TEN NOT TO MISS Ten titles not to miss Highlights of the Season
Kevin Barry The Heart in Winter Canongate Books, 6 June, hb, £18.99, 9781805302117
Sagas, romance & historical
The prize-winning author of Night Boat to Tangier returns with this
novel set in Butte, Montana, in 1891 among a community of hard-living Irish immigrants who work in the copper mines. Wild Tom Rourke, fond of a drink, writes love letters on behalf of illiterate miners hoping to woo a future wife, while also working as a photographer’s assistant. Which is where he first claps eyes on Polly Gillespie, the new bride of a mine captain. An attraction too strong to ignore leads the pair to strike out West together, outlaws on a stolen horse. Fizzing with energy and style, in Barry’s gorgeous prose, this is the writer at the height of his powers.
Kaliane Bradley The Ministry of Time Sceptre, 14 May, hb, £16.99, 9781399726344
General fiction
This bracingly original yet hugely commercial début,
from Penguin Press editor Bradley, is Sceptre’s superlead début for 2024, sold in 19 territories to date. It opens with the unnamed female civil servant narrator learning that the British government has developed the means to travel through time and she is to work as a “bridge”, a liaison and housemate, for a Victorian polar explorer rescued from history. Ensconced in a safehouse somewhere in London, the sexual tension between the pair simmers. The Ministry of Time has terrific fun with the genre, careering from time-travel to comedy to love story to spy thriller but with darker undercurrents swirling beneath.
Reverend Richard Coles Murder at the Monastery Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 6 June, hb, £22, 9781474612715
Adventure, crime & horror
Cosy crime continues to warm the
cockles of the charts and, alongside a certain Mr Osman, the Reverend Richard Coles’ Canon Clement Mystery series has proved hugely popular with readers. In this third instalment, Daniel Clement, beloved Rector of Champton, seeks respite back
at the monastery where he lived as a novice after suffering a private humiliation. But there’s no peace to be found in the secluded monastery when a murder is committed.
Sarah Crossan Hey, Zoey Bloomsbury Publishing, 23 May, hb, £16.99, 9781526619860
General fiction
YA superstar Crossan is the winner of both the Carnegie Medal
and the YA Book Prize. Her first novel for adults was the dazzling Here is the Beehive. This is her second, and I honestly have not stopped thinking about it since I finished reading. Dolores O’Shea, 43, is in control of her life—a teacher, a dutiful daughter, a loyal wife: until she discovers an AI sex doll hidden in the garage. When her husband moves out, she moves Zoey, the doll, in, which leads to a reckoning with her past and the surfacing of repressed memories. Darkly funny, complicated, and in parts shocking, this is highly recommended for fans of Meg Mason.
Percival Everett James Mantle, 11 April, hb, £20, 9781035031238
Sagas, romance & historical
US author Everett came to prominence here in the UK when
The Trees, published by indie Influx Press, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. This, his 24th novel, is a “powerful” retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s friend, the enslaved Jim. Says Ann Patchett: “James is funny and horrifying, brilliant and riveting. In telling the story of Jim instead of Huckleberry Finn, Percival Everett delivers a powerful, necessary corrective to both literature and history. I found myself cheering both the writer and his hero. Who should read this book? Every single person in the country.”
loneliness, friendship and our acute longing for connection.
shortlisted for Début of the Year at the British Book Awards and translated into 10 languages. Ghost Mountain, his third novel, tells of the sudden appearance of the eponymous mountain, and the subtle effect it has on the lives of multiple characters in the surrounding community, and on later generations: the town drunk, the Clerk of Maps and his beautiful wife, a former art teacher and her beloved dog, a young couple with different beliefs. A fable-like novel, contemporary yet curiously timeless, which unfolds in Hession’s trademark gentle style.
copies through Nielsen BookScan in the UK. Twenty years on from the events of the first novel, Eilis Lacey is now Eilis Fiorello, married to Italian American plumber Tony and living in a house in the Long Island suburbs when she receives a shocking piece of news, powerful enough to propel her back to Ireland and a world she thought she had left far behind. Did she make the wrong choice all those years ago? It is Picador’s biggest book of 2024 and a “global publishing event” is promised with the author in the UK and Ireland over publication.
Suzie Miller Prima Facie Hutchinson Heinemann, 14 March, hb, £16.99, 9781529153644
Adventure, crime & horror
Playwright Miller adapts her Tony and
Carys Davies Clear Granta Books, 7 March, hb, £12.99, 9781803510408
General fiction
I am a great admirer of Davies’ short, jewel-like novels and
here is another. Set in 1843, on a remote island in the Shetlands, halfway to Norway, during the Highland Clearances. Clear tells of sole inhabitant Ivar, the last of his family, who subsists on the scarce bounty of land and sea. One day he discovers an unconscious stranger, washed up at the foot of the cliffs. The man is John Ferguson, a minister with the new Free Church of Scotland, who has come on behalf of the landowner to evict Ivar. Davies’ beautifully structured, gem of a novel is a mediation on
Ronan Hession Ghost Mountain Bluemoose Books, 23 May, hb, £17, 9781915693136
General fiction
Booksellers will likely remember the Dublin- based musician and
author’s 2019 début novel, Leonard and Hungry Paul, by dint of the fact it was a genuine, heartwarming, word-of-mouth hit, from small yet mighty indie publisher Bluemoose, which was
Olivier award-winning stage play of the same name into her début thriller, which I read in a single sitting. Tessa Ensler, played by Jodie Comer on stage, is a hot shot criminal defence barrister, among the brightest stars at her male-dominated London chambers having risen, via Cambridge University, from a Luton council estate. When a date with a colleague goes very wrong, Tessa finds herself on the other side of the courtroom in a rape case, her belief in justice about to be tested. A gripping thriller with blistering points to make about class, power, the patriarchy and the courage of rape survivors who take the stand. Very highly recommended.
Colm Tóibín Long Island Picador, 23 May, hb, £20, 9781035029440
General fiction
Thrillingly, this is the sequel to Colm Toibin’s 2009 Costa
Novel Award-winning Brooklyn which has sold nearly 300,000
Sarah Perry Enlightenment Jonathan Cape, 2 May, hb, £20, 9781787334991
General fiction
The Essex Serpent author moves to Cape with this story
of love and astronomy, which tells of the unlikely friendship between Thomas Hart and young Grace Macauley, fellow worshippers at the Bethesda Baptist chapel in a small Essex town. When Thomas falls for another man, the pair develop an obsession with a vanished 19th-century female astronomer and a historical mystery, and Grace pursues a love story of her own. Perry says: “I’m so pleased to be bringing Enlightenment into the world. I think everything that is most dear to me is here—love, faith, science, Essex and the Moon!”
February 2024–July 2024 09
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