This preview highlights titles to be published in January 2022
01 Top sellers
Editor’s Choice
Editor’s Choice
decades into the brutal rule of Ferdinand Marcos. A rebellion is brewing and Primi Peregrino infiltrates the meetings of support- ers to pursue romantic connections with the authors of her favourite books. From the author of Insurrecto (Fitzcarraldo).
Literary Tessa Hadley
Free Love Jonathan Cape, 20th, £16.99, HB, 9781787333673
One summer evening in a suburban garden after dinner, pretty, dutiful housewife Phyllis kisses the twentysomething son of a family friend and sets in motion a train of events that will explode her small, Home Counties exist- ence—and her marriage to the dependable Roger. The year is 1967 and Phyllis’ sexual and intellectual awakening mirrors that of turbulent 1960s society that is trans- forming around her. Hadley writes with such psycho- logical acuity about love and passion and ordinary lives, somehow catching the truth of things and pinning it to the page. BookScan
Literary short stories
Lily King Five Tuesdays in Winter Picador, 20th, £14.99, HB, 9781529086478
I discovered Lily King last year, with her beguiling fifth novel Writers & Lovers, so was thrilled to learn of her first collection of short stories. Here are 10, five of which originally appeared in literary magazines. My favourites are “Creature”, in which a 14-year-old girl takes a summer job as a live-in babysitter for an old lady’s grandchildren and fights back when her employer’s son tries to take advantage, and “When in the Dordogne”, in which a teen- ager is left at home while his parents go on holiday, in the care of two college boys hired to housesit who change his life. BookScan
Neil Gaiman, Colleen Doran (illus) Chivalry Headline, 26th, £14.99, HB, 9781472290649 Graphic novel adaptation of Gaiman’s short story which tells of an elderly widow who buys what turns out to be the Holy Grail from a second-hand shop, setting her off on an epic journey with an ancient knight who lures her with relics in the hope of winning the cup. Slips from December. BookScan
Editor’s Choice
Editor’s Choice
Maggie Hope An Orphan’s Secret Ebury Press, 6th, £6.99, PBO, 9780091956226 Latest from the top-selling saga author concerns a young married woman who thinks she has left her tragic past behind, only for a menacing figure to loom once again, and threaten to destroy all that she has fought for… BookScan
Literary
Sean Thor Conroe Fuccboi Wildfire, 25th, £16.99, HB, 9781472293107
Début Said to be a “raucous, free-
styling” examination of masculinity under late capitalism, this is set in 2017. Twentysomething protagonist Sean Thor Conroe, the fuccboi of the title, has been dumped by his ex and is trying to write while surviving in the gig economy.
Commercial
Nikki May Wahala Doubleday, 6th, £14.99, HB, 9780857527783
Début My pick of the débuts, this is wildly entertaining. Set in contemporary
London, from noisy Nigerian restaurants to gleaming champagne bars, it follows friends Ronke, Simi and Boo. The trio, who met as students at Bristol University, all have mixed Nigerian and English heritage and, now in their mid-30s, are grappling with different problems in their professional and personal lives. Enter Isobel, a glamorous “old friend” of Simi’s from Lagos who is set on infiltrating the tight-knit group, but to what end? Isobel’s hidden motive propels the narrative, all the way to the final twist.
TheBookseller.com
Crime & thriller Louise Welsh
The Second Cut Canongate, 27th, £14.99, HB, 9781838850869
Back in 2002, The Cutting Room was “one of the most intriguing, assured and unput- downable débuts to come out of Scotland in recent years,” said the Sunday Times. This is the sequel but it absolutely works as a standalone. Auctioneer Rilke has been staying out of trouble when he gets a tip-off from an old friend, Jojo, about a lucrative house clearance. Then Jojo is found dead, and it seems to be up to Rilke to find out why. It’s a joy to spend time in the company of the cadaverous, weary Rilke, in a driech Glasgow as he follows the murky trail from gangsters to chemsex parties.
Isabel Allende Violeta Bloomsbury, 25th, £16.99, HB, 9781526648341 Latest from the author of A Long Petal of the Sea is the epic story of Violeta del Valle, born in South America in 1920. Violeta is a woman whose life spans 100 years against the backdrop of extraordinary events; the fight for women’s rights, the rise and fall of tyrants and not one, but two pandemics. BookScan
Gina Apostol Bibliolepsy Soho Press 6th, £21.99, HB, 9781641292511 Originally published in the Philippines in 1998, this is set in the mid-1980s, two
Louis-Philippe Dalmbert, Marjolijn de Jaeger (trans) The Mediterranean Wall Pushkin Press, 27th, £12.99, TPB, 9781782277095 Three women wait on the Libyan shore to board a crowded migrant boat heading for Europe: Dima, fleeing war and torture in Syria; Sembar, running from conscription in Eritrea; and Shoshana, driven from Nigeria by climate change and hunger.
Louise Erdrich The Sentence Corsair, 20th, £20, HB, 9781472156990 Latest from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist tells of Tookie, a headstrong and deeply wronged Ojibwe woman with a chequered past, who is released from a long prison sentence. She finds work in a Minneapolis bookstore but soon the ghosts come calling. “The poet laureate of the contemporary Native American experience”
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