Category: Fiction
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Orange
by Curtis Garner Paperback, £10.99 This is a beautiful book. It’s Garner’s second novel, and it follows Daniel, who has moved to London from Cornwall and is figuring out how to mesh his identity together. The chapters alternate between Daniel’s somewhat pained life as a lonely teenager in Cornwall and his much livelier one as…
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James
Percival Everett The best novel I’ve read this year. The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he flees to nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn…
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Heated Rivalry
Rachel Reid Nothing interferes with pro hockey star Shane Hollander’s game. Now that he’s captain of the Montreal Voyageurs, he won’t let anything jeopardize that—definitely not the sexy rival he loves to hate. Boston Bears captain Ilya Rozanov is everything Shane’s not. The self-proclaimed king of the ice, he’s as cocky as he is talented.…
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Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte “May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you – haunt me, then” Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the…
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Vigil
by George Saunders Hardback, £18.99 The vigil in question is being held for a wealthy elderly man called K J Boone who is dying in what appears to be the present-day United States. Those coming in and out include people from his past – some from his time as a global leader of an oil…
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The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig Paperback, £9.99 This novel was published in 2020, and is an antidote to the stress caused by life’s inevitable uncertainties. Haig had me thinking about what actually matters, beyond all the specific choices we all make. The Midnight Library follows music shop assistant and cat owner Nora Seed, who has had enough…
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Good Girl
by Aria Aber Paperback, £9.99 A portrait of the artist as a young woman in a Berlin that can’t escape its history: an electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery.
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Hamnet
by Maggie O’Farrell £10.99, Paperback The untold love story that inspired Shakespeare’s greatest masterpiece. On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Hamnet tells the powerful story of Agnes and Will, and of the son whose…
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Briefly, a Delicious Life
by Nell Stevens Paperback, £9.99 If I had to condense my review of this book into three words, I would describe it as full of life, which is ironic, as the narrator is a ghost who has been dead for centuries. However, this ghost – Blanca – watches and involves herself in the stories of…
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The Woman Dies
by Aoko Matsuda Europa Editions, Paperback, £14.99 What I love about short stories is that they can lightly slip into the crack of everyday hectic-ness. One day, Aoko Matsuda, the author of Where the Wild Ladies Are — witty, uncanny, feminist tales rewriting Japanese folklore, winner of the 2021 World Fantasy Award Best Collection —…
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The Proof of my Innocence
by Jonathan Coe This is the funniest book I’ve read all year. Stuffed with good puns and jokes, it’s also an excellent pastiche of genres including cosy crime, autofiction and ‘dark academia’ (no, I had no idea either – apparently it includes The Secret History). I knew I’d enjoy it when I saw that the…
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My Rice is Best!
By Selina Brown and Maxwell A. Oginni Penguin, Paperback, £7.99 Any books about food immediately draw me in, and this was no exception! Brown’s storytelling and Oginni’s illustrations are bound to start conversations about favourite foods and cooking. Each page is brimming with as much energy as the children in the book, Yinka and Shane,…
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Katabasis
By R F Kuang Harpercollins, Hardback, £22 The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld. Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick. But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in…
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A Language of Limbs
By Dylin Hardcastle Verve Books, Paperback, £10.99 I picked this book up at random based on the image on the cover, which really drew me in with the affection and vulnerability portrayed, and I’m very glad I chose it. Hardcastle weaves together the stories of two very different lives with great skill and emotion, and…
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I Hope This Finds You Well
By Natalie Sue Harpercollins, Paperback, £9.99 Would you want to know what your colleagues say behind your back? Jolene certainly doesn’t. She’s riddled with anxiety, depressed, and hates her coworkers. The less she knows about them, the better. So when a catastrophic IT f*ck up grants her access to all of their emails and private…
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The Housemaid
Freida McFadden I can pretend to be whoever I like. But I’ll soon learn that the Winchesters’ secrets are far more dangerous than my own… Every day I clean the Winchesters’ beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up…
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Butter
By Asako Yuzuki Harpercollins, Paperback, £9.99 11 months ago, the paperback for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (by Gabrielle Zevin) came out and I spent the summer selling it. My first thought was that it was probably overhyped, but I was intrigued and caved when a friend lent me a copy in early autumn. I…
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All Fours
By Miranda July Canongate Books, Paperback, £9.99 “I’d whipped myself into a froth of longing — or worked, created fictions…. Was there any actual enchantment or was it all just survival, ways to muddle through?” I’m jealous of you if you are yet to read Miranda July’s All Fours, now out in paperback. It has…
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