This preview highlights titles to be published in May
05
Editor’s Choice
Editor’s Choice
Editor’s Choice
Literary
Miranda July All Fours Canongate Books, 16th £20, hb, 9781838853440
Despite publishers’ love of the phrase, a “laugh-out-loud” novel is a rare thing. But July’s surprising, sexy and tender tale of a middle-aged artist and mother upending her life—not with the cross-American roadtrip she had planned but with a different reinvention altogether—had me helplessly cackling. It is the funniest book I’ve ever read. July is the author of The First Bad Man and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award-winning collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You. Canongate’s superlead campaign will include author visits in March and June. BookScan
Top sellers
John Grisham Camino Ghosts Hodder & Stoughton, 28th, £22, hb, 9781529342505 The third thriller in the series set on the Florida island, starring bookseller Bruce Cable. BookScan
HQ, 23rd, £9.99, pbo, 9781848459212 The new novel from the author of Summer Wedding sees a septuagenarian form an unexpected bond with a struggling artist secretly staying in her cottage. BookScan
Literary
Stephen King You Like It Darker Hodder & Stoughton, 21st, £25, hb, 9781399725095 Twelve stories delving into the darker side of life. King’s two most recent novels, Fairy Tale and Holly, were instant UK number ones and 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of Carrie, which will be supported by “major marketing activity”.BookScan
Sarah Morgan The Summer Swap
TheBookseller.com
Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson (trans) One Hour of Fervour Gallic Books, 16th, £16.99, hb, 9781913547608 Longlisted for the Prix Goncourt, the new novel from the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a story of frustrated parenthood. A Japanese art dealer promises to stay away from his daughter, who grows up on the other side of the world, born to a mysteri- ous Frenchwoman. It’s also a love letter to Japan, where Barbery lived.
John Boyne Earth Doubleday, 2nd, £12.99, hb, 9780857529831 The second book in the series of four novellas that began with Water
Crime & thriller
Anders Lustgarten Three Burials Hamish Hamilton, 2nd, £16.99, hb, 9780241638798
Début A vigilante nurse goes on the run with the body of a murdered migrant
and a rogue policeman, in this comic thriller told in three acts from multiple perspectives. It is both a cinematic car-chase caper and a blistering critique of the response to the refu- gee crisis and capitalist exploitation in a broken Britain. Lustgarten is an award-winning play- wright whose play “A Day At the Racists” won the Catherine Johnson Award while “If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep” won the Harold Pinter Playwriting Award.
Literary
Oisín McKenna Evenings and Weekends 4th Estate, 9th, £16.99, hb, 9780008604172
Début Set over two sweltering days in June 2019, this début interweaves the
perspectives of interlinked Londoners. Maggie is 30, pregnant and broke. Her boyfriend Ed has a secret history with her pal Phil, but he’s fallen for his housemate Keith, who’s taken. As the capital approaches fever pitch, each hurtles towards a transformative decision or realisation. Poignant yet unsentimental, with vivid characters and dialogue, this literary page-turner explores privilege, sexual- ity and shame, and what it means to be young and insecure—financially, professionally, personally.
follows a gay Irishman who works as an escort before becoming a profes- sional footballer. A gritty and complex exploration of guilt and shame, says Doubleday. BookScan
a young Black man’s life in the début novel from a New Yorker staff writer who drew inspiration from his experiences working on Obama’s 2008 presi- dential campaign. Feels especially timely in this pivotal year of elections.
from an Icelandic rising star imagines a country bitterly divided by an impending vote on whether a new empathy test should be mandatory. A novel of big ideas, it intertwines the perspec- tives of four characters caught in the teeth of the debate.
Ammar Kalia A Person is a Prayer Oldcastle Books Ltd, 30th, £16.99, hb, 9780857305855
Début Shortlisted for the Unbound
Allen Bratton Henry Henry Jonathan Cape, 2nd, £16.99, hb, 9781787334595
Début The Line of Beauty meets
“Succession” in this “blis- teringly funny” retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad history plays, which trans- plants the privilege and tragedy to contemporary London, exploring inheri- tance and love.
Vinson Cunningham Great Expectations Riverrun, 9th, £18.99, hb, 9781529437768
Début A historic presi- dential campaign
changes the trajectory of
Constance Debré, Holly James (trans) Play Boy Tuskar Rock, 5th, £10.99, pbo, 9781800819849 The award-winning first volume of the Love Me Tender author’s autobiographical trilogy chronicling her decision, aged 43, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer.
Fríða Ísberg The Mark Faber & Faber, 2nd, £16.99, hb, 9780571376742 This speculative début
Firsts Prize, this “lyrical and wryly humorous” family saga from the Guardian’s Global Music Critic is told over the course of three days across six decades and was inspired by Kalia’s family’s journey from India to Kenya to England.
Carolyn Kuebler Liquid, Fragile, Perishable Melville House, 9th, £16.99, tpb, 9781685891091
Début This portrait of the intricate web
of relations and fate in a small New England town is moving and innovative, says Melville House. The author is the editor of the
Eirinie Lapidaki The Wives of Halcyon
21
literary journal New England Review.
Amitava Kumar My Beloved Life Picador, 30th, £16.99, hb, 9781035013692 The new novel from the author of Immigrant, Montana traces the unex- pected arc of a man’s life, from his 1935 birth in an Indian village to his death from Covid-19 in 2020. “This book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling”, says Salman Rushdie.
© Elizabeth Weinberg
© David Evans
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
