BOOKS


Previews New Titles: Fiction


New Titles: Fiction August


Going against convention, this month is uncharacteristically busy, playing host to many prominent releases from across the board


Alice O'Keeffe @aliceokbooks


Y


ou read it here first: August is the new Septem- ber. The traditionally


“quiet” summer month is full of big names across all genres ahead of what must surely be a bumper autumn.


A busy month, but lots of proofs were delayed which meant I couldn’t get my hands on a couple I was desperate to read: Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy (Hamish Hamilton) sequel to the brilliant Silence of the Girls, or Elif Shafak’s follow-up to her Booker- shortlisted 10 Minutes, 39 Seconds in This Strange World, the Cyprus- set The Island of Missing Trees (Viking). Happily, a proof of Leïla Slimani’s The Country of Others (Faber) did arrive in time, as did the brilliant début novel from T S Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Daisy Lafarge, Paul (Granta). Leading the pack in crime is Paula Hawkins’ third novel, A


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 7th May 2021


Slow Fire Burning (Doubleday), my Book of the Month, for which I predict big things. Antony Horowitz delivers the third in his hugely popular Hawthorne & Horowitz series, A Line to Kill (Century). Detective Jane Tennison returns in Lynda La Plante’s Unholy Murder (Zaffre) and 1979 (Litle, Brown) launches a new series from Val McDermid, her first in nearly 20 years. And as one series launches, another ends. Susannah Gregory’s medieval physician Mathew Bartholomew bows out aſter 25 books, The Chancellor’s Secret (Sphere) is his final case. Admirers of “Line of Dut” might be interested to know that the creator Jed Mecurio has a graphic novel out this month. Sleeper (Scribe) features a biologically enhanced law- enforcement marshal, working in deep space on one last mission. And for “Bridgerton” fans, Julia Quinn’s first graphic novel Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron (Piatkus) is an in-joke, I’m told; based on story snippets peppered through a number of her novels and enjoyed by her characters.


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 (14th May) will feature New Titles: Non-Fiction covering titles released in August.


Book of the Month Hawkins is on Fire with her third, thrilling caper


Crime & thriller


Paula Hawkins A Slow Fire Burning Doubleday, 31st, £20, HB, 9780857524447


On a shabby canal boat moored on Regent’s Canal in north London, a young man’s body is discovered—lying in a pool of blood, with a smile carved into his throat—by his busybody neighbour. Miriam keeps a note of the


comings and goings along the canal, and a disturbed young woman with a quick temper, Laura, seems to have been the last visitor on the victim’s boat. But what seems a straightforward case is anything but, as


Hawkins introduces the wider cast of characters—the victim’s grieving aunt Carla; Carla’s shady novelist husband, Theo; the confused, elderly Irene—and slowly reveals the connections between them all, the loyalties and grievances, the secrets and the ties. Hawkins says she set out to explore the way that no tragedy happens in isolation, and how certain events can have ramifications a decade later. The title A Slow Fire Burning refers to the process by which


the paper in books becomes brittle over time as a result of the acid contained within the paper itself. Here the characters too are revealed to have something that has been burning inside them for years. A intriguing, unputdownable thriller that is as much about the compelling, damaged characters as it is about the intricate plot.


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