BOOKS
Previews New Titles: Fiction
New Titles: Fiction January 2022
There are a number of standout titles slated for the first month of next year, with hot competition for the Book of the Month and a fine roster of crime titles
Alice O'Keeffe @aliceokbooks
H
appy New Year! 2022 begins with a bang, and one of the biggest literary
novels of the year, To Paradise (Picador), Hanya Yanagihara’s much-anticipated follow-up to A Little Life. There was stiff competi- tion for the Book of the Month slot: I adored Tessa Hadley’s Free Love (Jonathan Cape), about a 1960s housewife’s emancipation, and Nikki May’s wild ride of a début Wahala (Doubleday). There is something for all
tastes in crime this month, from Janice Hallet’s The Twyford Code (Viper), about a mystery concealed in the novels of a celebrated children’s author, to high-concept thriller The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier (Michael Joseph)—rights have sold in 40 territories. Sophie Hannah serves up another helping of psychological suspense with The Couple at the Table (Hodder),
Submissions New Titles: Fiction is a monthly preview of hardbacks, trade paperbacks and paperback originals. For its submission guidelines, contact alice.o’keeffe@
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Next week 22
while The Christie Affair (Mantle), the fourth novel from Nina de Gramont, imagines what might have happened during Agatha Christie’s infamous disappear- ance in 1926. Christie’s influence can also be seen in HarperCollins’ big début, The Maid, from S&S Canada staffer Nita Prose, soon to be a film starring Florence Pugh. As we are starting to return
to our cities, two London-set rom-coms caught my eye: Sarra Manning’s London, with Love and Saskia Sarginson’s The Central Line (Piatkus). Lucy Diamond moves to Quercus for her 17th novel, Anything Could Happen. Historical fiction is set to be huge in 2022, so I hear. A big début for Harvill Secker is Pandora by Susan Stokes-Chapman, set in Georgian London, which concerns a mysterious ancient Greek vase. Pre-Revolutionary Paris is the seting for Anna Mazzola’s The Clockwork Girl (Orion). On a bitersweet note, The Book of Sand (Century) is the first fantasy novel from the acclaimed crime writer Mo Hayder, writing under the pseudonym Theo Clare. She died earlier this year.
BookScan ratings accompanying titles are based on TCM sales (excludes e-book, export, direct, library and other sales) of the author’s most recent original work in a similar format with at least six months’ sales through Nielsen BookScan, using the notation left.
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The next edition of The Bookseller (8th October) will feature New Titles: Non-Fiction covering titles released in January 2022.
1st October 2021
Book of the Month Yanagihara follows up hit début with scintillating novel
Literary
Hanya Yanagihara To Paradise Picador, 11th, £20, HB, 9781529077476
No-one who read Yanagihara’s second novel A Little Life (2015) could ever forget it. Initially published without particular fanfare, it became a real word-of-mouth hit and was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize
and the Women’s Prize. So, this is likely to be one of the biggest literary novels of the year, in all senses—my advance proof ran to 701 pages. To Paradise comprises a trio of stories, all set in New York
City 100 years apart. It opens in an alternate 1893: New York is part of the Free States, a nation separate to the rest of America, that allows gay marriage. David Bingham is the scion of a rich family, who wish him to marry wealthy widower Charles, but he is drawn to a penniless music teacher, Edward. The next part is set in 1993, during the AIDS epidemic, where another David Bingham, a young Hawaiian man, works as a paralegal and lives with wealthy senior partner Charles. The final section, set in 2093, reveals a world riven by pandemics and a city that resembles a totalitarian state. Here Charlie’s story unfolds, intercut with letters written in 2043. I don’t have the space to say more here, but it is an extraordinary novel; powerfully imagined and deeply moving. BookScan
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