BOOKS


Previews New Titles: Fiction


New Titles: Fiction February 2024


Family values: February plays host to a number of books based around the theme of family, many début novels and the return of some big names


mental disturbance. Mathew Blake’s thriller Anna O is about a woman who murders in her sleep.


Madeleine Feeny @madeleinefeeny


ny A


s Tolstoy knew, family tensions are oſten the stuff of which literary


greatness is made. Today’s authors also have the chance to explore the way family is being redefined. Kate Davies’ excellent second novel Nuclear Family does just that, as does Lote Jeffs’ début. Meanwhile Blessings, the first novel from rising star Chukwuebuka Ibeh, offers a stark contrast in its unflinching portrayal of the forced secrecy of life as a gay person in Nigeria. Toby Lloyd’s début takes us


into a London Jewish family on the brink, and Emily Howes’ The Painter’s Daughters imagines the lives of Thomas Gainsborough’s daughters. Both books capture the fearful, baffled response of families to mental illness in children. In them, sleep oſten gives the clue to


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.


Next week 22


Two very different novels are set in England’s post- industrial North: Andrew McMillan’s Pit, and Jennie Godfrey’s The List of Suspicious Things, in which two children investigate the Yorkshire Ripper. Underage sleuths also take the lead in Marie Tierney’s Deadly Animals and Angie Kim’s Happiness Falls.


Alongside the expected clutch of débuts, we have new literary titles from Howard Jacobson and Édouard Louis, SFF releases from Jasper Fforde, Kelly Link and Christopher Fowler, the long-awaited second thriller from A J Finn and the third from Alex Michaelides. There are also four books whose titles begin “The Book of…”, a trend almost as pervasive as the “How to Kill…” subgenre.


One final morsel from me. It’s a month with no fewer than three culinary murder mysteries, so watch what you eat this festive season.


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 (10th November) will feature New Titles: Non-Fiction covering titles released in February 2024.


3rd November 2023


Book of the Month A story of twin sisters that will stay with you


Literary Kate Davies


Nuclear Family The Borough Press, 15th, £16.99, hb, 9780008536619


I loved Davies’ début novel In at the Deep End, which won the Polari Prize and was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, so I could not wait to dive into her second, Nuclear Family—which


is perhaps even more brilliant. Inspired by the author’s own experiences (she was conceived


with donated sperm), this London-set family drama follows twin sisters, Lena and Alison, who face a bombshell aged 34 when their widowed dad reveals he is not their biological father. Alison, whose wife is using donor sperm to conceive their baby, thinks DNA doesn’t matter. But Lena becomes increasingly obsessed with tracking down her biological father, and with the celebrity half-brother she discovers. With its clever mirroring and inversions, the book’s relation-


ships are finely drawn, the dialogue pitch-perfect, and Davies has a well-tuned ear for comic incongruities and striking meta- phors. Confronting sensitive subjects with wit and tenderness, she explores the challenges of deciding to start a family; the emotional toll of fertility treatment; queer identity, parenthood, ageing and loss. An exhilarating meditation on the meaning of family. BookScan 


© Idil Sukan


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