Florence Knapp’s first novel The Names, publishing this month, tells not one story but three. As it opens, a mother is preparing to take her newborn boy to formally register his name. Will it be Bear, as his older sister would like, her own choice of Julian, or Gordon, named after his controlling father? The universe pivots on the decision she makes. Knapp plaits together the three stories that follow to trace the three different worlds in which the boy grows to manhood. Think of it as Sliding Doorsfor nominative determinism.
In this universe, at least, it is going like gangbusters. Described as “the book of the fair” at Frankfurt two years ago, Knapp’s publisher secured the rights in a 13-way auction and it’s already due to appear in 20 languages. It is a prime example of a renewed interest in what might be called “high-concept fiction”.
Knapp, though, says that the first time she even heard the epithet was in a meeting with an agent after she’d finished writing her book. “I looked it up when I came home, and even now, it still feels like a really intangible thing: something to do with a hook, and maybe something to do with structure?” She says she’s not a science fiction reader, but her husband is an avid fan and she found herself fascinated when he talked to her about world-building in that genre.
The idea for what became The Names first came to her in 2017 or 2018, but “I’d written a completely different book in between that I thought would have more commercial appeal, and it never found a publisher. So when I was setting out to write this one, I didn’t have a sense of it being a big idea at all: it was just the thing that, when I was faced with quite a lot of rejection, I kept coming back to.”
The narrative structure was, she says, “really helpful. I think I realised early on that I wanted to show, in a very crystallised way, those moments in a person’s life that are formative. If I hadn’t had that structure, it would have been quite amorphous for the reader.” Instead, she says, “it felt like stepping stones. OK, I just need to get to the next place, and then the next place …”
“High concept” is a tricky notion to define, but you know it when you see it. It’s a story with a ready-made elevator pitch; a grabby gimmick in the narrative or world-building that can be summarised in a couple of sentences. Another recent example is last year’s hit debutThe Ministry of Timeby Kaliane Bradley: a story about refugees finding their feet in London, but the refugees are from other eras rather than other countries. And probably the hottest piece of translated fiction since Knausgård,Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, announces early on: “Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November.” Think the classic movie Groundhog Day, or the TV showRussian Doll, in which Natasha Lyonne’s character relives her 36th birthday party over and over – only with a Danish antiquarian bookseller and an International Booker shortlisting.
There are two accounts you could offer of why these stories are popular now, one of them cynical, one of them less so. There’s a bit of truth in both. The cynical one is that high-concept books are much easier to get past marketing meetings. A novel with a gimmick sticks in the mind. Its fanbase can sell it on TikTok – “it’s High School Musical – but with giant crabs!” – and buyers at bookshops will rememberthatbook with the cool premise in the absence of a marquee author name.
The less cynical version is that these books find readers because they use their MacGuffins to deft literary effect – and because a public that used to be sniffy about genre fiction is coming to appreciate its imaginative possibilities. The novelist Jenny Colgan describes the increased appetite for high-concept fiction as a sign that readers are “getting over their prejudices to discover how many amazing worlds there are out there”. As she puts it, “sci-fi is just shorthand for using certain tropes – time travel, rockets, apocalypse – to tell the kind of story you are telling: a love story, or a story about sadness or loss. And some of those work very well but loads sink without trace.” The vital ingredient, she argues, is quality. “If you do something brilliantly you can smash through people’s genre walls.”
The Namesis perfectly pitched between so-called literary and popular fiction, full of heart, and works out its premise compellingly. Meanwhile Bradley’s book is consistently funny and inventive, and crackles at the level of the sentence: the fun the author is having is contagious. And Balle explores her world absorbingly; the generative idea at the heart of it grips the reader’s imagination from the off.
The same was true of those high-concept books that broke through in recent years: Kate Atkinson’sLife After Life(an alternate-realities precursor to The Names, spliced in with a touch of Groundhog Day); Audrey Niffenegger’s time-jumbled romanceThe Time Traveler’s Wife; Naomi Alderman’sThe Power(what if, overnight, women were a physical threat to men rather than vice versa?) and David Mitchell’sCloud Atlas, to name just a few.
Kaliane Bradley, who is both a publisher (she’s an editor at Penguin) and a novelist, says she sees a high-concept pitch as “an easy way into something that might be more complex or with multiple strands”. She uses the example of Dracula: “There’s a mysterious foreigner, and it’s partly about fear of the immigrant, and it’s about nervousness around female sexuality … but the high-concept pitch is: ‘It’s a guy who sucks your blood.’”
She thinks the present boom is attributable to a “certain loosening around the boundaries of genre” which has made people less anxious about approaching a book through a keynote idea: “There was perhaps a time when people would have been only attracted by that or only put off by it.”
She says she wrote her own high-concept novel by accident. “I thought my first novel would be a big literary book about Cambodia,” she says. The Ministry of Timebegan as a jeu d’esprit to amuse Bradley’s friends, “and the conceit was: what would it be like if your favourite polar explorer, because we were all very into polar exploration, lived in your house? That’s it. That’s the concept […] The very first version was almost an experiment, really, and then it turned into a book by mistake.”
She adds: “The difference between this book and the book that I was writing that’s now in a bottom drawer, is that one I felt like I had to take veryseriously, and I had a realobligationto write. Whereas for this, it was just like: this is a fun idea. What if I just mess around with it? I realise it’s different for every writer, but for me, that was just the more fertile way of thinking about writing.”
The Names by Florence Knapp is published by Phoenix (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.