BOOKS


Previews New Titles: Fiction


New Titles: Fiction May


Just as spring hails warmer weather, it also sees publishers turn their eyes to summer reading and so, in May, expect literary delights and débuts


Madeleine Feeny @madeleinefeeny


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s publishing cranks up for summer reading and festival season, May sees an avalanche of releases from major literary players including Colm Tóibín, Sarah Perry and Chigozie Obioma, alongside some interesting débuts likely to trouble the bestseller lists and prize commitees this year. I’m a sucker for comedy, which Kaliane Bradley’s explosive début has in spades, as does Miranda July’s riotous second novel, while Anders Lustgarten’s thriller, tackling the migrant crisis, is both angry and comic. But it’s not all LOLs; there’s shuddering passion in the 1960s Dutch countryside; protest in 1980s Beijing; epipha- nies in heatwave London; and scandal in 1990s Ireland. Several of these speak to ongoing trends: Irish novels, oſten portraying tight-knit communi- ties; literature from China; and


Submissions New Titles: Fiction is a monthly preview of hardbacks, trade paperbacks and paperback originals. For its submission guidelines, contact alice.o’keeffe@ thebookseller.com. For submission deadlines, visit thebookseller.com/ publishing-calendar.


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narratives playing with time. Sam Taylor’s The Two Loves of Sophie Strom traces two parallel lives, while Juli Min’s Shanghailanders follows a household back in time. Influencer culture is addressed by Emily Jane Hodgkin and OnyiNwabineli, and both Catherine Prasifa and Honor Levy explore growing up online.


I’m a sucker for comedy, which Kaliane Bradley’s explosive début has in spades, as does Miranda July’s riotous second novel


Book of the Month Bradley’s comedic, time-bending début dazzles


SSF Kaliane Bradley


Spain is also having a moment, with translated débuts Bad Habit by Alana S Portero and Woodworm by Layla Martinez carried here on tides of domestic acclaim. Sports romance and bookish romance remain hot, but nothing beats the story behind Here for the Wrong Reasons, whose co-authors went from friends to lovers while writing their lesbian rom-com.


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.


50,000+ 25,000+ 10,000+ 5,000+ 3,000+


The next edition of The Bookseller (9th February) will feature New Titles Non-Fiction covering titles released in May.


2nd February 2024


The Ministry of Time Sceptre, 14th, £16.99, hb, 9781399726344


Début Unless you’ve been living under a rock—or perhaps in a different


timeline—you’ve probably heard about Sceptre’s superlead, written by the Penguin Press commissioning editor who won both the Harper’s Bazaar and V S Pritchett short story prizes in 2022.


The speculative literary début has already sold in 19 territories and screen rights were optioned in a 21-way auction. It is narrated by a civil servant who becomes the “bridge” for a 19th-century naval officer who has been expatriated to 21st-century London in a secret government project. She must help Lieutenant Graham Gore, a real historical figure who never returned from Franklin’s 1845 lost Arctic expedition, acclimatise to modernity while sharing a house—an arrange- ment not conducive to maintaining professional boundaries. It’s an inspired premise, fertile ground for hilariously incongruous dialogue, comic perspectives on our era, and deeper explora- tions of free will, structural inequalities and shifting values. Bradley writes with sparkling vividness and precision, infec- tiously capturing the mind-bending effects of love. Whizzing up time-travel, romance, espionage, friendship and loss with dazzling assurance, this riotous journey into the British empire and establishment reckons with our colonial past, our myopic present and our fragile future.


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