“A story of parallel worlds and astral projection which offers a vision of a world in which there were no European empires, and in which a form of African cosmology has become the dominant world religion. A novel of epic proportions and massive ambition.” Read more...

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“The poet A. K. Blakemore’s prose debut The Manningtree Witches is a historical novel based on the real-life 17th century witch trials in Essex, England, set during the civil war and at a time when Puritan attitudes prevailed. I’ve seen it described, rather deliciously, as Fleabag meets Hilary Mantel, and if you can resist that then you are made of sterner stuff than I. Shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize.” Read more...

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Zakiya Dalila Harris’s debut novel The Other Black Girl, earned her a million-dollar book deal and shot into the New York Times bestseller list on release. Described as Get Out meets Stepford Wives, the book begins as a slow burn office drama—in which a black publishing assistant greets the arrival of a new black colleague with excitement and then suspicion—before taking a turn for the speculative.” Read more...

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“I was eagerly anticipating Jon McGregor’s new novel Lean Fall Stand—his fifth—and it didn’t disappoint. Like his Costa Prize-winning anti-mystery Reservoir 13, it begins with a scene of high drama before allowing the consequences to spool out over the subsequent years. In Reservoir 13, it was the search for a missing girl; in Lean Fall Stand it is a freak accident during an Antarctic expedition. The pitch and intensity of that opening scene is never revisited, but serves instead as fuel to fire the reader’s interest in the slower unravelling. Striking and unusual.” Read more...

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Cusk is best known for her Outline trilogy, those cool and exacting works of autofiction. Second Place too draws from life, in as much as the main character ‘M’ is a writer who lives in an isolated marsh—not unlike Cusk herself—and the narrator gestures towards some ‘global pandemonium’ making travel difficult. But the main thrust of the plot is derived from, or adapted from, a 1933 memoir by the American salonnière Mabel Dodge Luhan, who invited the writer D.H. Lawrence to live at her arts colony in New Mexico. Like Luhan, Cusk’s M writes to a painter she admires, inviting him to live in a guest house on her property. Like Luhan, M hopes that this this celebrated artist will reflect her life and landscape in some way through his art, something she does not feel qualified to do. And—like Luhan’s relationship with Lawrence—this relationship cannot be anything other than fraught and parasitic. But who, exactly, is the parasite?” Read more...

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Control of material, perfect pacing, absolute grasp of war’s absurdities as well as its tragedies—what’s not to admire! Steven Conte’s writing is direct and compelling—the chapter describing a forty-hour shift of operations on the wounded is a masterclass of relentless horror and humour. But The Tolstoy Estate is much more than just a war story and, indeed, much more than a triumph of writerly techniques, although the abrupt change of perspective in the middle really is a triumph.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist

Katharine Grant,

“‘Highly anticipated’ is such a difficult phrase for authors! Stress levels are high, particularly when the author has decided, in effect, to turn history inside out. Kate Grenville has taken the bland letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of John Macarthur, the so-called ‘father of the Australian wool industry’, and read between the lines to give us an alternative story. And what a compelling tale she’s woven, of a canny, resourceful woman, not perfect by any means, but who, through her own efforts and ingenuity, is transformed from reluctant Australian immigrant, a victim of sorts, into a vigorous and successful matriarch.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist

Katharine Grant,

“Pip Williams writes with such love. The Dictionary of Lost Words is the kindest book you’re ever likely to read. But don’t mistake me. Pip Williams’ kindness isn’t of the sweetly insipid variety. Rigorous, full of insights and honesty, always avoiding the stereotype and the obvious ploy, we’re with a writer whose gentle authority touches places that flashier novels never quite reach (to coin a phrase). This isn’t luck. The Dictionary of Lost Words is as carefully constructed as the Oxford English Dictionary whose creation is the novel’s setting.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist

Katharine Grant,

“Well, this book just roars into action. From the first moment, you’re being swept away by the energy with which Vuillard writes. And his translator keeps up with him every step of the way. It’s about Thomas Müntzer, who’s a little-remembered hero of the European religious reformation in the 16^th century. Vuillard conjures all his persuasive brilliance, but also his selfless and self-destructive rage. This is a kind of fictionalised biography, charged with electrical imaginative power. It’s thrillingly energetic and vivid.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett,

“This capacious, thoughtful, generous book is a kind of meditation on mortality. It’s a book full of sorrow and regret. But it’s also very funny. Stepanova has a wonderfully humorous way of looking at the pathos of the passing of life. It’s a very unusual approach, and it’s delightful to spend so much time—it’s a long book—in the company of an author who has such a wise spirit and such a well-furnished mind. She never says an obvious thing. Her opinions are carefully thought out, and often startling.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett,

“Its structure is extraordinary. I’ve never read anything like it. It’s as though we’ve raided the filing cabinet of the human resources department on a spaceship where half the workers are humans, and the other half are… I suppose robots, or artificial intelligences contained in humanoid bodies. Each of these people, these spaceship dwellers, have been asked to report on their state of mind to the personnel department, and there’s this wonderful conjunction of fantasy with the most tedious aspects of office life and bureaucracy. It’s so funny.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett,

“It has a very innovative form. It’s a series of linked pieces, each one part-essay, part-story, part-biographical account of great minds, geniuses, who—according to this account—seem always on the verge of collapsing into madness as they unlock the secrets of the universe. What I took away from this book, is a new understanding that mathematics and physics, like language, are symbolic systems. And none of those systems are really capable of containing the strangeness of the actual substance, the matter, of the universe. All that a scientist can do, and all that a creative writer can do, when grappling with what Labatut calls “the dark heart” of the physical world, is create a kind of poetry. It’s a dazzlingly clever book.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett,

“This is a collection of ghost stories. Enríquez uses the conventions of gothic horror and the macabre to write these brilliantly strange parables about the modern world. Her settings are detailed and concrete and realistic, mainly in Buenos Aires—she’s an Argentinian writer. The stories are very unsettling. But they’re also colourful and flamboyant, and sometimes disconcertingly funny, and always icily intelligent. They have the energy of ghosts that just won’t agree to be exorcised.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett,

“This book is frightening. Reading it, you feel you’re being hypnotised. Your emotions are set all a-jangle, and your mind is being opened up to new thoughts. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing—very powerful, very compelling. It’s a story about war, yes. But also a story about love. The author David Diop creates incantatory word music, and the translator Anna Moschovakis absolutely has managed to recreate it.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett,

“Ishiguro will be publishing his first new novel since winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017. Klara and the Sun is told through the eyes of a slightly out-of-date android (‘Artificial Friend’) as she secures her first owner. It’s a slim book, with big ambitions – asking questions about the ethics of artificial intelligence” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“The psychological thriller that everyone is talking about this season.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“I am personally looking forward to Irish writer Megan Nolan’s debut, Acts of Desperation, about a brief, toxic relationship, its aftermath, and examining the self-negating impulse of a woman who needs to see herself reflected in the eyes of another person to feel herself to be real.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“It follows a trans woman called Reese who is a Brooklyn 30-something. It’s a sort of trans Fleabag, I think, because she’s in a series of inappropriate relationships with men who are just awful and unavailable to commit to her. But she really craves that settled domesticity, that quote-unquote ‘normal’ family life that is starting to become available to queer people. There are so many interesting details and conversations—they talk about the politics of queerness and identity, the kind of discussions you can’t quite imagine on social media, because they have the freedom to talk without the backlash.” Read more...

Landmark LGBTQI books

Rosie Wilby,

“Oyler is a fantastically acerbic critic, whose work I’ve admired for a while … It goes almost without saying that a lot of eyes will be on her own fiction debut – but indications are good.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist