived the murder attempt and was soon writing a memoir about the attack, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, which hit number one in the Sunday Times Bestsellers List straight away. 

Perhaps the most Rushdiean part of this awful event was the fact he reported remembering a vivid dream, in which he was stabbed in a Roman amphitheatre, only two days before the actual stabbing occurred. The intensity of the dream caused him to consider canceling the event–but he eventually decided on attending.

Since then, just one novel has been released, an amazing, rich and vibrant story called Victory City which was mostly written before the attack. 

The story is  purported  to have been found, hidden in a earthenware pot by a woman called Pampa Kampana, who is reaching the end of her 250 years of life. It begins when she is nine, and watches her mother commit Sati along with hundreds of village women. Immediately after this tragedy, a goddess enters Pampa and she becomes magical, and long-lived.  She takes refuge in a cave with a holy man, and is abused by him, but also educated. 

She is still a young woman when the magic begins. Pampa instructs two of her brothers, Hukka and Bukka, to sow a bag of seeds at the site of their old village.  A city grows, and  people sprout from the earth. Pampa whispers memories into them, so they feel they have a history. The brothers become the first kings. Pampa marries them each in turn, though her daughters are born of her true love, a Portuguese horse trader who names the city Bisnaga.

The city she founds becomes a utopia—a feminist one–Pampa is an avid advocate for gender equality, and wishes her daughters to rein after her husbands’ deaths. This request is met with much conflict and her sons seize control of the kingdom. Pampa and her three daughters are forced to flee into a magical forest where they shelter for several decades. The three daughters eventually grow in separate directions and Pampa returns to Bisnaga. In her absence, she had become a legend, and, as she still looks much the same age, can move about the city freely. Eventually,  she becomes the advisor of the latest monarch, Krishnadevaraya.

After many wars to guard and widen the borders of the kingdom, Krishnadevaraya goes mad and Pampa, caught in one of his rages, is forcefully blinded with an iron-rod. She takes up refuge with a holy man, finally beginning to feel her age which is now over two hundred. The residents of the city become outraged at this betrayal and turn against their king and the kingdom degenerates and is ransacked and destroyed. The novel ends with Pampa burying her written history in a pot and waiting for the Goddess to release her so that she may die.

So what is this allegory about? 
It is possible that he has used an ancient empire, the  Vijayanagara, and to a degree followed major turning points in the history of the empire. But it strikes me we could actually be following major turning points of human history. Even so, there are moments that need careful analysis; for instance the invasion of the pink monkeys in the forests where Pampa and her daughters have settled. Who are the conniving pink monkeys who inveigle their way into the monkey tribes and then take them over? Maybe that is what human history was: the brief illusion of happy victories set in a long continuum of bitter, disillusioning defeats (pg 155).

 And why, when she takes refuge in a cave with a holy man after her mother’s death, is she regularly abused by him? This passage struck me: That's how men were, Pampa Kampana thought. A man philosophized about peace but in his treatment of the helpless girl sleeping in his cave, his deeds were not inlignment with his philospopy. 

Virupaksha Temple, Vijayanagara, Karnataka

In some ways, Pampa could almost be Salman, who has experienced both adoration and opprobrium for his acts of creation. Without doubt, to me, the writer is saying that we humans are both good and evil. In this book we meet oppression, religious zealotry, authoritarianism, divide, patriarchy. But there is also equality, redemption, the power of love, and a demonstration of how humans can be at their most creative when they live in an atmosphere of openness, tolerance, and egalitarianism.

The 'Stellar Author' series of posts on Kitchen Table Writers has looked at several amazing writers, including:

George Eliot

HenryJames

Cormac Mccarthy

Virginia Woolf

A S Byatt

Herman Melville

Boris Pasternak

Just click on the link to read the blogs. 

Finding your Writing Voice Part Three

In the previous two  blogposts in this short series, we looked at how you could start the process of finding your own unique writing voice. We established that your writing ‘voice’ is as valid as anyone’s, so long it has sufficient flow to hold a reader’s attention. You were offered some exercises to practise gaining a hold on your voice, and beginning to have confidence in it. You can find this blogpost here. 

We then looked at writing in a character's voice, and how this might be different...and the same...as your own unique writing voice. 

Hopefully, you're gaining that confidence as you write––whatever you write––because ‘voice’ matters whether you're engaged in poetry, fiction, nonfiction or whatever form or genre you write.You can find this blogpost here.

It might be said that the essence of a poet’s work is involved in voice. The prose writer’s decision on how the narrative voice should sound is also an essential one. Although more subtly understood, it’s important for the script writer to understand how they can employ voice in their work. Here is David Mamet (Great American Plays): The dramatic poetry (the text) must possess all the fluidity, rhythmic forces and tonal beauty of which the author is capable. This is to say it would be good if the playwright could actually write… 

In Writing for TV and Radio, Teddern and Warbutten, suggest ‘voice’ is about: direct address – talking to the audience The technique of direct address is frequent in radio plays, and was employed to great effect in the US version of the TV drama House of Cards. Here is Frank Underwood, in the opening scene of the first series.

He’s bending over a dog injured by a car. After sending the only other witness to fetch help, he turns directly to the camera and says: 

There are two kinds of pain. The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain, the sort of pain that's only suffering. I have no patience for useless things. Moments like this require someone who will act, who will do the unpleasant thing, the necessary thing… And, looking down at the dog…There. No more pain… The voice, and what it shows us about Underwood, who has just broken the animal’s neck off screen, has our early attention.

We established that voice is closely related to pouring your thoughts into your writing, and you’ll find that your voice will be at its most confident when you write about the things you know best. ‘Write what you know’ is one of the oldest pieces of advice offered to writers, but confusion arises about this because the advice seems contradictory. Many writers create vivid pieces after researching a subject from scratch. Writers of fiction invent new worlds, or set stories in historic periods they can’t experience. How does this fit with the notion of writing only what you know?

Writing what you know means drawing on your experience, memories, knowledge and your passions. Struggling with subjects that have no interest for you will result in work that is flat and stilted. The very act of researching new ideas will be made easier if you have a sincere interest.

Style and Tone

The terms style and tone are often spoken about, especially in connection to whether a reader enjoyed a book and is talking about the voice of the author. But what are they, and how do they differ from the writer's voice? Are they something you should think about when you are writing or do they just happen? And aren’t they essentially the same thing?

Both are ways to express yourself, and serve an important purpose, while being quite different from each other.  

The words, sentence structure, and grammar—the nuts and bolts of language––create your style and form the way you tell your story. One writer's style might be long, flowing sentences, other writers love sparse, short sentences.  and simple, easy-to-understand words.Think about some of the authors or different genres you’ve read. Typically, each genre will have some style similarities, but each author will put his or her own touch on it. 

Start by asking if your writing style fits the genre you’re writing. For instance, a crime press release should not read like a crime thriller. After all, the reader will have expectations, and veering too far off the established path can cause them to lose interest or simply be too puzzled by the disparity between theme and style to keep reading. So your first step, then, is to find the appropriate style for the genre you are writing, and make it your own.

Tone

can be described as your ‘attitude’ when writing a piece; the feelings about the subject and content. Here is Donna Tart's protagonist: They were deep in their own world; for all the attention they were paying to me I might as well have been in Idaho but that was fine with me; I knew this story. My dad who’d been drama star in college, had for a brief while earned his living as an actor: voice-overs in commercials, a few minor parts (a murdered playboy, the spoiled son of a mob boss) in television and the movies. Then – after he’d married my mother – it had all fizzled out. (The Goldfinch). The tone Theodore takes as he describes his parents explains and illuminates his attitude to them.

When done well, the skilled writer can use the tone of their voice to entice the reader right into the mood – the way the writing makes you feel – of the narrator or other characters.

Exercise: Immersing in Style and Tone

Take a book by an author you admire and love to read (not necessarily contemporary). Read enough to immerse yourself in the writing style and the writer’s voice as well as the themes and forms that are characteristic of this author

Now think how you can use those skills without sounding like that writer. In other words when writing with your unique voice. 

Start by being intentional – Do some research, and figure out what styles and tones can work effectively for your genre. How do you want your work to come across to the reader? Choose your style and tone before you even begin. Remember, you want to find the appropriate style and tone and then make them your own.

Also be consistent – Make sure your writing stays true to those choices or make a full change if needed, but don’t flip flop. This involves reading your work closely after you have finished, to ensure your style and tone stays consistent throughout. Inconsistencies in style and tone can leave the reader confused or annoyed.

Verbal Inventiveness

Alongside the use of sound devices such as assonance, consonance, alliteration and euphony, writers of all disciplines have the opportunity to use phono semantics, employing sounds that create a meaning in the reader’s mind. Children’s writers often take advantage of onomatopoeia, which young readers enjoy. Phonetic symbolism – the emotional use of sounds – can work for adults, but needs to be subtle. Take for instance the use of certain longer sounds, such as EE OO and SS. These are often used in the genres of horror, sci-fi and ghost stories, while GL is visual – glittering, glowing and gleaming. S can sound underhand and slippery, while STR feels strong – strong enough for words used in connection with punishment, such as strapping, striking and even strangling. To find and use sounds in this way, without the reader consciously noting your use, keep an ear open yourself, as you read.

Eimear McBride uses audaciously radical and challenging language  in her book  A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing: 

Feel the roast of it. Like sunburn. Like a hot sunstroke. Like globs dropping in. Through my hair. Spat skin with it. Blank my eyes the dazzle. Huge shatter. Me who is just new. Fallen out of the sky

 McBride’s subject matter is harrowing and she wanted her novel to be a physical experience – a disjointing, sickening and often frightening experience. It was described as being written in…not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense… McBride wanted it to be seen as a clear attempt to push literary boundaries and break new ground in how language was used. Read the interview she gave for The White Review describing how she was trying to give us the thoughts in the first person of a young girl before those thoughts become words. http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-eimear-mcbride/.

Exercise Thinking about Language

• Advertising is a particular area where language is pulled apart and re-invented to help in the selling of goods and services.  So copy-writers come up with new words like melty, dependability, manscaping and ‘Stoptober’, for the NHS October campaign to help smokers quit smoking.
• Choose any advertisement from any medium which attracts you because of its use of language (rather, say, than it imagery).
• Write a poem, a prose freewrite, or a very short scripted scene, using any lingual inspiration or influences you can take from the advert.
• Reflect on your use of language – whether this exercise made you think about the language you use, or if you want to experiment further with these elements – in your writing diary.

HOW TO WIN THE BOOKER: EVERETT AND WOOD.

Although the  Booker shortlist is revered, and always anticipated, it has, in the past, been sometimes a bit of a let-down, often featuring books that are filled with 21st century angst, that are just too long or obscure or unnecessarily dense. Quite often they offer nothing but a bleakness that surely we can do without. This year, though, I've loved them all and can't wait to tell you what each book is about.  So far, in three posts, I've looked at the winner, which has  greener-than-green credentials...Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the deepest and most poetic, Held by Anne Michaels, and the raunchiest, The Safekeep byYael Van Der Wouden. In this post I'm going to look at two more before I finally turn my attention to the only 'quite long' novel on the list. 

James, by the long-acclaimed American author Percival Everett, who is back on the Booker shortlist after being there two years ago with The Trees, has written what I think is the funniest and most powerful novel on this list. 

Stone Yard Devotional, by Australian writer Charlotte Wood, is also a book that made me smile. Maybe Wood didn't want her book to be thought of as  'comic' but  it features, quite heavily, an infestation of mice in an isolated community of nuns, which decidedly raises more than one chuckle.

Percival Everett

Before I began James, I did wonder if the world needed yet another retelling of Huckleberry Finn. But James is a hilariously dark, beautifully compassionate yet deeply corrective, perfect for the 21st Century reader. The titular James, as he'd rather be called, is nothing like the 'Yessum' Jim of the original. In fact, he, and his fellow Mississipi slaves only use such language when the white masters are around. In their heads, in the narrative of this book, and when they talk together, their English is perfectly received. This device allows Everett to present James as  a fully-rounded character, enabling his voice to be heard properly  and giving him the agency to direct his own life, even under threat of the whip.

 

Here's James teaching his children how to speak to slave owners. 

    "Let's try some situational translations. You're walking down the street and you see Mrs Holiday's kitchen is on fire. She's standing in her yard, her back to the house, unaware. How do you tell her?"   

     "Fire, Fire," January said.

    "Direct. And that's almost correct," I say.

    "The youngest of them, lean and tall five-year-old Rachel, said, "Lawdy, missum. Looky dere."

    "Perfect," I said. "Why is that correct?"

    Lizzie raised her hand, "Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble." 

The reviewer Anna Bonet also loved this book; “Powerful” is an overused adjective when it comes to describing books, but it feels right here. In fact, James is more than that. At times, it is brutal to read – necessarily so, given that slavery is one of its primary subject matters – but it also manages to be light and funny and completely gripping. I could barely put it down.

When he realises he is going to be sold away from his beloved wife and children, he runs, falling in with Huck in much the same way as in the original Mark Twain, but in this story, he's the one who cares for the lad, leads their escape and engineers the happy ending. 

Charlotte Wood

Stone Yard Devotional has an unnamed narrator, who constantly surprises us. At the start of the novel she has abandoned her job and husband and, although not religious, decides to spend a short time in a rural Australian nunnery. The convent's routine of bells and service turns out to be just what she needs and she stays; a decision she never fully explains. As she moves through each day as a secular member of a convent, she reveals that she has uncomfortable memories of a girl in her class at school. This woman is now a famous nun, and is about to visit, bringing with her a corps the nuns wish to bury in their grounds. 

The story quickly becomes surreal, almost oppressive, as we watch, fascinated, a dance of manners between  the narrator, the charismatic Helen and the society of nuns. it takes a long time to get permission to give the corps a Christian burial, but meanwhile we witness the infestations of millions of mice being unceremoniously dumped into a deep hole in the ground. 

Orlando Bird, in the Telegraph, says this of the book;  Our narrator’s world is one of “dormant” truths waiting to be “released into the open at last”. Yet Stone Yard Devotional is all the more accomplished for resisting neat conclusions – “I don’t know why” is a familiar refrain – and recognising that even the examined life sits only “on the edge of comprehension”. Wood may not be the first artist to embrace uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, but at its best her novel does it beautifully.

It's a good read, but of the two, I will never forget James' journey up and down the Mississippi. 

Writing about the Climate Crisis–– A Workshop for Writers

photo: Nina Milton

Habitat loss, marine pollution and climate change issues are blighting the natural world. They are also changing the lives of communities across the globe. There are many writers who wish to write this complex subject, but are often at a loss about where to begin and in which direction to head. 

This WRITERS' WORKSHOP is being held on Friday 24th JANUARY 2025 

online, and available to all writers, whatever your situation. 

Co-ordinated by Nina Milton, this 2 hour workshop is suitable for prose writers interesting in pursuing these subjects.  It won’t pretend to find the all answers, but it will allow us to become a little more aware of the issues around the subject and challenge our responses as writers. 

You may be thinking of writing about the changes or threats to the diversity of the natural world, about the communities effected by changing environments, or about the routes to more sustainable living. You may even be imagining a different future world.

We will discuss  some of the ways this sort of writing has been tackled by both fiction and nonfiction writers, at new and different ways of approaching these issues, and look how this writing will present in the future. 

With discussion and writing exercises with feedback on writing achieved and the chance to peer review each other's work, it is hoped that by the end of the workshop, attendees will feel more confident about approaching this vast subject, and have some new skills to enable this. 

Once you have signed up, you can access the information. on this workshop with links and reading recommendations.

Contact Nina Milton at kitchentablewriters@live.com to find out more details of the workshop.

Costs; £10 PER WRITER: Bursaries are available to help with costs. 

How to Win the Booker Prize: HELD by Anne Michaels

 

Anne Michaels

Michaels must be one of the few writers today who can pull off writing in fragments, for fugitive pieces could as easily serve as the title of this new book, Held, a novel similarly made up of scraps of storytelling and essayistic fragments, and the themes of memory, war, and personal ghosts, revisit her preoccupations. But this book not about the Holocaust, but of many wars and war zones, and the relationship of the characters to these. 

I first read the Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels when her  1996 first novel, the multi-award-winning Fugitive Pieces, after it won the Orange Prize for Fiction.The story is divided into two sections––Jakob Beer is a Polish Holocaust survivor––while Ben is the son of two Holocaust survivors. 

The themes relate to the Holocaust––trauma, grief, loss and memory which are explored thought nature metaphors. The story has a poetic style, which has caused some critics to feel that it re-imagines the 'story' of the Holocaust, partly through nature.

The Booker Prize judges said some very nice things about this book;

‘There are very few books that can achieve a pitch of poetic intensity sustained across a whole novel. Through broken stanza-like paragraphs and chapters that move between different members of the family across a century, Held achieves the feat of being deeply moving and asks the question ‘Who can say what happens when we are remembered?’ with tenderness.'

‘We loved the quietness of this book: we surrendered to it. The large themes are of the instability of the past and memory, but it works on a cellular level due to the astonishing beauty of the details. Whether it is the mistakes that are knitted into a sweater so that a drowned sailor can be identified, or the rituals of making homecoming pancakes, or what it feels like to be scrutinised as you are painted, the novel makes us pause.’

We are carried back and forth in time. Each section introduces new characters, different settings.here are quite a lot of characters within the book and one thing I tried to do was tie them all together; it seems that most of them are related to the others, but often it's quite hard to find that relationships through the generations as we move from the First World War to out own times, and the wars most recently remembered. Anyway, here goes; perhaps this will help you pin down the elusive butterfly that is this absorbing read:

John is a soldier who returns to his wife after being injured during the First World War. As he attempts to come to terms with the psychological trauma of his experiences, he finds works as a photographer.

Helena is John’s wife, a talented artist who constantly doubts her own talent and supports John as he struggles with the vivid memories of his experiences during the war.

Anna is John and Helena’s daughter; her work as a doctor means she frequently leaves her family to work in war zones.

Maria inherited the same caring nature as her mother, Anna, and also becomes a doctor, and is similarly drawn to working in war-torn areas. 

Working through the characters and the dates, I began to pick up echoes and piece together the tenuous personal links which hold together the disparate stories, first understanding that Aimo, who meets another Anna in Finland in 2025 must be the child whose musician parents we saw being expelled from Estonia for thought crimes in 1980, and then deciding that when we meet a Frenchwoman, out collecting firewood in1902, falls briefly for a photographer, their baby will become John. But there are also links which work though the themes, and it felt to me that these are meant to be even stronger becoming the point of the story, so that the characters are the carriers of theme and idea, posing profound questions about the human state, all expressed in Michael's arresting prose.

This makes her writing sometimes very difficult, but also so absorbing to read. What I loved most (even better than trying to piece it all together) are the little snapshots which are often hugely affecting, suffused with an awful, aching yearning for what is lost. It demands  thought and concentration from its readers but more than repays them. Here, Mara, back from being a medic at the front of a war, remembers some experiences:

She told them about her friend, a nurse who had more experience and compassion in her hands than Mara felt she would ever have…this same nurse had ridden through a bicycle through the dark, no light to give her away, packets of medicine taped to her skin under her waistband, who plummeted into an abyss that had not been there only hours before. The father who kept a scrap of cloth tied with string around her neck, fill with teeth, proof his sone had existed, though Mara knew he would never be sure they were his son's. 

However, I must admit there are critics of this kind of writing; this style of novel. Bikerbuddy,  online, said; 'I’ve never read Anne Michaels before. Polarising books can be interesting and I was interested in why this book had such a range of reactions with the public. Some loved the language and sentiments of the novel, others thought it pretentious, opaque, overwritten and/or confused. For my own part, I enjoyed aspects of the broad story,I felt as I read, it is a novel about an idea, as many are. But unlike many great novels which allow the reader space to ponder and reflect, Held felt like an act of proselytising. It’s a thesis dressed up in people’s clothing, walking and talking, with a determined purpose. This is an aspect of the book I disliked, yet I have found that others have been drawn to it. Held was different for me. It felt like a manipulative book. It felt dishonest.

The Times Literary Supplement said; The lush, lyrical prose favoured by the likes of Anne Michaels…is a risky business. At best it brings intensity, inwardness, descriptive beauty and a relief from the thudding and-then-and-then of conventional storytelling; at worst it can result in vatic waffle. In either case the impulse is to suppress definite characterization, historic specificity and narrative momentum in favour of “poetic” evocation.

Anna Bonnet says; This Canadian novelist, who won the Women’s Prize in 1997 for her Holocaust novel, Fugitive Pieces, is also a poet and it shows: Held is told in tiny, poetic vignettes. For me, this was part of the problem. While there are some mesmerising lines in this book, it is all so fragmented that I struggled to follow the narrative thread, let alone care for the characters. 

But I'm going to stand up for these diffulties. If you don't like a novelist's style and voice, find another novel to read, because there are plenty out there. The Booker Prize shortlist is testament to this; six extremely unique and original novels, all with something to say, I believe. 

I'm looking at all the Booker Shortlisted Books 2024, to see how they can help the writer. Here I review Safekeep and Here I review the winner; Orbital