SEASON HIGHLIGHTS February


hb, £16.99, 9780241325254


General fiction The eagerly- awaited début


Petina Gappah Out of Darkness, Shining Light Faber & Faber, 4 February, hb, £16.99, 9780571345328


General fiction “Engrossing, beautiful and


deeply imaginative,” says author Yaa Gyasi of this epic journey through 19th-century Africa following the funeral caravan of Bwana Daudi (David Livingstone) as his remains are transported over 1,500 miles so he can be borne across the sea and back to his own country.


Eimear McBride Strange Hotel Faber & Faber, 4 February, hb, £12.99, 9780571355143


General fiction Third novel from the author


of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize, follows a nameless woman who enters a nondescript hotel room she has been in once before, many years ago. But while the room hasn’t changed, she is a different person now.


Stacey Halls The Foundling Manilla Press, 4 February, hb, £12.99, 9781838770068


Sagas, romance & historical


Following her bestselling début The Familiars, Halls turns to Georgian


London for this tale of a mother, Bess Bright, who returns to London’s Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury to collect the illegit- imate daughter, Clara, she left there six years earlier—only to learn Clara has already been claimed.


novel from the author of We Were Eight Years in Power, and one of the leading voices on racial politics in contempo- rary America, this is the story of Hiram Walker, a slave with a mysterious power. Oprah Winfrey called it “one of the best books I have read in my entire life.”


Hannah Rothschild House of Trelawney Bloomsbury, 6 February, hb, £16.99, 9781526600608


General fiction Razor-sharp social satire


from the author of The Improbability of Love, which was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Trelawney Castle, the seat of the Trelawney family for over 800 years, is falling apart owing to lack of funds.


Isabel Greenberg Glass Town Jonathan Cape, 6 February, hb, £18.99, 9781787330832


Graphic novels The story of the Brontë siblings’


childhood imaginary world. “An ingenious intertwining of real life and make-believe, Glass Town explores the Brontës’ creative impulse and its effect on their lives… [It] will appeal to anyone who has wondered how imagination shapes us, as well as to card-carrying Brontë fans,” says Tracy Chevalier.


Stanley Donwood Bad Island Hamish Hamilton, 13 February, hb, £12.99, 9780241348758


Graphic novels From artist Stanley


Donwood, a starkly beautiful graphic novel about the end of the world. “Bad Island is an extraordinary, unsettling docu- ment: a silent species-history in 80 frames, a mute future archive. I can imagine it discov- ered in the remnants of a civili- sation; a set of runes found amid the ruins. Stark in its lines and dark in its vision, Bad Island reads you more that you read it,” says Robert Macfarlane.


Beth Morrey Saving Missy HarperFiction, 6 February, hb, £12.99, 9780008334024


General fiction A chance encounter in


the park with two very different women opens the door to a second chance for 79-year-old widow Missy, who believes her acute loneliness is all her own fault. A big début for HarperFiction, pitched squarely at the Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine readership,


Ta-Nehisi Coates The Water Dancer Hamish Hamilton, 6 February,


10


Tessa Hadley Late in the Day Vintage, 13 February, pb, £8.99, 9781784709235


General fiction One of my favourite


writers; her novels have inexplicably eluded the big prize shortlists. In her seventh novel, the lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death. Hadley’s psychological insight is remarkable, and her many fans include Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith and Anne Enright. Now in paperback.


Cho Nam-Joo, Jamie Chang Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 Scribner, 20 February, pb, £12.99, 9781471184284


General fiction A sensation in the author’s


native South Korea, this charts the life of Kim Jiyoung, from birth to age 33. In economical prose it tells of a life constantly devalued and undermined by a society that places the value of men far above that of women. Uncompromising and powerful, this shows hidden misogyny in sharp relief.


Lucy Foley The Guest List HarperFiction, 20 February, hb, £12.99, 9780008297169


Adventure, crime & horror


Foley’s The Hunting Party, an update on


the country house murder mystery, was great, and this is in a similar vein. On a remote island off the Irish coast, guests gather for a wedding. But the groom has a secret, a brides- maid has a grudge, a plus-one has a motive, and the best man has a past...


winning author (The White Tiger) follows a young illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka who is trying to make a new life in Sydney and must decide whether to report crucial infor- mation about a murder—and risk deportation in doing so.


Sadie Jones The Snakes Vintage, 20 February, pb, £8.99, 9781784708825


General fiction This did not make the


splash I was expecting in hard- back, and it deserves to find a big readership in paperback. When Dan marries Bea, he is aware she is very secretive about her background, but has no idea why. I was completely gripped by this story of the coruscating effects of money, greed and corruption: truly an all-consuming read from the first page to the devastating final line.


Colum McCann Apeirogon Bloomsbury, 26 February, hb, £18.99, 9781526607904


General fiction The story of two fathers,


one Israeli, one Palestinian; each of whom loses a daughter. One was killed by a suicide bomber, the other by a member of the border police outside her school. It asks: how do we continue to live after the most precious thing is lost?


March


Sarah J Maas House of Earth and Blood Bloomsbury, 3 March, hb, £16.99, 9781408884416


Science fiction & fantasy


The first adult novel from YA fantasy super-


star Maas launches the Crescent City series: set in a contempo- rary fantasy world of magic, danger and searing romance, where half-Fae, half-human Bryce Quinlan joins forces with fallen angel Hunt Athalar to unravel a mystery.


Ben Aaronovitch False Value Gollancz, 20 February, hb, £18.99, 9781473207851


General fiction Eighth in the Rivers of


London series. Peter Grant is facing fatherhood and an uncer- tain future, so he takes a job with an émigré Silicon Valley tech genius’ brand new London start-up. Compared to his last job, it should be a doddle. But magic is not finished with him...


Aravind Adiga Amnesty Picador, 20 February, hb, £16.99, 9781509879038


General fiction Latest from the Booker Prize-


The Bookseller Buyer’s Guide Fiction


Marina Lewycka The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid Fig Tree, 5 March, hb, £14.99, 9780241430309


General fiction The Pantis family unwit-


tingly becomes embroiled in a money-laundering scheme in the wake of the EU Referendum when George, who walked out on his wife to shack up with “Brexit Brenda” next door, wins millions on a Kosovan lottery— but cannot remember his password.


Bernardine Evaristo Girl, Woman, Other Penguin, 5 March, pb, £8.99, 9780241984994


General fiction Now in paper- back, the joint


Joanna Trollope Mum & Dad Macmillan, 5 March, hb, £18.99, 9781529003383


General fiction It has been 25 years since


Gus and Monica left England to start a wine business in Spain. Now Gus has a had a stroke and their three grown-up children descend on the vineyard, each with a different idea of how best to handle things. Long- simmering resentments will rise to the surface…


Booker Prize winner for 2019; a love song to black Britain told by 12 very different people. “Exuberant, bursting at the seams in delightful ways... Evaristo continues to expand and enhance our literary canon. If you want to understand modern day Britain, this is the writer to read,” says the New Statesman.


Max Porter Lanny Faber & Faber, 5 March, pb, £8.99, 9780571340293


General fiction The follow- up to his


award-winning début Grief is the Thing with Feathers is another dazzling experimental novel, now in paperback. It opens with Dead Papa Toothwort, a Green Man-esque figure, listening to voices rising from a village outside London, which swirl across the page.


Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen You Are Not Alone Macmillan, 5 March, hb, £12.99, 9781529010763


Adventure, crime & horror


I really rated the first two glossy, twisty,


New York-set psychological suspense books from this duo: The Wife Between Us and An


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