This preview highlights titles to be published in May 2022


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Editor’s Choice


Editor’s Choice


Editor’s Choice


Literary Benjamin Myers


The Perfect Golden Circle Bloomsbury Circus, 12th, £16.99, HB, 9781526631442


Latest from the author of The Offing, a Radio 2 Book Club pick, is set over the long, hot summer of 1989. Taciturn Falklands veteran Calvert and his affable, chaotic, subversive mate Redbone—occasionally tripping on mushrooms—set out from their village in a battered camper van nightly to form crop circles. While the press and “spotters” speculate wildly and the crop circles grow in notoriety, the two men care only for the act of creation itself. This gorgeously written novel is a song both to the land and the restora- tive power of friendship. BookScan 


Literary


Emilie Pine Ruth & Pen Hamish Hamilton, 5th, £14.99, HB, 9780241393666


Début First novel from the author of the hugely well-received personal essay


collection Notes to Self follows two women, unknown to each other, over a single day in Dublin in 2019. Ruth’s marriage to Aiden is at breaking point after their struggles with infertility and while he travels back from London, Ruth must reach a decision about their future. Meanwhile, neurodiverse teenager Pen attends a climate change protest and gathers the courage to tell her friend Alice something. A sensitive and moving exploration of the courage sometimes needed to find one’s place in the world.


Top sellers


Lucinda Riley The Murders at Fleat House Macmillan, 26th, £20, HB, 9781529094954 Posthumous publica- tion for this Norfolk-set mystery by the author of the phenomenally successful Seven Sisters series. The sudden death of a pupil in Fleat House at St Stephen’s, a rural boarding school, prompts the return of DI Jazmine “Jazz” Hunter to the force as a favour to her old boss. BookScan


Literary


through a time of extreme unrest in Italy, when radi- cal factions of the Left and Right took hostages and set bombs. Shortlisted for the Strega Prize.


and pictures, rants and conspiracy theories— which starts to affect her life outside of work. UK début for the Dutch novel- ist and playwright.


expanding, hypnotic” novel about depression, psychedelics and love for fans of W G Sebald and Ben Lerner, this tells of a failed novelist whose life is transformed by psyche- delic therapy, specifically psilocybin mushrooms.


Paddy Crewe My Name is Yip Doubleday, 5th, £14.99, HB, 9780857527912


Début Set in the American South


Elif Batuman Either/Or Jonathan Cape, 26th, £16.99, HB, 9781787333864 Sequel to The Idiot (short- listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction) but can be read as a standalone. The year is 1996 and Selin, now in her second year at Harvard, knows she has to make it count. Author Batuman is a staff writer at the New Yorker.


Marta Barone Sunken City Serpent’s Tail, 12th, £14.99, HB, 9781788168557 In Turin a newly bereaved young woman retraces the footsteps of her elusive late father, who lived


TheBookseller.com


Hanna Bervoets We Had to Remove This Post Picador, 26th, £12.99, HB, 9781529087222 Kayleigh takes a job as a content moderator for a social media platform— reviewing offensive videos


Daniel Birnbaum Dr B 4th Estate, 26th, £14.99, HB, 9780008374495


Début Based on the life of the author’s


own grandfather, a German Jewish journalist who was forced to leave Warsaw by the Nazis and sought refuge in Sweden during the Second World War. A riveting novel of book publishing, émigrés, spies and diplomats, says HarperCollins. Author Birnbaum is director of Acute Art in London.


William Brewer The Red Arrow John Murray, 12th, £14.99, HB, 9781529369670 Said to be a “mind-


Cressida Connolly Bad Relations Viking, 19th, £14.99, HB, 9780241537701 William Gale’s experiences on the battlefields of Crimea will bring about a change in him that will reverberate through his family over the next two centuries. In the 1970s, William’s English descendants invite a distant Australian cousin to stay in their bohemian house in Cornwall. Half a century later, there will be a terrible reckoning. After the Party was a Waterstone’s Book of the Month.


during the Gold Rush of the 1830s this follows Yip Tolroy, a four-foot-tall teenage mute who communicates with chalk and slate, and who goes on the run after he discov- ers gold and commits a terrible crime. Transworld will support with a “grass- roots” publicity campaign and literary festival appearances.


Natalia Garcia Freire, Victor Meadowcroft (trans) This World Does Not Belong to Us Oneworld, 5th, £12.99, TPB, 9780861541904


Début Part prose poem, part psychologi-


cal thriller, this tells of Lucas, who returns to his childhood home in rural


Literary short stories


Deesha Philyaw The Secret Lives of Church Ladies ONE, 5th, £14.99, HB, 9781911590699


Début I adored this collection of perfectly crafted stories, set mostly in the


American South, which delves into the secret longings, hidden desires and intimacies of Black women young and old. Every story held me rapt but if I had to pick a favourite it would be “Dear Sister”, in which the letter writer addresses her unknown half- sister to tell her of their father’s death, and reveals a family of squabbling, imper- fect siblings; it is equal parts hilarious and heartbreak- ing. Winner of the PEN/ Faulkner Prize in the US, a major HBO TV adaptation is in the works.


Ecuador to discover it has been taken over by two strangers. Taking refuge in the “dark underworld” of the insects, he plots his revenge.


Francesca Giacco Six Days in Rome Headline Review, 3rd, £14.99, TPB, 9781472295842


Début Artist Emilia arrives in Rome


after her relationship ends and, instead of a romantic break, faces six days alone. Then she meets John, an American expat living a seemingly idyllic life.


Georgi Gospodinov Time Shelter


W&N, 12th, £14.99, HB, 9781474623025 Gaustine has created the first “clinic for the past” in Zurich; each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, providing comfort to Alzheimer’s


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