Category: Fiction
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Flatland
By Edwin A Abbott Penguin, Paperback, £9.99 A curious classic of the genre set in a vividly described two-dimensional world. Its hugely imaginative and brilliantly depicted premise aside, it can be read as a comment on class, status and social mores. A wonderful, if odd, book.
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Enter the Aardvark
by Jessica Anthony Transworld Publishers, Paperback, £7.99 Absurdist, queer, gothic horror, political satire: you may not think you need it in your life, but here it is, and, it turns out, you do! Very funny, very strange, very marvellous. I adore this writer, and it is time everyone else adored her too.
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The Full Moon Coffee Shop
by Mai Mochizuki Paperback, £10.99 Under a glittering full moon, a Kyoto coffee shop appears only where and when it’s needed. It’s run by talking cats serving delicious desserts and age-old astrological wisdom. This coffee shop attracts customers who have lost their way in life, from a failed video game developer to a romantically challenged…
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Intermezzo
From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of…
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The Librarianist
by Patrick deWitt Paperback, £9.99 Patrick deWitt’s novels belong to a world of their own – mannered, somewhat stylised, an internal logic that is revealed only when necessary. They are all sharp dialogue, dry humour, absurdity, and human drama. A bit like Wes Anderson in novel form, but without the massive self-indulgence. And they are…
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The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver Paperback, £9.99 That the Price family’s move to the Belgian Congo is doomed is a given. How that doom manifests, and how the family recover, makes for a remarkably tense and compelling read. Very much one of the very few titles I wish I had never read so I can discover it…
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A Helping Hand
by Celia Dale Paperback, £9.99 Mid-century psychological horror, if labels are your thing. Otherwise a deeply unsettling, expertly crafted tale of bitter people doing mean things behind closed doors whilst [barely] keeping up appearances. Very English, very cruel, very unforgiving and very underrated.
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Evenings and Weekends
by Oisín McKenna Paperback, £9.99 Faced with moving back to the home town she fought to escape, she’s wondering if having a baby with boyfriend Ed will be the last spontaneous act of her life. Ed, meanwhile, is harbouring secret dreams of his own. Phil hates his office job and is living for the weekend,…
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Monkey Grip
by Helen Garner Paperback, £9.99 This Australian classic, made famous in the 1970s for being radical about sex, drugs and women’s experience, is beautifully worded, raw and dark, exploring being infatuated with the wrong people. The harder you pull away, the stronger the grip becomes.
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The Driver’s Seat
by Muriel Spark Paperback, £9.99 A psychological thriller that will test the mettle of reader sympathy. The Driver’s Seat is Muriel Spark at her most direct, most stark and most deviously playful. A short manipulative read with a lasting impact.
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The Ministry of Time
by Kaliane Bradley, paperback, £9.99 Silly, romantic, and stuffed with ideas, this hugely entertaining novel made me laugh at the snappy dialogue and gasp at the twists. The narrator is a civil servant who is assigned to look after one of several people who have arrived from the past. Her assignment is Commander Graham Gore,…
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There Are Rivers in the Sky
Elif Shafak, paperback, £9.99 The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted, internationally bestselling author of The Island of Missing Trees and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel set between the 19th century and modern times, about love and loss, memory and erasure, hurt…
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Sunrise on the Reaping
Suzanne Collins, HB, £19.99 Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves. When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and…
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Dead Animals
by Phoebe Stuckes Paperback, £9.99 It can be nerve-wracking when a well-remembered former colleague writes a book. Will we be in it? Will it be good? Declaration of interest: Phoebe Stuckes is that colleague, our former bookseller extraordinaire. And having been wowed by Phoebe’s poems in Platinum Blonde, I knew that her novel would be…
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I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman Paperback, £9.99 SISTERHOOD. SECRETS. SURVIVAL. Discover the haunting, heart-breaking post-apocalyptic TikTok sensation. Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus?Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of…
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Greek Lessons
by Han Kang Paperback, £9.99 Beautifully written, this slender book offers a quiet yet haunting narrative. I particularly enjoyed the books meditation on language abd our individual relation to it, and how it connects us to each other not only in metaphorical but also quite tangible ways. Readers who enjoyed Kang’s ‘The White Book’ cannot…
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Mongrel
Promising violinist Yuki leaves her native rural Japan for London at 18 to start a new life. There, she falls in love with her teacher, over ten years her senior. Meiko grows from child to teen to adult, grieving her mother, falling in love with her best friend and losing her connection to her Japanese…
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Cold Comfort Farm
By Stella Gibbons Paperback £9.99 An unsubtle satire on the genres of the turgid, overwrought and overwritten considered important literature (Gibbons tartly highlights the passages she considers most characteristic of such); an outright attack on its many clichés (the doom, tragedy and vapid characterisation, all of which face the brunt of Gibbon’s put down’s and…
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