This preview highlights titles to be published in January 2022
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coming-of-age story following 14-year-old David, who runs away from home in Florida and becomes addicted to crack cocaine. He is ricocheting between jail and rehab over the next decade, until he takes an adult literature class…
settles into the studio upstairs. An uneasy friend- ship forms, with Agnes telling the younger woman stories about her life, and slowly exposing the narrow divide between creativity and madness.
Yishai Sarid
The Memory Monster Serpent’s Tail, 13th, £12.99, HB, 9781788169110 Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, the unnamed narrator recounts his downfall, from promising young historian guiding tours through death camps, to becoming dangerously obsessed by them. This asks how we can honour the suffering of our forebears without being consumed by it.
Indyana Schneider 28 Questions Scribner, 20th, £14.99, HB, 9781398501096 A student strikes up a friendship with a fellow Australian in the bar of an Oxford college and the intensity of their connec- tion is both thrilling and terrifying. A passionate novel about first love, says Scribner.
Paulo Scott, Daniel Hahn (trans) Phenotypes And Other Stories, 4th, £10, HB, 9781913505189 An investigation into the emotional and societal costs of racism which follows two Brazilian brothers, Federico and Lorenço. Their father is Black and their mother is white. Federico has light skin and so passes as white, but Lorenço is dark-skinned.
reckoning in the age of Trump as she flees her suburban life—suffering from chronic insomnia while dealing with an angsty teenage daughter and an ill mother—by buying a decrepit house in Syracuse. “A dazzling lightning bolt of a novel,” says Jenny Offill.
Tuskar Rock, 6th, £14.99, HB, 9781800810013 The first novel in more than 20 years from Joy Williams (“one of the great writers of her generation”, New York Times) is a powerful story of surviving ecological disaster following a teenager who discovers a group of elderly people plotting to punish the corporations and people they hold responsible for the destruction of nature.
Wolf steals his mother’s car to search for his sister, who left home 10 years earlier. He crashes, caus- ing an accident, and is arrested. An exploration of how trauma shapes generations and the wounds it leaves behind, from the Mauritius-born author of The Last Brother.
arms, hammers on her sister’s door, bringing chaos and cataclysmic revelations.
Jerome Ferrari, Alison Anderson (trans) In His Own Image Europa Editions, 6th, £12.99, PBO, 9781787703476 In rural Corsica, Antonia’s life is transformed when she is given a camera, igniting a lifelong passion that will lead her, eventu- ally, to document the war in Yugoslavia.
Claire Vaye Watkins I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness Riverrun, 20th, £16.99, HB, 9781529418354 A fabulous title for this tale of one woman’s reckoning with marriage, work, sex and mother- hood. A writer, and strug- gling new mother, leaves behind her husband and baby to take a speaking engagement in the Mojave Desert where she grew up, and meets her past at every turn.
Aysegül Savas White on White Harvill Secker, 20th, £12.99, HB, 9781787303089
Début A student moves to a city and
rents an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town, but who one day turns up and
Literary
Jakob Guanzon Abundance Dialogue Books, 20th, £14.99, HB, 9780349702698
ing” début about the causes and effects of poverty in contemporary America, as experienced by Henry and his son
Junior after they are evicted, each chapter is struc- tured around the amount of cash Henry has in his pocket at any one time. Douglas Stuart is a fan: “A tense yet tender portrait of a father and son trying to escape life on the margin. Determination and despair collide in this unforgettable début with an ending that broke my heart.”
Dana Spiotta Wayward Virago, 13th, £14.99, HB, 9780349016412 “A furious and addictive” novel, according to the New York Times, about one woman’s midlife
Edmund White A Previous Life Bloomsbury, 25th, £18.99, HB, 9781526632241 A Sicilian aristocrat and his younger American wife agree to each write a memoir about their past lives; she reveals her multiple marriages to older men, and he details the affairs he has had with men and women, and his passionate affair with the author Edmund White.
Joy Williams Harrow
Robert Aickman Go Back At Once And Other Stories, 11th, £11.99, PBO, 9781913505202 Written in 1975 but never before published, this tells of two unusual women in pre-Depression Britain who learn of a new utopia on the Adriatic Sea. Very timely, as it speaks to our modern-day questioning of societal and gender roles, says the publisher.
Robert Olen Butler Late City No Exit Press, 27th, £12.99, PBO, 9780857304896 A 115-year-old former newspaperman lies on his deathbed as the 2016 US election results arrive, and talks to God about his life, from growing up in Louisiana to fighting in the trenches in the First World War. Author Butler won the Pulitzer Prize for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.
Jo McMillan The Happiness Factory Bluemoose Books, 28th, £9.99, PBO, 9781910422854 Second novel from the author of Motherland tells of Mo Moore, estranged daughter of a sex-aid entrepreneur, who, upon inheriting her father’s wealth, abandons her care job in England. She ends up in a remote mountain village in China that for centuries supplied dildos to the imperial bedcham- ber, but whose sex-aid factory is now in financial trouble…
Literary short stories
Nathacha Appanah, Geoffrey Strachan (trans) The Sky Above the Roof MacLehose Press, 20th, £10, PBO, 9781529408577 One night, 17-year-old
One to Watch
Début I ran out of reading time and was sorry not to get to this, but it looks really good. Said to be a “wrench-
Crime & thriller
Nita Prose The Maid HarperCollins, 20th, £14.99, HB, 9780008435721
ries to date, and Florence Pugh is set to produce and star in the film adaptation. Unassuming maid Molly works at the
Regency Grand Hotel and takes great pride in her spotless rooms, until the day she stumbles across the dead body of a guest. Molly then sets off in pursuit of the truth, and discovers some dark secrets lurking in her beloved workplace. Think Eleanor Oliphant crossed with an Agatha Christie- esque murder mystery. Author Prose is editorial director at Simon & Schuster Canada.
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Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Anna Goldstein (trans) A Sister’s Story Europa Editions, 20th, £12.99, PBO, 9781787703490 Follow up to A Girl Returned that can also be read as a standalone. In the dead of night, Adrianna, a baby in her
Saba Sams Send Nudes Bloomsbury, 20th, £14.99, HB, 9781526621771
Début Ten short stories that chart the
treacherous terrain of
One to Watch
Début HarperCollins is very excited about this contempo- rary murder mystery; rights have sold in 29 territo-
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