This preview highlights titles to be published in August
08 Top sellers
Editor’s Choice
including Heart FM radio and YouTube adverts. Slips from July. BookScan
Literary
Editor’s Choice
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Harriet Evans The Beloved Girls Headline Review, 19th, £14.99, HB, 9781472271419
The 12th novel from the former publishing staffer turned bestselling author begins with Catherine, a successful barrister who has started behaving strangely. Always secretive about her past (her two children and husband know that she left her family home on her 18th birthday), Catherine appears to be in deep distress, and then she vanishes. Why? The answer lies in the summer of 1989, when a young girl, Jane Lestrange, arrived at a West Country manor house and a tragic chain of events were set inexorably in motion. A wonderfully escapist read, with a rich sense of place.
Literary
Daisy Lafarge Paul Granta Books, 5th, £14.99, TPB, 9781783786350
Début Frances, a 21-year-old medieval history graduate student, plans to
spend the summer volunteering on various eco-farms in rural France. Her first posting is an organic farm run by a charismatic man called Paul, who is twice her age. He tells Frances he is an anthropologist and that the farm is named Noa Noa after his adventures in Tahiti. Frances, unmoored from her studies, starts to fall under his spell, and she changes from being merely amena- ble, to relinquishing control over her own life. A bril- liantly unsettling debut about male power and female passivity.
Louise Candlish The Heights S&S Adult Fiction, 5th, £14.99, HB, 9781471183485 This has bounced around the schedules, but here’s hoping we won’t have to wait much longer. Latest from the excellent Candlish—“queen of the sucker punch twist”, says Ruth Ware—is a story of tragedy and revenge that begins with a woman catching a glimpse of a man on a roof terrace in Shad Thames. This is strange for two reasons: firstly, he’s been dead for two years; secondly, she’s the one who killed him... Slips from May. BookScan
Editor’s Choice
Editor’s Choice
Historical crime & thriller
Silvia Moreno-Garcia Velvet Was the Night Jo Fletcher Books, 17th, £16.99, HB, 9781529417944
Mexico City, 1971. Maite, unmarried and stuck in a dull secretarial job, lives for the passion and adventure in “Secret Romance” magazine, until the day her beautiful art-student neighbour Leonara disappears. Maite decides to track her down, but in a city roiling with political unrest and violent protest, this is a dangerous quest. And she is not the only one searching; also interested in Leonara’s whereabouts are a criminal gang under the command of a ruthless boss, a government agent and a group of student radicals. Stylish Mexican noir, and a fascinating insight into recent history.
Literary/historical Leïla Slimani
The Country of Others Faber & Faber, 5th, £14.99, HB, 9780571361618
A new direction for the author of Lullaby, this is the first in a historical fiction trilogy telling the story of one French family from 1946 to 2016. It begins in Morocco, 1947, where Mathilde has followed her new Moroccan husband, Amine. The pair met when he was billeted in Alsace, fighting for the French. Now on his isolated family farm, Mathilde finds the loneliness, inequality and relative poverty of her new life a struggle, and very different to what she had imagined. Drawn from the author’s own personal family history, this is one for fans of Elena Ferrante.
Stephen King Billy Summers Hodder & Stoughton, 3rd, £20, HB, 9781529365726 The master Stephen King with his thriller hat on. Contract killer Billy Summers, an ex-marine and decorated Iraq War veteran, has one last payday before retirement, but everything is about to go horribly wrong. Part war story, part love letter to small-town America, says Hodder, with a “brilliantly suspenseful” ticking clock to the hit… BookScan
Kristen Arnett With Teeth Corsair, 5th, £16.99, HB, 9781472156495 As her son grows from feral toddler to surly teenager, while her wife Monika works outside the home, Sammie’s struggle to create a picture-perfect queer family in Florida unravels. “A darkly funny, brutally honest story about a woman undone by motherhood,” says Jennifer Weiner.
Claire-Louise Bennett Checkout 19 Jonathan Cape, 19th, £14.99, HB, 9781787333543
Début First novel from the author
of the short story collec- tion Pond, and winner of the White Review Short Story Prize, is truly origi- nal. A woman revisits the moments that shape her life, from crushes on teachers to a love of read- ing. “A masterwork of feminist working-class fiction,” says Cape. Deborah Levy is a fan.
Shari Lapena Not a Happy Family Bantam Press, 5th, £14.99, HB, 9781787633018 Latest domestic thriller from the “queen of the one-sit read” concerns the murder of an elderly couple, hours after a tense Easter dinner with their three adult children. Who, of course, are devastated. Or are they? They each stand to inherit millions after all… Transworld plans a “brand-building” publicity campaign,
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John Boyne The Echo Chamber Doubleday, 5th, £16.99, HB, 9780857526212 Charts the downward spiral of the Cleverley family—father George, a TV interviewer; his wife Beverley, a celebrated novelist; and their three children—who will learn how carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant via one social media app. BookScan
Susie Boyt Loved and Missed Virago, 26th, £16.99, HB, 9780349015057 A tragicomedy from the author of My Judy Garland Life, about a mother who, fearing her adult daughter is lost in the fog of addiction, removes the baby, her granddaughter. Examines the limits,
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