BOOKS


Editor’s Choice


Previews New Titles: Fiction


prizes, a girl’s life is upended when her stay- at-home dad goes miss- ing. “A brilliant, satisfying, compassionate mystery that is as much about language and storytelling as it is about a missing father”, says Gabrielle Zevin.


Literary Toby Lloyd


Fervour Sceptre, 22nd, £16.99, hb, 9781399724616


Début The story of a London Jewish family, this début explores identity, faith and


folklore, generational trauma and psychologi- cal cause and effect. The Rosenthals are pushed to breaking point when daughter Elsie disappears following the death of her grand- father, a Holocaust survivor, and returns chan- ged. As the family struggles to cope with her deteriorating mental health, tensions rise, not helped by Mrs Rosenthal’s decision to use their lives as writing material. The dynamics are acutely observed, the char- acters vividly realised, and the escalating drama has the hypnotic, chilling effect of a horror film.


Mohamed Mbougar Sarr The Most Secret Memory of Men Harvill Secker, 22nd, £20, hb, 9781787303713 A story of literary obses- sion by a Senegalese rising literary star, the first winner of the Prix Goncourt from Sub-Saharan Africa, in which a young writer goes on the hunt for the vanished author of a legendary book called The Maze of Inhumanity. The “extensive” PR campaign includes an author visit.


sapphic” story about the power of youthful ideal- ism, in which a woman whose husband has left her gets sucked into a group of wealthy English teenagers.


O’Farrell is a political campaigner and author of six novels, including The Man Who Forgot His Wife. BookScan 


Édouard Louis Change Harvill Secker, 8th, £18.99, hb, 9781787303256 The new novel from the author of The End of Eddy is a story of social class and transformation. It charts the protagonist Édouard Louis’ departure from his working-class home town for school in Amiens and on to univer- sity in Paris, determined to shed his old life and identity.


Roisin Maguire Night Swimmers Serpent’s Tail, 1st, £16.99, hb, 9781800816749


Editor’s Choice


Début A man leaves Belfast for a


SFF Molly McGhee


Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind 4th Estate, 1st, £16.99, hb, 9780008589134


Début A former editor at FSG and Tor, McGhee went viral when she quit her


job in the “great resignation” from the US pub- lishing industry, and that rage against late- capitalist work culture fuels her provocative début novel. In it, loveably hapless Jonathan Abernathy attempts to control his ever- growing mountain of debt with a mysterious job “auditing” the dreams of corporate employees to imp- rove their productivity. But soon the lines between life and work, right and wrong, sleep and consciousness start to blur. Infusing savage societal critique with wit and tenderness, this is satire with heart.


24 3rd November 2023


coastal village to process his grief after losing a baby, then gets trapped by lockdown. When an eccentric local woman saves his life, they are drawn together in a way that forces a reckoning with their personal traumas.


Robert Lautner Quint Te Borough Press, 1st, £16.99, hb, 9780008647469 The author of The Road to Reckoning gives voice to the grizzled sea captain who meets his end in “Jaws”. Quint chronicles his early seafaring days, the life-altering events of 1945, and his arrival on Amity Island. Publishing in the 50th anniversary year of Jaws, this is a literary picaresque with echoes of Hemingway, says The Borough Press.


Ashani Lewis Winter Animals Dialogue Books, 15th, £18.99, hb, 9780349703299


Début This début novel is a “seductive,


Andrew McMillan Pity Canongate, 8th, £14.99, hb, 9781838858957 The first novel from the multi-award-winning poet whose début collection physical was the only poetry book ever to win the Guardian First Book Award. Set across three generations of a South Yorkshire mining family, Pity explores masculinity, sexuality and post-industrialisation.


Katherine Min The Fetishist Fleet, 28th, £16.99, hb, 9780349727936 The second novel by the author of Secondhand World is being published posthumously; Min’s daughter found the manu- script in a drawer after her death in 2019 and will front the campaign. The book tells the story of a daughter’s rash and haphazard revenge on the man she believes drove her mother to her death. Hilariously savage and poignant, says Fleet.


John O’Farrell Family Politics Doubleday, 8th, £20, hb, 9780857529770 A “political satire for voters of any hue”, this novel follows a die-hard Labour couple coming to terms with their son coming out as a Tory.


Helen Oyeyemi Parasol Against the Axe Faber & Faber, 1st, £16.99, hb, 9780571366620 The new novel from the author of The Icarus Girl whisks readers away on a kaleidoscopic weekend in Prague. Suffused with warmth and joy, it is a love letter to Prague, and to the art of storytelling, says Faber. BookScan 


Lucas Rijneveld, Michele Hutchison (trans) My Heavenly Favourite Faber & Faber, 1st, £16.99, hb, 9780571375493 The “provocative, unflinch- ing” second novel from the author and translator of The Discomfort of Evening, winner of the International Booker Prize. In 2005, a 14-year-old farmer’s daughter befriends the local veterinarian. Their obsessive relationship leads to a terrifying trap and a confession that could rip their small community apart. BookScan 


Ian Russell-Hsieh I’m New Here Scribner, 1st, £14.99, hb, 9781398522886


Début Suddenly single and unemployed,


Holly Pester The Lodgers Granta Books, 1st, £14.99, tpb, 9781783789832


Début This “accom- plished and


timely” dark comedy about lodgings, lovers and mother-daughter bonds tackles the renting crisis in the UK. Comic Timing, Pester’s first full poetry collection (also Granta), was nominated for the Forward Prize in 2021.


Miranda Pountney How to Be Somebody Else Jonathan Cape, 15th, £16.99, hb, 9781787332102


Début This “sleek, styl- ish un-coming-


of-age” tells the story of a young Englishwoman apparently living the dream in New York, who suddenly walks out of her career and apartment, and into an all-consuming affair. For readers of Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and Writers and Lovers by Lily King, says Cape.


Rebecca K Reilly Greta and Valdin Hutchinson Heinemann, 8th, £14.99, hb, 9781529154191


Début This novel spent more than


a year in the bestseller charts in New Zealand, where it has won or been shortlisted for multiple awards. It is the story of a sister and brother navigating queerness, multiracial identity (they are Māori-Russian- Catalonian) and love.


Taiwanese-British photog- rapher Sean flies to Taipei, his parents’ homeland, to seek oblivion, but only finds alienation. Then a chance encounter with an older man draws him into an ambiguous friendship. This hallucinatory début is a masterclass in unreliable narration, says Scribner.


Sasha Salzmann, Imogen Taylor (trans) Glorious People Pushkin Press, 1st, £16.99, hb, 9781782279488 Longlisted for the German Book Prize, this “engross- ing” novel depicts the disintegration of the Soviet Union through the eyes of two women in Ukraine who lived through it, illuminating the back- story behind the current conflict.


Mihret Sibhat The History of a Difficult Child Chatto & Windus, 1st, £16.99, hb, 9781784744373


Début Narrated by the indomitable


youngest child in a large, turbulent family, this is the story of a scorned, formerly land-owning family living in a small town in 1980s Ethiopia, in the wake of the socialist revolution. Exhilarating and tragicomic, says Chatto.


© Pete Perry


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