BOOKS


his father’s murder. BookScan 


Historical


Vanessa Beaumont The Other Side of Paradise Oneworld, 9th, £16.99, hb, 9780861547777


Début A family is ripped apart by the


shackles of inheritance in this 1920s tale of a moth- er’s love for her two sons, for fans of “Downton Abbey”.


Janet Skeslien Charles The Librarians of Rue de Picardie Headline Review, 7th, £20, hb, 9781035417889 From the author of The Paris Library, an “inspir- ing” tale of courage based on the true story of Jessie Carson, the American librarian who established the first children’s libraries in post-First World War France, then disappeared.


Ina Christova The Fabergé Girl East-West, 16th, £10, hb, 978-6190113256


Début Based on the true story of


Alma Pihl, the only female jewellery designer at the House of Fabergé during the age of silver culture in St Petersburg, this love story offers a portrait of revolutionary Russia. Christova is the Bulgarian winner of the 2023 Novel London Literary Competition.


Bridget Collins The Silence Factory Te Borough Press, 9th, £18.99, hb, 9780008424046 Blending historical and speculative fiction, the


Fiction Willow Smith & Jess Hendel


Black Shield Maiden Del Rey, 7th, £20, hb, 9781529101980


Smith, this medieval fantasy epic is the first in a new trilogy. It follows Yafeu, a defiant young warrior who is stolen from her home in the Ghanaian Empire. Thrust into the unfamiliar world of the Vikings, she discovers savage shield maidens, tyrannical rulers and mysterious gods, but also a kindred spirit in Freydis, a Viking princess. With Freydis at her side, Yafeu will alter the course of history. The series will reflect Smith’s passionate advocacy of diverse voices.


Lianne Dillsworth House of Shades Hutchinson Heine- mann, 16th, £18.99, hb, 9781529152159 A woman doctor moves to a forbidding house in Fitzrovia for a life-changing commission in this Victorian gothic mystery from the author of Theatre of Marvels. BookScan 


Lissa Evans


Small Bomb at Dimperly Doubleday, 2nd, £18.99, hb, 9780857528292 The twice-Women’s Prize- shortlisted author of Their Finest Hour and a Half and Crooked Heart delivers a “heart-warming” tale of a family and their country house reluctantly chang- ing with the times in the aftermath of the Second World War.


Mai Jia, Dylan Levi King (trans) The Colonel and the Eunuch Apollo, 9th, £20, hb, 9781804540268 A Chinese number one bestseller, with over 2.5 million copies sold, this


Anna Noyes The Blue Maiden Atlantic Books, 5th, £14.99, hb, 9781786495815 From the author of the story collection Goodnight, Beautiful Women comes a gothic novel about two wild sisters, outcasts in their restrictive island commu- nity, and an outsider who changes everything.


Joyce Carol Oates Butcher 4th Estate, 23rd, £16.99, hb, 9780008694876 From one of America’s most distinguished writers comes a “harrowing” story blending fact and fiction, about Dr Silas


Eric Emmanuel Schmitt, Steven Rendall (trans) Paradises Lost - Book 1 Europa Editions, 9th, £14.99, tpb, 9781787704572 Yuval Noah Harari meets Alexandre Dumas in the first instalment in a monumental fiction series recounting the history of humanity.


Slobodan Šnajder, Celia Hawkesworth (trans) The Brass Age Mountain Leopard Press, 2nd, £25, hb, 9781914495229 The first English transla- tion of a multi-award- winning modern epic by a leading Croatian writer: a Mittel European


One to Watch


Début Co-written by the platinum-selling musician, record producer, activist and actress daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-


Literary Colm Tóibín


Long Island Picador, 23rd, £20, hb, 9781035029440


Previews New Titles: Fiction


third adult novel from the author of The Binding and The Betrayals is an other- worldly 1870s tale about a young widower who is drawn into the world of a factory-owner selling silk that creates silence. BookScan 


literary coming-of-age story set in 20th-century China explores what makes a hero. It marks a departure from the spy thrillers that made his name.


Val McDermid Lady Macbeth Polygon, 2nd, £10, hb, 9781846976759 The fifth book in Polygon’s Darkland Tales series sees the bestselling crime writer delve into medieval Scotland for a retelling that “excavates the real character” behind Shakespeare’s femme fatale. BookScan 


Jessica Moor


Hold Back the Night Manilla Press, 9th, £16.99, hb, 9781804181379 From the author of Young Women, a “heart-wrench- ing” story of complicity and atonement, delving into the history of conver- sion therapy and the AIDS crisis.


Weir, “father of gyno- psychiatry”. At New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, Weir establishes himself as a pioneer of 19th-century surgery, experimenting on women who have been neglected by the state.


novel tracing the fate of the “Volksdeutscher”, a German minority in North-Eastern Croatia (Slavonia) who emigrated there in the 18th century, integrated into the local population and then were conscripted into the Waffen SS in 1940.


of a Jewish boy in 1930s Vienna. It combines the conceptual elements of The Time Traveler’s Wife with the political tensions of All The Light We Cannot See, says Faber.


Hesse Phillips Lightborne Atlantic Books, 5th, £18.99, hb, 9781805460367


Début Playwright Kit Marlowe navi-


gates accusations, intrigue, queer love and betrayal on the plague- stricken streets of Elizabethan England, in this “vivid and edgy piece of storytelling,” says Joseph O’Connor.


Defne Suman Summer Heat Apollo, 9th, £20, hb, 9781035902330 Set between 2003 and 1974, during Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus, the third novel to be trans- lated into English by the author of The Silence of Scheherazade is the story of an Istanbul art historian whose search for excite- ment upends her future and all she believed about her past.


Sonia Velton The Nightingale’s Castle Abacus, 2nd, £18.99, hb, 9780349146096 The second novel from the author of Blackberry and Wild Rose, which was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, is a feminist retelling of the story of Countess Erzsébet Báthory, the infamous “Blood Countess” of 16th-century Hungary.


Alison Weir


Sam Taylor The Two Loves of Sophie Strom Faber & Faber, 2nd, £18.99, hb, 9780571380107 Written by a pre-eminent literary translator, this “heartwrenching” story of love in the face of indoc- trination and tragedy follows two parallel fates


Mary I: Queen of Sorrows Headline Review, 9th, £25, hb, 9781472278135 The third instalment of the Tudor Rose series tells the story of the daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, who was the first queen to rule England in her own right—and charts how a beloved princess became the infamous Bloody Mary. BookScan 


Liu Hong The Good Women of Fudi Scribe UK, 9th, £10.99, pbo, 9781915590572 Imperial China meets Edwardian England in this “epic” story of loves lost and gained set in


One to Watch


Début In the sequel to Tóibín’s hit Brooklyn, which was adapted into a BAFTA-winning film, we are


reunited with its heroine Eilis Lacey. Twenty years on, in the 1970s, she is living with her husband and children in Long Island.


A shocking piece of news propels Eilis back to Ireland, to a world she thought she had long left behind and to ways of living and loving she thought she had lost. The thrice-Booker-shortlisted author of 11 novels and two short story collections is the Laureate for Irish Fiction 2022–2024.


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