Book of the week: Albert & the Whale by Philip Hoare

published 26 March 2021

Fiona Mozley’s debut novel, the Booker-shortlisted Elmet, was a family saga “steeped in legends of the Yorkshire countryside”, said Katie Rosseinsky in the London Evening Standard. Her follow-up shows she is “equally well-attuned to the rhythms of urban life”. Set in a crumbling Soho town house, Hot Stew features a large, varied cast: a pair of prostitutes, Precious and Tabitha; a down-and-out couple known as Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee, who perform “lacklustre magic tricks” in the pub; and, of course, an “unscrupulous” property developer who wants to turn it into luxury flats. Mozley skilfully knits their “disparate stories” together, creating a “compelling” portrait of city life.

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Although her characters tend towards caricatures, this doesn’t much matter, said Lara Feigel in The Guardian. “Like Dickens or Balzac, Mozley is interested in breathing life into clichés, using two-dimensionality to gain breadth and social reach.” At a time when so many young novelists are taking refuge in the dystopian, it’s refreshing to encounter a writer reinvigorating “large-scale social realism for our times”.