BOOKS Fiction


Kazushige Abe, Michael Emmerich (trans) Mysterious Setting Pushkin Press, 7th, £9.99, PB, 9781805330486 A darkly comic novel about the fate of a tone-deaf girl who wants to sing.


Kaveh Akbar Martyr! Picador, 7th, £16.99, HB, 9781035026067


Debut This début novel from prize-


winning poet Akbar follows a young man who uncovers the truth behind his mother’s death.


Emma Denny All the Painted Stars HQ, 28th, £9.99, PB, 9780008622435 This character-driven romance features two female protagonists. When Lily discovers her best friend Johanna’s hand in marriage is being awarded as the main prize at a tournament, she is determined to stop it.


Kofi Awoonor This Earth, My Brother Apollo, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781035906130


Debut In this début novel, Awoonor


interweaves poetry and allegory into a profound tale of social corruption in post-colonial Ghana.


Rodrigo Blanco Calderón Simpatía Seven Stories, 7th, £12.99, PB, 9781911710073 Simpatía is a suspenseful novel with unexpected twists and turns about the collapse of Chavismo in modern-day Venezuela.


Hadeer Elsbai The Weavers of Alamaxa Orbit, 28th, £9.99, PB, 9780356520506 Elsbai concludes her Alamaxa Duology, inspired by Egyptian history and myth, with a tale of magic, war, betrayal, sisterhood and love.


Chidi Ebere Now I Am Here Picador, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781035004034 A powerful novel concerned with how good people can end up doing terrible things during times of war and conflict.


Category Spotlight Discover: March


Grace Curtis Floating Hotel Hodderscape, 21st, £20, HB, 9781529390582 Touted as “‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ in space”, Floating Hotel is a cosy science-fiction story of misfits, rebels and found family.


Percival Everett I Am Not Sidney Poitier Picador, 21st, £9.99, PB, 9781035036493 The sudden death of Not Sidney Poitier’s mother orphans him at age 11. He is left with a name no one understands and a serious number of shares in the Turner Corporation. The novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin colour with his fabulous wealth.


Percival Everett Telephone Picador, 21st, £9.99, PB, 9781035036585 A finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this is a deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us.


Jamal Mahjoub Wings of Dust Apollo, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781035906000 In this fictionalised memoir, Mahjoub interrogates how the first generation of Northern Sudanese citizens undertook the momentous task of creating a newly independent nation.


Karen King-Aribisala Kicking Tongues Apollo, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781035906116 King-Aribisala transposes Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to modern-day Nigeria in this tale of 40 very different travellers thrown together on a bus journey from Lagos to the new capital, Abuja.


Lisa Ko


Percival Everett Percival Everett by Virgil Russell Picador, 21st, £9.99, PB, 9781035036523 A man visits his ageing father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write? Metafiction.


Percival Everett Assumption Picador, 21st, £9.99, PB, 9781035036424 This triptych of murder mysteries sees the deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town on the trail of an old woman’s murderer.


Memory Piece Dialogue, 21st, £18.99, HB, 9780349704319 Moving from the pre- digital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is the story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.


Dambudzo Marechera Black Sunlight Apollo, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781035906161 In this dark and deeply radical novel, Marechera offers a visceral account of a photojournalist’s entanglement with a terrorist organisation.


Chetna Maroo Western Lane Picador, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781529094640 A moving exploration of an immigrant father’s attempts to raise his family as a single parent, while consumed by grief and loss.


Alex La Guma A Walk in the Night Apollo, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781035906147 In this collection of short stories, previously banned in South Africa, La Guma vividly reveals the plight of the poor and oppressed in apartheid South Africa.


Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life and Others Picador, 7th, £9.99, PB, 9781035038596 The first story collection by science-fiction author Chiang was the basis for the Oscar-winning film “Arrival”.


30 2nd February 2024


Buchi Emecheta The New Tribe Apollo, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781035906109 In this title, Emecheta tells the tale of a young Nigerian boy adopted by a white family.


Percival Everett Damned If I Do Picador, 21st, £9.99, PB, 9781035036431 A postmodern set of short stories featuring an artist, a cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen and a reluctant romance novelist.


Brydie Lee-Kennedy Go Lightly Bloomsbury, 14th, £14.99, HB, 9781526669698 A funny and tender story of friendship, family and messy love—and how getting it wrong is some- times the only way to get it right.


Imran Mahmood Finding Sophie Raven, 14th, £14.99, HB, 9781526647597 This compelling domestic suspense, from the rising star behind BBC/ Netflix smash hit “You Don’t Know Me”, follows two parents who try to solve the mystery behind their teenage daughter’s disappearance.


In this poignant novel, Mungoshi explores the consequences of colonial- ism in 1960s Zimbabwe and asks how a nation can look to the future and preserve its traditions while being tied down to the present tyranny of its oppressors.


Viet Thanh Nguyen A Man of Two Faces Corsair, 7th, £22, HB, 9781472155641 The unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer.


Rebeka Njau Ripples in the Pool Apollo, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781035906154 A powerful and intricately symbolic novel, Ripples in the Pool is a ground- breaking classic that is known as the first Kenyan novel—and one of the first African novels— to portray a lesbian relationship.


Kennedy Ryan This Could Be Us Piatkus, 5th, £9.99, PB, 9780349436524 For fans of Tia Williams and Colleen Hoover comes a deeply moving and personal novel about sacrifice, self- reliance and finding true happiness from “one of the finest romance writers of our age”, according to Entertainment Weekly.


Kate Mascarenhas Hokey Pokey Apollo, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781789543872 A murder mystery set in a grand hotel featuring a famous opera star and a psychoanalyst with a hidden agenda.


Charles Mungoshi Waiting for the Rain Apollo, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781035906123


Ken Saro-Wiwa Sozaboy Apollo, 14th, £9.99, PB, 9781035906031 Sozaboy powerfully describes the fate of a young, naive soldier thrown into the frontline of a civil war, from his first proud days of recruitment to the disillusionment and horrors that follow.


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