AutCasts Recommends: Neurodivergent Fiction
A round-up of some of the best neurodivergent fiction from the last couple of years, just in time for the holidays!
It’s that time of year when the consumer frenzy is at its peak, as people rush around buying gifts for friends, loved ones and maybe even for themselves. I’m not really a Christmas person, nor a shopping person, but I do love to buy books for myself and others at any time of the year. And since it’s the holiday season I thought I’d wrap up 2023’s ‘AutCasts Recommends’ series with a round-up of the best neurodivergent fiction from the last couple of years.
Welcome to AutCasts, a free bi-weeekly newsletter by writer, Aisling Walsh, exploring neurodivergence through cinema’s oddballs, misfits & rebels!
If you read my recent article for Publishers Weekly you might remember that I discussed how the publishing world is still fixated on reproducing, rewarding and awarding novels centring neurodivergent characters written by neurotypical authors. Too often, these novels tend towards fetishising their protagonist’s neurodivergence while also reproducing some of the most reductive and damaging neurodivergent stereotypes. It’s an uphill struggle for openly neurodivergent authors to break into the world of writing. Nevertheless, more and more neurodivergent writers are getting published across all genres of fiction, from horror, to speculative, to romance. Neurodivergent writers contribute to a rich ecosystem of fictional writing, while pushing boundaries in subject and form and defying many of the neurodivergent stereotypes which mainstream publishing has clung to for so long.
The following is a short list, in no particular order, of recent titles from neurodivergent authors writing across genres that you may like to gift to yourself or others this holiday season. Happy reading!
Eyes Guts Throat Bones by Moïra Fowley
Moïra Fowley is a writer who has come onto my radar multiple times this year, most recently because a short story from this collection, Such a Pretty Face, was awarded the An Post Short Story of the Year for 2023. Two days later I tried to get a hard copy of Eyes Guts Throat Bones in Galway to find they were completely sold out in every bookshop – good news for any author!
Eyes Guts Throat Bones is Fowley’s debut short story collection following the publication of three successful YA novels. Across 14 stories, Fowley explores late capitalist nightmares, suicide, motherhood and relationships through a queer mix of body-horror, the speculative and dystopian Irish landscapes where children turn to mulch and smiles can cause landslides. The pandemic left a clear imprint on this collection of tales for the end of the world: the uncertainty, the claustrophobia and the terrible choices that have to be made when the world is crumbling around us. As a small-town Irish girl some of these worlds were terribly familiar, even with the speculative twist. But the writing is good enough so that readers beyond Ireland will be (in some cases literally) sucked into the worlds of Fowley’s protagonists.
You can order Eyes Guts Throat Bones directly from the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Unwieldy Creatures by Addie Tsai
Staying with the speculative, Addie Tsai’s Unwieldy Creatures, published in 2022, is a gripping queer and contemporary retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The novel straddles the parallel lives and narratives of Plum and Dr. Frank, two queer and biracial scientists who meet as colleagues in Dr. Frank’s lab. Dr. Frank is a pioneer in reproductive technologies who is determined to develop the ability to create life without the need for either sperm or an egg. Plum is an ambitious intern who idolises Dr. Frank and is eager to collaborate with their experiments despite the warning signs. When things go horribly wrong in the lab both narrators are forced to confront the ethical implications of their ambitions and their reproductive experiments.
Tsai needs only the slightest of nudges to bring us from the contemporary realities of designer babies and a new generation of eugenically-minded genetic research, towards the dystopian possibilities for reproductive engineering and a future where the creation of life is divorced from the limitations of real bodies. Nominated for the prestigious Shirley Jackson award, Unwieldy Creatures honours the proud feminist lineage of the original Frankenstein, while exploring family trauma, the nature of queer desire, gender and racial identities that do not fit neatly into established binaries and the increasingly blurred limits of medical ethics.
If, like me, you’re thirsty for more Frankenstein adjacent content, you can find
writing on here with a number of offerings including an newsletter!You can order Unwieldy Creatures from Bookshop.org 1
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Naoise Dolan is the second Irish writer to make this list, having published her second novel The Happy Couple in 2023. I haven’t got round to reading this yet but I did enjoy Dolan’s bestselling debut novel Exciting Times, published in 2020. Exciting Times follows Ava as she struggles to get by in Hong Kong on a miniscule ESL teacher’s salary. After drifting into an affair with an older and emotionally unavailable banker, Julian, Ava becomes a live-in lover, but never quite girlfriend, in his show-room apartment. While Julian is away on business trips, Ava sparks a friendship with a local lawyer, Edith, which soon turns into an affair. Ava must choose between the superficial opulence offered by Julian and real intimacy with Edith.
I’m not usually that fussed about contemporary fiction, nor the ‘hit me girls’ sub-genre, but Dolan offers wit and sarcasm and I’m delighted to see an autistic author writing about love triangles and pentangles in a world where autistic people are too often seen as sexless (as opposed to asexual2) Sheldon Cooper cut-outs.
You can order Exciting Times from Bookshop.org
The Deep by Solomon Rivers
As a massive Octavia E. Butler (who was also dyslexic, by the way) fan, I was delighted to stumble across Soloman’s work with its echoes of Butlers’s Wild Seed novel from the Patternist series and Alexis Pauline Gumbs nonfiction work Undrowned.
Inspired by a song from the experimental hip-hop group Clipping, The Deep follows Yetu, a memory-keeper and historian who has been tasked to preserve the stories of her people: the underwater-dwelling descendants of enslaved pregnant African women who were thrown overboard by slave owners during the Atlantic slave trade. Yetu flees to the surface world to escape this responsibility but is confronted with the ongoing horrors of our contemporary world.
Published in 2019, The Deep is a powerful narrative of embodied memory, intergenerational trauma and the legacies of the slave trade. Solomon received a Lambda award for Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror and was shortlisted for the Nebula, Locus, and Hugo awards. The Deep is unusual in that three further authors are credited, Jonathan Snipes, Daveed Diggs and William Hutson who all members of Clipping. This is an intriguing exercise in collaboration and co-authorship in a literary world where authorship is practically currency.
You can find The Deep at Bookshop.org
All the Little Bird Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s debut novel, All the Little Bird Hearts, secured a place in history as the first openly autistic author to make The Booker Prize Longlist. All the Little Bird Hearts centres on Sunday, an autistic single mother, settled into her quiet existence raising her daughter Dolly and working in a local garden centre. When new neighbours, Vita and Rollo, move in next door, mother and daughter alike are captivated by their charisma and exciting, affluent lives. But as Dolly begins to spend more and more time with the neighbours, Sunday fears she will lose her daughter altogether.
While All the Little Bird Hearts did not make it to the shortlist, there is much to love about this tale of neighbourly intrigue where the protagonist’s autism is not the only thing of note about her. In an interview for The Booker Prize Lloyd-Barlow says:
I hope too, that other autistic writers might read my work and find it authentic, even if it does not directly reflect their own experiences. There are many autistic writers producing good work and I would be happy both to be included in this number and to see more autistic writing being celebrated.
You can read an extract from All the Little Bird Hearts on The Booker Prize website and order a copy at Bookshop.org!
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I’ll be back next time to settle an age old debate: is The Nightmare Before Christmas a Halloween or a Christmas movie? In the meantime why not drop your own neurodivergent fiction recommendations below?
This post is in no way affiliated with Bookshop.org but it seemed preferable to linking to an Am*zon page. If you have the means to support the work of any or all of these authors why not buy a copy from your local bookshop? Alternatively you can request it from your local library so that others can enjoy it too! Bonus: the more our libraries fill with books by #ActuallyAutistic authors the better!
There is a qualitative difference between asexuality as a part of the spectrum of human sexuality and being regarded as sexless: Autistic and disabled people are often considered to be devoid of an interest in sex or relationships and confronted with attitudes and policies that say we should not, or cannot, have sex and/or sustain relationships because of our disabilities.
Great list! Have you read "Radio Silence" by Alice Oseman? It's not stated in the book, but I think the entire novel is a beautiful portrayal of the power and value of Autistic friendships (pretty sure the two main characters are both in club 'tism!).
I haven’t read any of the titles on your list (yet!). Thank you for sharing these recommendations 💛