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Paperback Preview October
October is brimming with popular favourites and, ahead of Christmas, it also sees a surge in gift titles as publishing schedules start to return to normality
Alison Flood @alisonflood
I
t feels like paperback publica- tion is picking up again this month, and books are shiſting around a litle less: there are a host of sure-fire hits here, with the likes of Sophie Kinsella, James Paterson, Cecelia Ahern and Heather Morris all gracing our topsellers list. Literary fiction is also packed full of joys, from Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre (the perfect Halloween read?) to Cynan Jones’ Stillicide, both excellent genre-spanning novels which I didn’t have room for in my editor’s picks. Short stories, too, are on fine form, with new collections from Zadie Smith, Deborah Eisenberg and Sarah Hall: what riches. Giſty titles are also on the up, as Christmas approaches, and there are a slew of non-fiction books telling the stories of the “Windrush”
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Short stories, too, are on fine form, with new collections from Zadie Smith, Deborah Eisenberg and Sarah Hall: what riches
Book of the Month A début with warmth, fun and insight from Nzelu
Commercial/literary
Okechukwu Nzelu The Private Joys
of Nnenna Maloney Dialogue Books, 8th, £8.99, 9780349701035
generation, including Colin Grant’s Homecoming and David Mathews’ Voices of the Windrush Generation. I’d also note Sphere’s reissue of Patricia Highsmith’s Deep Water, in advance of the adaptation of the psychological thriller starring Ben Affleck.
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.
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The next edition of The Bookseller (14th August) will feature New Titles: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Paperback Preview and Children’s Preview covering titles released in November.
22 24th July 2020
Shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize, this follows teenager Nnenna Maloney and her single mother Joanie in Manchester, as Nnenna starts to ask more questions about Maurice, the Nigerian father her white mother refuses to discuss. It moves between
Joanie meeting Maurice—she’s an unhappy, bright teenager unable to fit in at Cambridge; he’s a recent graduate, desperately homesick and struggling with his Christianity—and Nnenna, their daughter, anxious and smart, dealing with the micro- aggressions of racism her mother doesn’t notice, longing to connect with her absent father’s Igbo culture and trying to find her independence. I am not much of a one for laughing out loud while reading,
but it made me snort with laughter frequently. It also had me aching with sadness for the lonely Joanie and her equally lonely daughter, while wishing to hear a lot more from Jonathan, an old friend of Joanie and her former partner Maurice. Nzelu bril- liantly inhabits all of his protagonists to create a warm, funny, insightful début which I absolutely raced through. “Effortlessly capture[s] the tricky nuance of life, love, race, sexuality and familial relationships,” said Candice Carty-Williams, while Bernardine Evaristo called it “smart, serious and entertaining”.
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