SEASON HIGHLIGHTS


Anonymous Girl. Here, drifting Shay Miller is drawn in by a glamorous group of women who seem to have perfect lives. Her life improves in their company, but what price will she have to pay?


Ian McEwan Machines Like Me Vintage, 5 March, pb, £8.99, 9781529111255


General fiction Now in paper- back, the latest


from the Booker Prize-winning novelist is set in an alternative 1980s London. Britain has lost the Falklands War and Charlie buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. “Machines Like Me reminds us that McEwan is once-in-a-gener- ation talent, offering readerly pleasure, cerebral incisiveness and an enticing imagination,” says the Spectator.


Andrew Michael Hurley Starve Acre John Murray, 31 March, pb, £8.99, 9781529387308


General fiction I loved this deeply unset-


tling tale, superbly told, of a man grieving the loss of his five- year-old son and his stricken wife, who believes their son’s spirit is still with them at Starve Acre—so named because noth- ing will grow there.


April


become “Gretel”, who is exactly what men want: a regular “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” next door with no problems.


Anne Tyler Redhead by the Side of the Road Chatto & Windus, 9 April, hb, £14.99, 9781784743475


General fiction Who doesn’t love Anne


Tyler’s writing? The wonderful A Spool of Blue Thread invigo- rated her career, with a place on the shortlist of two big literary prizes, plus it was a Richard & Judy Book Club selection. This is billed as an offbeat love story about missteps, second chances and the elusive art of human connection.


Jill Dawson The Language of Birds Sceptre, 14 April, pb, £8.99, 9781473654556


General fiction This was a Book of the


Month for me in hardback, a gripping retelling of the infa- mous Lord Lucan case in which the nanny, not the aristocrat, takes centre stage. Dawson captures the joie de vivre of a young woman with a painful past starting a new life in London, before the shocking events unfold.


Wilbur Smith, Corban Addison Call of the Raven Zaffre Publishing, 16 April, hb, £20, 9781785767944


Adventure, crime & horror


Prequel to A Falcon Flies, to be published


40 years after that book’s first publication, this is described as the “origin story” of Augustus Mungo St John, the son of a wealthy plantation owner who returns from university to find his family ruined, his inheritance stolen and his childhood sweet- heart taken by the conniving Chester Marion.


Sarah Vaughan Little Disasters Simon & Schuster, 2 April, hb, £14.99, 9781471165030


Adventure, crime & horror


Eagerly awaited follow-up to


Anatomy of a Scandal. Liz and Jess have been friends since they both started their families. But how well do they really know each other? Soon Liz is forced to question everything she thought she knew: about Jess, and about herself.


Holly Bourne Pretending Hodder & Stoughton, 2 April, hb, £14.99, 9781473668133


General fiction I loved How Do You Like Me


Now, so I am very much looking forward to this, the story of April. Fed up with dating rubbish men, she decides to


Taffy Brodesser-Akner Fleishman is in Trouble Wildfire, 21 April, pb, £8.99, 9781472267078


General fiction My book of summer 2019,


now in paperback. The début novel from the New York Times journalist is a blistering novel about marriage, divorce and modern love, in which Toby Fleishman’s life is turned upside down when his ex-wife Rachel suddenly disappears. Savagely funny and unputdownable.


Beth O’Leary The Switch Quercus, 30 April, hb, £12.99, 9781787474994


General fiction I loved her outstanding


romcom The Flatshare, and this is the much-anticipated follow- up. Eileen is sick of being 79 and her granddaughter Leena is tired of life in her twenties. So they swap lives for two months: Eileen moves into Leena’s flat in


the Big Smoke to look for love, and Leena to her grandmother’s cottage in a Yorkshire village.


Faber & Faber, 30 April, pb, £8.99, 9780571321964


General fiction Latest outstanding


novel from Doughty (a Book of the Month for me in hardback) is, on the one hand, a riveting thriller, near impossible to put down, about a woman’s experi- ence of coercive control. But when I finished it I was in tears. And there really aren’t very many authors with the power to do that. Now in paperback.


Victoria Hislop Those Who Are Loved Headline Review, 30 April, pb, £8.99, 9781472223227


Robert Webb Come Again Canongate Books, 23 April, hb, £16.99, 9781786890122


General fiction First novel from the star of


Channel 4’s “Peep Show” and author of How Not to Be a Boy follows recently bereaved Kate, who wakes up one morning back in her university bedroom on the first day of Freshers’ Week in 1992. She will meet Luke again, the husband she has just lost, but this time around she might be able to save him.


Cecelia Ahern Postscript HarperFiction, 30 April, pb, £7.99, 9780008194901


Sagas, romance & historical


Now in paper- back, the long-awaited


sequel to the international bestseller PS I Love You follows grieving widow Holly Kennedy, who is approached by a group calling itself the PS I Love You Club, and it needs her help. “Warmth emanates from the pages of this lovely, uplifting novel,” says Good Housekeeping.


Sagas, romance & historical


Set in Greece in the run-up to and during


the Second World War and the Civil War that followed, Hislop’s fifth novel tells of deeply divided families and enduring female friendships. “She makes a touching family story out of violent and divisive times, and her fans will lap this up,” says the Daily Mail. Now in paperback.


Garth Greenwell Cleanness Picador, 30 April, hb, £14.99, 9781509874637


General fiction A return to the characters and


setting—Sofia, Bulgaria—of his critically acclaimed début, What Belongs to You, declared an “instant classic” by the New York Times Book Review. Author Lisa Taddeo says: “Cleanness is stun- ning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth.”


Erin Kelly We Know You Know Hodder Paperback, 30 April, pb, £7.99, 9781444797305 A title


Adventure, crime & horror


change for the paperback


(published as Stone Mothers in hardback), this follow-up to the superbly plotted He Said/She Said concerns the chilling secrets of an abandoned asylum. “A gripping thriller which is impossible to put down, culminating in a heart-stopping final showdown,” according to the Daily Express.


Christina Dalcher Q HQ, 30 April, hb, £12.99, 9780008303341


General fiction The follow-up to her début


bestseller Vox. All children must now undergo tests to establish their quotient—Q—and those who don’t measure up are placed in special schools so teachers can focus on the gifted. When Elena’s daughter is taken away, she decides to follow.


Louise Doughty Platform Seven


May


Stephen King If It Bleeds Hodder & Stoughton, 5 May, hb, £20, 9781529391534


Adventure, crime & horror


A collection of four long-form stories, includ-


ing a standalone sequel to The Outsider, which features Holly Gibney of the Finders Keepers detective agency, working on her first solo case. Includes an author’s note from King, giving readers an insight into the origin of each story. “One of the


greatest storytellers of the past century,” says the Daily Mail.


Lionel Shriver The Motion of the Body Through Space Borough Press, 7 May, hb, £16.99, 9780007560783


General fiction A woman’s previously


sedentary husband discovers exercise, joins the cult of fitness consuming the Western world and becomes an “unbearable narcissist” in the latest from the fiercely funny and pin-sharp Shriver.


Paul Kingsnorth Alexandria Faber & Faber, 7 May, hb, £16.99, 9780571322107


General fiction Set on the far side of the


climate apocalypse, the final novel in the Buccmaster trilogy follows The Wake and Beast. “Kingsnorth’s style is a kind of ancient modernism... powerful and singular—Beckett doing ‘Beowulf’,” says the London Review of Books.


Salman Rushdie Quichotte Vintage, 7 May, pb, £9.99, 9781529111989


General fiction Now in paper- back, the


Booker Prize-shortlisted novel inspired by Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and set in contem- porary America, where the titu- lar Quichotte, an ageing travel- ling salesman, falls in love with a TV star, and wishes an imagi- nary son, Sancho, into existence. “Quichotte is one of the clever- est, most enjoyable metafic- tional capers this side of post- modernism,” says the Sunday Times.


Rose Tremain Islands of Mercy Chatto & Windus, 7 May, hb, £18.99, 9781784743314


Sagas, romance & historical


“The novel explores the primal human


quest to find meaning in a life, an aspiration which engages people in wildly different ways across the globe. I chose two contrasting locations: the genteel city of Bath and the harsh island of Borneo and unfolded in them both stories of sexual entrapment, material striving, loss of love, untimely death and—through them all— the desperate and unending


February 2020–July 2020 11


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