M, a 50-year-old novelist living in an idyllic place by a lake, is travelling to a literary festival to give a talk. A sequence of events, mostly beyond her control, leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar town. It’s dead quiet, except for a travelling circus camped on the outskirts. M checks into a hotel, ignores her phone and wanders around, reminiscing about books read, films watched, museums visited. Some of these recollections are grounded in fable; others are vividly realistic. Among the latter are memories of her childhood and youth, spent in a “country that no longer exists apart from on old maps and in history books”.

M describes the country she comes from as a “beast” waging war against its neighbour. We can guess her meaning without turning to the author’s biographical note. Maria Stepanova – whose masterly In Memory of Memory combined family memoir, essay and fiction – left her native Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We might also wonder how closely The Disappearing Act tracks her own life. But the novelist M is not here to discuss autofiction – she has more important things to reflect on.

What was it like inside the beast? “She’d lived her whole life … doing nothing, or doing only what came naturally to her, and wanting to believe she had got away with it.” Was it wrong of her to enjoy her life there? She understands that “joy was the very thing the beast was bent on annihilating … and that it was important to keep it alive to spite the beast”, but that’s little consolation now that her former compatriots are killing others “with missiles, with fire from the sky, with bare hands”.

M’s relationship with the legacy of her one-time homeland – first and foremost, its language – is inevitably compromised. One of the stories she retells, the tale of a linguist whose tongue is cut out before he can use it, could be about herself. But the book’s laconic style, with distant echoes of poetry, skilfully conveyed by translator Sasha Dugdale, shows that M still has the power of telling.

True to the novel’s title, M’s presence gradually diminishes, starting from her realisation that she is “cut off, a spare limb”. Watching young lovers, “she felt as if these things no longer affected her; the economy of erotic selection and exchange bore no relation to her current existence”. Served bread in a cafe, she leaves it on the plate before suddenly forcing it into her mouth, as if trying to convince herself that she is hungry and therefore still there. These transformations may be alarming, but when “her inner self … gradually quietened, becoming soft, childlike”, it brings a sense of freedom and possibility. Part of her longs to recreate the dream in which “she was on a train to the dacha, the years falling away from her as she travelled” until she was a small child again.

Her mother once told her about a sign reading “There is no way out”: M considers her own exit strategy. Can she find a “novel way out of a hopeless situation”? With no set plan, she visits the circus and offers to help perform a magic act. It involves lying in a sarcophagus with her knees up to her chin, which she finds “boring and painful” though not hard. The owner of the circus asks her if she is a Jew, and M, happily discarding her “Russian novelist” identity, says yes.

The world has labelled her a writer, yet she wants to be seen as herself – whatever that might be – and the circus promises a chance of that. She leaves most of her possessions behind and sets off to join the troupe. She’ll walk through the empty town; she’ll start again at the beginning. It’s not too late, is it?

“There was so much guilt around M, and in her, that it was hard to breathe” – over the past four years, this sentiment has become familiar to many Russians opposing the war in Ukraine. Authors such as Mikhail Shishkin have spoken about collective guilt in their nonfiction; a “common enough motif”, as M says of yet another remembered story. Wherever her escapade brings her next, she is proof that it takes a novelist with poetic imagination to capture the nature of the beast.

When Raymond Antrobus was a child, he writes in his new book, The Quiet Ear, his father would call him “white” when he was drunk, and “black” when he was sober. “White” was meant as an insult, the author explains over tea in his flat in Margate, where a pile of toys indicate the recent presence of his own young son. In his cruellest moments, it was a way for Antrobus’s black father, who died in 2014, to say “I don’t understand you. I don’t love you. You don’t understand my pain.”

Antrobus, 38, is calm and reflective when he talks about this. As a deaf person who relies on hearing aids and lip-reading to communicate, he says he has long had to “make sense of myself for other people”.

“I got to this point where I was like: what would happen if I didn’t have to do that? What does freedom look like for me?” It was writing poetry that got him to that place, and with that has come a great deal of critical acclaim: his first collection, The Perseverance, published in 2018, won the Rathbones Folio prize (now the Writers’ prize), the Sunday Times young writer of the year award and the Ted Hughes award. That last felt somewhat ironic, given that The Perseverance contains a redacted version of Hughes’s poem Deaf School, along with Antrobus’s response, which grapples with its hurtful depiction of deaf children. In Hughes’s poem, the students “lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound” and are “alert and simple”; Antrobus’s poem After Reading Deaf School by the Mississippi River flips it: “Ted is alert and simple. / Ted lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound”.

Antrobus is driven by the desire to understand people and their motivations. His father’s “white” insult came from a projection of his insecurities about his own identity, he believes now. Born in rural Jamaica, the darkest-skinned of seven brothers, his father developed an “ugly duckling” complex from a young age, and was sent to live with an aunt in Kingston when he was three. As a young adult, after his own father had moved to England, he was sent for, moving first to Wolverhampton and later London, where he met Antrobus’s mother at a squatters’ party. Both the poet’s parents had other partners initially, and their relationship was marked by his father’s disappearances, but it lasted in some way or another until Antrobus was four or five. At that point, the writer’s grandmother stepped in to help look after him and his older sister. Even as a child, Antrobus could sense his father’s complicated relationship with his homeland – after a visit to Jamaica 15 years after he had left, his father “found that the place had changed so much and he couldn’t relate to people in the same way. And then they started calling him white because he’d been away so long.”

As well as being a second-generation Jamaican immigrant, on his white mother’s side the writer is related to Sir Edmund Antrobus, an enslaver who owned plantations in Jamaica, British Guiana and St Kitts. “It gives me this perspective, of my nation, of my language, which is always slightly like one foot on the land and one foot in the sea,” he says. He has researched the Antrobus lineage and visited the Cheshire village from which the name hails. “Edmund Antrobus’s wealth did not trickle down to my family or to the Antrobuses that are living there in Antrobus village. The wealth has been extracted” – those descendants are in South Africa and have been made even richer by “diamond mine stuff”, he says. “It’s just weird. Should I feel complicit in that?”

The only way he has found to reckon with his own identity is through creativity. “I’ve fought through it, I’ve felt through it,” he says, which led him to think: “How can I bring other people into that?” His teaching work – Antrobus is a freelance poetry teacher and editor, and a board member at the Poetry School – was one way he has been able to help others. It has been a source of guilt that he hasn’t been able to take on as much of that kind of work of late. He puts a lot of pressure on himself to “give back”.

“I’m carrying survivor’s guilt,” he says. Born in Hackney in 1986, he grew up attending a mixture of deaf and hearing schools, and was given specialised support in order to learn to speak, write, sign and lip-read effectively. “I’ve been visiting deaf schools for a decade now, and I’m still yet to see provision that matched the care I got,” he says. Given the closures of deaf schools and cuts to provisions for deaf pupils made over the last three decades, to get the same level of support now “I would have to be the child of an aristocrat”. And without that support, he probably wouldn’t have been able to write. “It blows my mind.”

That’s not to say that Antrobus had an easy ride: for a long while, in order to fit in, he resisted anything that would make him look more deaf. His parents – both hearing – never learned sign language, which his mother still feels guilty about. “But it wasn’t really just her fault,” the writer says. “It was also me refusing it.” As a child, he was constantly trying to minimise the fact that he was deaf, whipping out his hearing aids whenever photos were taken and refusing to use the British Sign Language (BSL) he learned at school in front of the hearing children “out of self-consciousness”. He learned ways to avoid bullying, joining both the deaf and hearing teams for football, athletics and swimming. “That’s what kind of saved me,” he says: the social status he was afforded by being good at sport gave him a free pass from the bullying he saw other, non-sporty deaf children experience.

Having written three acclaimed poetry collections and two children’s books – the first of which, Can Bears Ski?, became the first ever CBeebies bedtime story to be read in sign language, by deaf actor Rose Ayling-Ellis – Antrobus has now turned to writing adult prose. The Quiet Ear pays homage to Antrobus’s teachers of the deaf, and sets out to show why deaf children deserve so much more support than they are currently receiving. The author describes it as “memoir as advocacy”, charting events in his own life while weaving in deaf history and a call to arms.

It feels like a timely book, in an era when healthcare is in crisis and diversity and inclusion measures are under threat across the globe. Antrobus has firsthand experience of contending with “anti-woke” culture in the US, having lived in Oklahoma with his then wife, who is American, for three years. It was ultimately the cost of private healthcare that drew the couple back to the UK when they were expecting their son, having been “hit with a crazy bill”. They had initially planned to return after their son’s birth, but worries about the US approach to “healthcare, DEI, all of that stuff which sounds like science fiction” convinced them to stay in the UK, and though they have since separated, they continue to co-parent in Margate.

Yet, though a preferable place to raise a child in some ways, the UK is still at “primary school level” when thinking about disability in general, Antrobus says. He has been pleased to see some positive developments when it comes to deaf rights and awareness, such as Ayling-Ellis winning Strictly Come Dancing in 2021 and becoming a well-known public figure (“She is going to have an impact on the culture in the UK for ever”) and the passing of the British Sign Language Act in 2022, which put BSL on course to become a recognised language. But he is disheartened by the government’s proposed cuts to personal independence payments (Pips) for disabled people and the continued closure of deaf schools.

Margate, where he has been living for the last year, has a “significant deaf history”, but the Royal School for Deaf Children in Margate, one of the oldest deaf schools in the UK, closed in 2015 with no replacement, and the Margate Deaf Club is no longer running. “I haven’t been able to access the deaf community here. It’s dissipated. And that, I think, is an example of what is happening all over the country,” he says. “There’s more separation, isolation, hurdles to jump through.”

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Such isolation can be fatal – as the author demonstrates in The Quiet Ear when he writes about a former classmate. Tyrone had worn bright blue hearing aids that he would sometimes pimp up with drawings and stickers, emboldening Antrobus to be more open about his own deafness, since “the girls still really fancied” Tyrone. After leaving school, though, Tyrone lost contact with his deaf friends, struggled to assimilate into the hearing world, developed alcoholism and was arrested on domestic abuse charges. In prison, he did not have his hearing aids and was not referred for new ones after a counsellor deemed his communication to be “fine without them”; he ultimately died by suicide in his cell.

It is no wonder, then, that Antrobus feels so indebted to his teachers, to his mum, his mentors – to everyone who kept him off a path similar to Tyrone’s. Now, when he meets people who don’t feel “properly deaf”, he encourages them to embrace their identity and find a community – as when he was walking near his home recently and approached a man with a cochlear implant.

After Antrobus said, “Oh, my deaf friend, how are you doing?” and started signing to him, the man became “stiff and anxious”, explaining that he didn’t know sign language. Exclusionary attitudes from signing deaf people had made this man feel that he wasn’t welcome in deaf communities. Traditionally, there was an emphasis on what Antrobus refers to as “capital ‘D’ Deaf people”, who are culturally Deaf, “sign as a first language and are engaged in deaf history and identity”. When the writer explained to this man that the deaf world is very open now, “he started crying, and said, ‘Thank you so much. I needed permission to be a deaf person.’”

Antrobus’s hope is that The Quiet Ear will give more deaf people that permission, and educate hearing people about what the community needs. When it comes to deaf and disability rights, “we are at quite an interesting and, I hope, transitional, point”, he says. He is encouraged by how many people are speaking out against the proposed changes to Pips and learning more about disability justice. “It’s good, it’s giving people energy.”

There will be a follow-up to The Quiet Ear, Antrobus says, “about language, about voice, about class” – but not about deafness. In the meantime, he’s hoping to work more in the art world, having been commissioned to create work for the Guggenheim and the Barbican. “It challenges me to think in a new dimension,” he says. When we speak, he is just about to travel to Italy for a month-long residency at the esteemed Civitella Ranieri Foundation for artists and writers. “It’s exciting,” but there’s also a part of him that is sad and anxious – this is the longest he has been away from his son.

Antrobus clearly loves being a parent – at any mention of his three-year-old he becomes warmer, softer. But “it is difficult, balancing work and parenting,” he says, acknowledging that by asking their son’s mother to take care of him while Antrobus goes away for work he is “giving her a weight”.

He tries not to give too much time to other parenting worries, about how his son’s sense of identity will be shaped by social media, or him growing up as a black child in a country that has recently had race riots. “If I was to lean too much into that, I would go mad,” he says, but he hopes that his son will have “a lot more certainty and grounding” about who he is than Antrobus had as a child.

His son is hearing, though is learning to sign, and Antrobus “would put money on him doing the BSL GCSE” when he is older. Antrobus himself is able to communicate better than ever, using SSE (sign supported English) and the help of hi-tech hearing aids that connect to his phone (he switched to a private audiology clinic after winning the Ted Hughes award). As a champion of the NHS “going private was a guilt thing”, yet having access to the latest models via private healthcare has meant he “can relax a bit more”, no longer having to rely on lip-reading as much.

Antrobus is determined to make use of everything he has been given, to make work like The Quiet Ear, to keep advocating for better resources for deaf people. “I’ve probably been given more than I’ve given back,” he says. “So I owe the world a lot.”

You could see Peace’s new book as his third in a series of novels centred on football bosses – the Manageriad? – after The Damned Utd (about Brian Clough) and Red or Dead (Bill Shankly). It unfolds more than three months after the Munich air disaster of 1958, when the plane carrying Matt Busby’s Manchester United home from a European
Cup tie in Belgrade crashed after a stop to refuel, killing 20 of the 44
people on board, with three more dying later in hospital.

Writing in the third person but from the point of view of dozens of those involved – players, journalists, families – Peace dramatises the crash, its aftermath and how United, then reigning champions, managed to complete the remaining third of the season under Busby’s assistant, Jimmy Murphy, miraculously reaching the FA Cup final. It’s a tale of duty, guilt and blame, with the day-to-day commitments on the pitch and boardroom fulfilled amid the burying of the dead and nagging questions about why the plane crashed. A voice inside the head of goalkeeper Harry Gregg, tormented after saving fellow passengers from the wreckage, asks why no one on board spoke up about not taking off in bad weather. “Because like all people,” he replies, “we’re afraid to lose face in front of our friends.”

It’s a stirring proposition but there are doubts about Peace’s handling from the start, with an on-the-nose epigraph from James Joyce’s The Dead introducing a prologue in which the United players, a month before the crash, enter the pitch at Arsenal in white away kit, emerging “out of the tunnel like a ghost train”, a line I winced to read – and that’s before the first line proper, in which Bobby Charlton’s mum is worrying
that “something was wrong, she just didn’t know what”. Her friend agrees: “Can you not sense there’s something in the air … ?”, just as Peace cuts to the wreckage.

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Yet the fault in Munichs isn’t artistic licence – rather, its lack. After The Damned Utd, former Leeds midfielder John Giles sued Peace for his portrayal as “a scheming leprechaun” (Giles’s words), and it’s hard not to feel that Peace has been wary of taking liberties ever since, portraying Shankly from the outside in Red or Dead and doing similar here. One funeral procession after another is described via names of roads on the route; unremarkable action is narrated to imply troubled psychological states, as when we see Murphy in his garden “out in the cold, damp morning, pacing up and down… holding his rosary, its beads and its crucifix in his hand, rubbing at the figure and face of Christ on the Cross as he paced, as he prayed, first asking for forgiveness, then asking for comfort, comfort for others, asking for strength, strength for others, then strength for himself, the strength to help others, the strength to go on, to somehow go on.”

Effective, for sure, but it also feels like a workaround; Peace is in his comfort zone whenever he can give us a good long list, as when Busby, out of hospital, at last gets to watch a match at Old Trafford only to find himself confusing living players with a team sheet of the dead. Individuation matters less than accretion – you feel Peace is seeking the basic drama of how dozens of families suffered the same agony at the same time. Throughout, there’s tension from the title, because Peace doesn’t explain in the novel itself that rival fans still taunt United supporters as “Munichs”; it’s as if he wanted to frame a story about the best of football with the worst of the sport.

His afterword defies anyone to read the novel and still use “Munich” as a slur, which seems to misunderstand his likely audience; he even says United fans (he supports Huddersfield) might reclaim the taunt as a badge of the club’s uniqueness. That suggestion hints at the mood of nostalgia in which this novel was written – capturing an era in which fans awaited results in Saturday evening’s paper or a footballer could be nicknamed after a character on The Archers – yet it’s surely also true that the Munich disaster is the tragic prehistory underpinning the vast and much less obviously heroic commercial enterprise we know today. But my hunch is that this great author would need to be in a less wistful mood – the mood of his novel GB84, perhaps – to want to narrow his eyes at that.