Joshua Ferris

Dr Paul O'Rourke, the dentist narrator of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, has no gift for friendship. His alienation is a kind of pathology. Or maybe a congenital disease. Loneliness inheres in his hobbies, his love affairs, his every exchange. Even social media, that great banisher of loneliness, just makes matters worse.

He was born to no grand tradition, no family custom beyond a baseball game. His inheritance was poverty and suicide. He escaped the first; the second still beckons. He looks envyingly at people who belong, by birth, to religions that he scorns intellectually. God? He won't have anything to do with God. But God's people are another story. He longs to commune with them, to indulge in their rituals and share in their reassurances. He just can't have any respect for them because they believe in God.

What to do with a guy like this – a guy with a grudge against the universe, a guy who never makes anything easy?

My answer was to have his identity stolen.

Joshua Ferris Photograph: Elisabetta A Villa/Getty Images

As I see it, there are two sources of fear on the internet. The first is that someone steals your identity and empties your bank account. You spend years trying to settle the matter, your credit in ruins and your name on no-fly lists. Then there's a far more pervasive fear: that everyone else on the internet is having a better time than you are. The fear of missing out. The relentless reminder of your lack of sparkle and daring. Or, put a slightly different way: "Why won't somebody more interesting come along and steal my identity?"

O'Rourke refuses to have anything to do with the internet – until somebody makes a website for his dental practice. A Facebook page appears in his name. Then a Twitter account. He's mad as blazes. Who's doing this to him? What right do they have? What is their objective?

He goes down a wormhole. Never before has anyone become more obsessed with the internet than this self-professed luddite.

Then the real terror sinks in. The possibility that the man impersonating him might be living a better life than he is. It occurs to him to say, I want to be that version of me. That version is connected. That version enjoys community and a brotherhood. He's a man with a secret inheritance. An ancient religion so suppressed by the antagonistic forces of history that it's invisible, even on the internet.

O'Rourke learns that he might belong to this strange tradition. But it's not clear that he can make such a leap of faith. He's never done it before – unless you count his lifelong support for the losing Boston Red Sox.

Take away the group, the community, the elected or inherited connection, and we are just human vectors pointed at death. But gather the comprehending and the likeminded together, and for an hour or two, the worst existential fears retreat into the shadows. In the end, that's what O'Rourke wants. It's not a lot to ask for. And yet it's everything.

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Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Chatto & Windus/PA

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689. My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died. More than died at Hiroshima. More corpses than there are words in my novel.

If The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the high points of Japanese culture, the Death Railway is one of its lowest. For 12 years I tried to write a novel about these things, increasingly feeling that if I couldn't write it, I would never write another novel. And for 12 years I failed. Then I realised my father, now in his 90s, was growing frail. Though it made no sense, I felt I had to somehow finish this novel before he died, or I never would.

The novel, I came to see, had to be a love story. Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after.

War stories deal in death. War illuminates love; while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art. It is not eschewing sentimentality. It is to lie.

I went to Japan. There I searched and found several guards who had worked on the Death Railway. Five minutes before meeting with one guard I realised he was the man who had been the Ivan the Terrible of my father's camp, the man the Australians called the Lizard. Sentenced to death for war crimes after the war, the Lizard later had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and then was released in a general amnesty in 1956. He is the only man I ever heard my father – a gentle, peaceful man – talk of with violent intent.

The meeting was in the offices of a taxi company in suburban Tokyo. Lee Hak Rae, as he is now, was a gracious old man. Near the end of our meeting, I asked him to slap me. Violent face slapping – known as binta – was the immediate form of punishment in the camps, doled out frequently and viciously. On the third blow, the taxi office began to shake and toss violently, like a dinghy in a wild sea.

In one of those coincidences in which reality delights but fiction, for fear of being unrealistic, never permits, a 7.3 Richter scale earthquake had hit Tokyo. For half a minute I saw the Lizard frightened. I saw too that wherever evil is, it wasn't in that shuddering room with that old man and me.

Within hours of returning home, my father rang. He wanted to know what had happened. He was 98, but his mind was still good, his recall phenomenal. I told him I had met with some guards who had been at his camps, including the Lizard. I said how each one had expressed sorrow and asked me to pass on their apologies to my father.

Later that day, my father lost all memory of his time as a PoW. And yet his prewar memory remained strong. It was, my sister said, as though he were finally free.

For the next half year I lived alone on an island off Tasmania. I rewrote the novel. I felt I had written all my books in order to write this one book.

My father grew ill. One morning as I sat at his bedside he asked how the novel was going. I told him I had emailed it to the publisher before coming to see him. It was finished.

That night my father died.

I dedicated my book 'To prisoner san byaku san jū go'. It was my father's Japanese prison number, 335.

He had taught it to me as I was growing up as his son, a child of the narrow road to the deep north.

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Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

I'm old enough to remember when man was the tool-using animal. Now a brisk stroll through YouTube will take you past a great many animals using tools. Chimps have a theory of mind. Scrub jays evidence episodic memory. Elephants mourn the dead. So far, every time we've determined the crucial difference between humans and other animals, we've turned out to be wrong again.

As children we're strongly encouraged to identify with the other animals. We are taught to bark like dogs, quack like ducks around the same time we are learning the words for mummy and daddy. Our cots are full of cuddly predators. Our books are full of animals who wear clothes, have tender feelings, and hope not to be eaten. Our plates are full of chicken, lamb and cow. It is very confusing.

For me, perhaps even more confusing than the usual. My father was a psychologist at Indiana University, who studied learning by training rats to run through mazes. We had rats at home, treated as pets; rats in the lab, treated as research subjects; and occasional wild rats, treated as vermin. I learned early the lesson that where you are born is a key data point, arguably the key data point, in how your life will go.

The idea for this book was a gift from my daughter. For the millennial New Year, she and her boyfriend took me to visit my childhood home in Indiana. My husband had to stay behind in California. He worked at the Sacramento energy company (SMUD) and had to be at his post at midnight in case the world ended. Y2K. You remember.

So while he was there, keeping us safe, we were off in Indianapolis, celebrating Hoosier-style – a Pacers game, a John Mellencamp concert, dancing until dawn at the Slippery Noodle blues club.

The next day we drove to Bloomington. My father died two years before my daughter was born, so he's always been a mythical figure to her. I took her to the university campus to show her where his office had been, and to the old rat lab, now something else entirely. Afterwards I told her about an experiment once done by a different Indiana University psychologist, and she told me I should I write my next book based on that experiment.

I don't have good ideas myself, but I know them when I hear them. I worked on We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves on and off for the next 10 years.

But I could also say that the book started much longer ago than that. I began arguing with my father over the question of whether animals could think when I was about six years old. His conclusions were based on a career of cautious, scientifically collected, peer-reviewed data. Mine were based on six years of personal observations of the family dogs, cats, birds, hamsters, turtles, snakes and rats. You might have thought I'd have shown some humility at some point, bowed to his greater expertise. But that just shows how little you know me.

In many ways, this book represents my latest salvo in that long-running argument. It is my attempt to work through what it means to be a human animal. I conceived of it as a book about language – who talks and who doesn't, who is heard and who isn't, what can be said and by whom, and what can't be. As I wrote, it became a book about memory and also about family in both the small and the largest possible sense of that word.

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Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Guardian

To say that J is a love story isn't to say very much. Most novels are, in one way or another, the affection a writer feels for his characters – even the least attractive – being the greatest love story of them all. Love can seem to matter in novels even more than in life, the necessary compression of fictional time, where we see ends almost before we see beginnings, making love especially precarious. But over and above their being important to each other, the lovers in this novel – Ailinn and Kevern – matter because they are repositories for eager curiosity, tenderness and memory in a society that no longer practises gentleness or curiosity, or values remembering, and because they bear a burden, largely unknown to themselves, which might be redemptive, or might be the opposite.

Something has happened before J starts, and what that something is I can best describe as an annihilation of a people and an idea. Who the people are and how and why the annihilation of them took place – an atrocity officially and popularly denied – is the story the novel tells over its 300 pages. But the idea that's annihilated is spelled out on page one. It is that you must not devour everything in sight, that you must never act so ruthlessly against those whose existence challenges you that the only thing left to sink your teeth into is yourself.

"Naught's had, all's Spent," laments Lady Macbeth, in the desolation that succeeds the bloody accomplishment of Duncan's murder. "'Tis safer to be that which we destroy/ Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy". There is a communal equivalent of this moral vacuum. It is the lesson of Cambodia and Rwanda and Bosnia, as it was the lesson of Nazi Germany – and the Jewish genocide reverberates fearfully throughout J – that when a society bonds in destruction, its own loss, never mind that of the victim people, is immeasurable. This can be understood practically, as a loss of the contributions previously made by the victims, and morally, as a loss of probity and even sanity. But it is no less a philosophical loss – an abandonment of the idea that difference is necessary, that we lose definition once those we have long defined ourselves against are gone, that argument is necessary to the spiritual and intellectual wellbeing of any society.

J is set in such a world of forgetting and loss. Here, an anodyne conformity reigns, wiping out whatever is quick and unsuspected – jazz, wit, improvisation – and breeding a dull violence below the surface of domestic life. Quite what constitutes comedy as opposed to tragedy is a vexatious question, but if this novel is different in tone from anything I've written before, that is because the qualities that might roughly be said to have defined my voice in the past – disputatiousness and irony, a love of the sardonic, the ambivalent and the contradictory – are precisely what are missing from the world of J. It was either satirise it or enter it, and in order to enter it I needed a more fraught and hazardous voice altogether. This doesn't mean there is no comedy in J but it is comedy suffused with the dark invigoration of dread.

J is not a novel of prophecy or warning. Though a novel of the future, it is no less a novel of the past and present. The things that happen have happened before, and whether or not they will happen again is not the issue since they are, in a sense, still happening – in that we remain marked by them, troubled by memories that are not always our own, assuming guilt and trying to get rid of it all at once, still denying, disowning and repeating, still seeking simplicity and conviction, though it was simplicity and conviction that did for us the last time.

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Neel Mukherjee

Neel Mukherjee. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

It began, of course, with questions, the first of which must be the most fundamental one in any theoretical thinking about form: what social work does the novel do? Others, concatenated, followed. Does the politics of the realist novel, seen lucidly in the origins of the form, and in its heydays in the 19th century and the early 20th, still obtain nearly a century after modernism? What has happened to the political novel in the Anglo-American world? (By "political", I mean "the way we live in the world", in the way a pioneering generation of feminists viewed the personal as the political; what other kind of personal is there?) To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of The Lives of Others, should have a political soul.

Work defines our lives and our place in the world. I wanted to depict this base, the triangulation of labour, capital and output/income, if you will, over which the structures of our lives, as individuals, families and social classes, are constructed. The book cuts through several such classes, or worlds, at a given point in Indian history, the late 1960s – a time of immense political ferment, of unrest and idealism, of hope for change and the end of that hope. The Ghoshes' well-heeled lives rest on the foundation of their ownership of paper-manufacturing factories; the lives of landlords in the Bengal countryside on ownership of arable land in which rice is cultivated; the lives of rice-farmers and labourers on selling their labour. The Lives of Others concentrates on the disequilibria and contradictions inherent in these worlds, but I wanted to take it one step further: what would happen if these worlds were all to collide?

History offered a ready-made template for this collision. One strand of the Naxalite movement of the late 1960s, a Maoist revolution that attempted to end India's appalling inequalities and iniquities by "armed struggle", involved the participation of members of the "urban intelligentsia', city-bred, university-attending women and men who spread out to the countryside – they also did a fair amount of city "activism" – to help bring about the change they desired. In the novel, Supratik is the perfect amphibian: he is a scion of the Ghosh family, the eldest grandson of the patriarch and matriarch, but also a Naxalite revolutionary who wants to change the world.

Let's return to the politics of the realist novel. What should the novel do: be a mirror to the reader's world, reflecting it back at her, or be a clear pane of glass, not reflecting but offering something away from the self, a vista of a bigger, wider, different world outside? The moral energy of the novel form derives from its capacity to imagine the lives of others. This empathy can be seen as the beginning of the moral sense. I wanted to explore the limits of this in The Lives of Others. By conceiving a densely imagined world "with that distinctness", as George Eliot says, "which is no longer reflection but feeling – an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects", and by constantly shifting points of view across a large cast of characters, could the novel have its moral imperative returned to it? Now that we have been bludgeoned into quiescence in these late-capitalist times by that most amoral of all entities, the free-market, that imperative seems more urgent, more political than ever.

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Ali Smith

Ali Smith. Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos for the Guardian

How to Be Both started with the structure of painting and the notion of time and the notion, too, of the time we take (or don't take) to use our eyes.

I tend to think all the arts are related and that the most exciting things happen, to them and us, when they cross borders into the other arts. I'd been reading about frescoes and fresco restoration. The structure of fresco is intriguing; it has to be light on its feet, done unbelievably fast, completed before the wet plaster dries, yet is so long-lasting, stays fresh-looking and still full of its same quickness, life and colour hundreds of years later. Frescoes become a physical part of the walls they're on – actually part of the plaster, as much a part of the wall as our skins are a part of us. The restorers, who invented ingenious ways of peeling the frescoes off the walls to mend or save them from the elements over the centuries, invariably found that they had structural underdrawings, the original sketches or figurings underneath the finished work, called sinopie, after the rust-coloured sticks the artists used to sketch their plans or drafts. Sometimes these uncovered sinopie resemble, sometimes they're a little different from, and occasionally they're completely other than, what we've been looking at for all the centuries on the surface. So you look at the wall, you see one thing, but something else is behind it, right in front of you, there but invisible. It's a perfect narrative structure.

I'd also been fascinated by something José Saramago, the great Portuguese novelist, says in one of his novels, The Stone Raft, about narrative and simultaneity. In it he laments the fact that several things can happen at exactly the same time in life but that in narrative you can't do simultaneity – one thing has to follow another. This makes him comically frustrated, furious and funny. Opera singers can do it, he says. Why can't writers?

I was in my publisher's office doing a recording for my last book, and as we finished I asked Simon, my editor, whether it'd be technically possible to publish a book in which two halves could be reversed, so that one book could simultaneously be two: one part of the story could, quite randomly, in one version come first, and in the other version come second. I'd been thinking it would be at least gestural to that idea of the simultaneity of layers, both of story and time. I don't see why not, he said. I'll find out. Two other people were there listening to our recording, one young, one more my age, and they both lit up at the idea. The man who was recording our podcast in the other room was listening through the wall; he said the word "palimpsest" (I remember it, in my earphone). A couple of days later Simon emailed me. "It's possible," he said.

I began to think about surface and underwork, about how all stories travel with at least one understory, and to wonder about this in relation to notions of time, sequence and consequence (I think the novel form is always about time), as well as about the act of looking, of representation across time. I had no idea what book would come of it. I knew it would be about then, now, and notions of observation over the centuries; right now in the western world we're living in a time where visuals and screens dictate almost everything.

Then one day I chanced on a picture in a magazine by a 15th-century artist I'd never heard of, and it was so striking it stopped me in my tracks. Francesco del Cossa. Who? When I did a bit of searching to find out about this artist, what I discovered was: how little was known and how resonant that little was; and that I had stumbled on a story about art and worth, one that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

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