It can be difficult to keep up with the flood of new books constantly being released into the world, but we at Five Books are here to help you, by highlighting the best new fiction: from the most anticipated new novels from our favourite authors to the most buzzed-about debuts of the day.
Our deputy editor Cal Flyn has recently started a regular series highlighting the notable new releases every season – gathered below as we go – and we also discuss and dissect the shortlists of some of the biggest prizes for fiction with their judging panels throughout the year, including the Booker and Booker International Prize shortlists, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and more.
We have a separate list of new historical fiction and we also have a small number of in-house reviews and short Q&As with the authors of recently released novels.
Tomb of Sand
by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell
*** Winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize***
“This is an extraordinary piece of fiction, but also an extraordinary piece of metafiction. It’s a novel of Partition, which is obviously a genre within from the Indian subcontinent. And at the same time, it is also none of these things, it is sui generis. It’s an extraordinarily joyful and playful and funny book, despite the fact that it begins with an 80-year-old woman who has lost her husband retiring to bed for months on end, turning to the wall and refusing to engage with life.” Read more...
The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist
Frank Wynne, Translator
Lessons
by Ian McEwan
A reflection of history and humanity that follows the dramatic life of one man from the dividing power of the iron curtain to the recent pandemic. Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan knows how to weave a thought provoking, gripping story so we're sure this will delight his fans.
Box set: The Passenger & Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy
Sixteen years after his devastating, Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic novel The Road was released, Cormac McCarthy—one of the greatest living American authors—is to publish two further books: two linked novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
The two books tell the story of Bobby and Alicia Western, a brother and sister pair tormented by their family history—their physicist father helped invent the atom bomb. In The Passenger, salvage diver Bobby stumbles upon a murder mystery while exploring a submerged plane wreck. In Stella Maris—a novel that unfolds entirely through a transcript of dialogue—maths prodigy Alicia is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Jenny Jackson, McCarthy's editor, described it to The New York Times as "a novel of ideas". (“What do you do after you’ve written ‘The Road’?” Jackson added. “The answer is, two books that take on God and existence.”)
The novels will be released in close succession in the United States: The Passenger on Oct 25, 2022 and Stella Maris on Nov 20, 2022. A box set will follow the following month. The books will be released simultaneously in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
“I’ve had my eye on quite a few literary debuts this season, not least Julia Armfield’s beautifully unnerving Our Wives Under the Sea. Armfield previously published a remarkable short story collection, salt slow, which saw her shortlisted for the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year here in the UK, and this book underlines her reputation for finely crafted tales of the horrifying, the strange and the contemporary gothic.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
The Books of Jacob: A Novel
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
“This book is attempting to embrace an entire world and culture, a particular period in Poland and Eastern Europe, and fold it into everything that can be known. It is a maximalist novel in that sense. There’s the theology of it, but also how market garden towns worked, how peasants lived, what beliefs people had and how those were challenged or changed. Both The Books of Jacob and A New Name are dealing with the numinous, a sense of God. But Jacob Frank is an apostate, he’s someone who is prepared to overturn centuries of his own religion in an attempt to create something new. Thanks to Olga—through Jenny—we get to witness this vast pageant of what it means to have lived through that time in Poland. It’s like a very, very large Bayeux Tapestry. But also, what it is to look back on that, given what we know now, because there are outside observers.” Read more...
The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist
Frank Wynne, Translator
The Book of Form and Emptiness: A Novel
by Ruth Ozeki
*** Winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction***
“Douglas Stuart is due to release his second novel, a highly anticipated follow up to his Booker Prize-winning, million-copy-selling debut Shuggie Bain; Young Mungo has been described as a working class Romeo and Juliet, in which two men from either side of Glasgow’s sectarian divide fall in love for the first time.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“I’m particularly excited about the February arrival of Pure Colour by Sheila Heti, surely the smartest, most erudite and exacting writer working today. Pure Colour has been billed by the publisher as ‘a galaxy of a novel’ which combines realism with surrealistic elements (at one point, the protagonist’s father moves through her as a spirit, at another she becomes a leaf), and asks the reader to consider life and death, the nature of art, and the nature of… well, nature. Unmissable.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Yanagihara’s new book is set in an alternate world, in which the American Civil War has produced a continent of rival territories—a Disunited States. It’s divided into three parts, each a hundred years apart and the final installment taking place in a dystopic 2093 as pandemics sweep the world. Characters appear and reappear in different guises, changing ethnicity and gender. It’s a novel of huge ambition, and one likely to arouse huge feeling and critical discussion; whatever your feelings about A Little Life, To Paradise is the novel everyone will be talking about in spring 2022.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
Billy Summers
by Stephen King
***Audiofile magazine Earphones Award for a truly exceptional audiobook***
The new Stephen King novel, Billy Summers, is just out and has been receiving rave reviews; The Guardian called the assassination thriller “his best book in years”—Cal Flyn, notable novels of Fall 2021.
Cal Flyn, Deputy editor
“It is a very introspective examination of the lives of a group of individuals, a study of a family and family dynamics, and an account of South Africa over the course of decades—from the later years of Apartheid, into the present. And he’s able to manage all of these registers with a seamlessness that is almost deceptively simple. There’s an incredible flow. It’s in four sections, and each of the sections is unbroken as a piece of narrative. But what he’s doing through it is moving you subtly from one person’s mind to somebody else’s mind, from the past into the present, from one kind of consciousness to another. To me it’s evocative of Virginia Woolf in the way that it brings together —as the human mind does—past and present, memory and subjectivities.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Maya Jasanoff, Historian
Small Pleasures
by Clare Chambers
An uplifting tale of an apparent virgin birth in 1950s England that’s been a word of mouth hit;
Cal Flyn, Deputy editor
“The Nobel laureate’s first novel in almost fifty years is billed by the publisher as ‘at once a literary hoot, a crafty whodunit, and a scathing indictment of Nigeria’s political elite’, which features stolen body parts, Yoruba royalty and a murdered engineer.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“I was a big fan of Alexandra Kleeman’s 2016 debut You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, which was a numbly dystopic story of obsessive friendship and extreme consumerism. Kleeman’s new book Something New Under the Sun, freshly out, is an equally unsettling story of Hollywood hell in a future California so racked by climate change as to resemble Hell itself. Part cli fi, part social satire, this is a novel for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Emma Cline.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
The Morning Star
by Karl Ove Knausgård
A traditional novel about strange celestial happenings, which has received critical acclaim in his native Norway —Cal Flyn, notable novels of Fall 2021.
Cal Flyn, Deputy editor
“The Magician is a magisterial work taking in a wide sweep of twentieth-century history while sensitively dissecting the inner life of one of the greatest writers of his day. A less author than Tóibín would have been overwhelmed by the richness of his material, spanning as it does the rise of Nazism, Mann’s need to escape from Germany with his Jewish wife and family, and his turbulent years in America. But The Magician is a novel, not a biography, and Tóibín’s focus is always on Mann himself, his homo-erotic longings, his curious detachment from his unruly children and the way in which he used his own experiences to create his novels.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Elizabeth Laird, Novelist
“A 1960s-set heist billed as ‘a family saga masquerading as a crime novel’. Whitehead’s high concept novels have often leaned on the conventions of genre fiction—and subverted them to glorious effect. For Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead turned for inspiration to caper films, crafting his comedic, intricately complex plot in their image.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
Beautiful World, Where Are You: A Novel
by Sally Rooney
Beautiful World, Where Are You was written under considerable pressure. Sally Rooney’s first two novels were smash hits—her debut, Conversations with Friends, earning her the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2017, and her second, Normal People, being an instant bestseller that was later adapted into a BBC/RTE television drama that infatuated the country, nay, the world, during the first, frantic days of the first Covid lockdown.
Having written the first and most of the second with a liberating sense of anonymity, Rooney had to approach her third novel from a completely different perspective. During the writing of Conversations with Friends and Normal People, she has said, “I wasn’t thinking, what is a voice? What is a protagonist? It was all so natural.” But now, with millions awaiting her next publication, “I sat down and thought, wait a minute, what is a novel?” The result, as might be guessed, is a more self-conscious book than her first two, but it is not, I think, a worse one.
It takes semi-epistolary form, as two female friends, Eileen and Alice, correspond between Dublin, where Eileen exists in a sort of stasis as a thirty-year-old editorial assistant, living in a grimy house-share, and a coastal village in Co. Mayo, where Alice is living alone in a rambling, rented house after suffering a breakdown during the promotion of her own bestselling novels.
It is impossible not to read Beautiful World, Where Are You as an internal conversation Rooney has been holding with herself over these last few years. “I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person, capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing,” declares Alice, surely echoing the famously reticent and publicity-shy Rooney’s own sentiments. But though Alice’s character is more obviously autofictional, one also senses Eileen to represent a version of Rooney too; an equal and opposite, a sometimes-mocking past self, who cannot quite believe Alice’s capacity for self-pity in the face of huge success.
Rooney’s status anxiety is made explicit in the content of the two women’s letters. They discuss aesthetics; politics; the place of art in a world racked by crisis—more specifically, the place of sexy, funny novels-of-manners of the kind Rooney herself produces; the pressures of fame; the unfairness of rewarding certain kinds of labour (literary) more than others (physical).
The letters are erudite, irritable, radical and sometimes funny, but perhaps inevitably (and perhaps gallingly for Rooney), the most immediately engaging elements of the book are the fripperies: the women’s romantic travails, their troubled personal relationship, the snappy dialogue and their awkward, effortful graspings towards intimacy. What’s strange about it, as the characters eerily note themselves in a sort of meta-commentary, is that despite all that’s going on in the world, despite everything we have to worry about, what we find ourselves obsessing over is the minutiae, the personal, the domestic, the romantic—the “breaking up and staying together” that Alice has come to scorn.
“I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse,” argues Eileen. “But at the same time, that is what I do every day.” And so we cannot help but be relieved when Alice or Eileen interrupts their intellectual grandstanding to prompt the other for some of the juicy specifics: what’s he like? have you slept with him yet? should I make up one bed or two?
Eileen’s on-off relationship with the idealistic political advisor Simon is the closest thing to the “19th century engines” that famously powered Rooney’s previous books, and in many ways they are similar to previous Rooney lovers: Eileen’s sharp, self-sabotaging intelligence, her submissive tendencies; Simon’s quiet, calm passivity. He’s a bland Prince Charming in the manner of Nick in Conversations with Friends—docile, pleasant, model handsome. He’s “a lamb,” as Alice remarks. Simon makes few demands of the female protagonist but absorbs much heat. The suspense arises purely from Eileen’s irrational refusal to be in a relationship with him.
But though we recognise the dynamic, it still has its pull—and there’s enough sexual weirdness to offer a focus of prurient interest. (In one early scene, Eileen brings Simon to climax during a phone call during which she narrates his future wife—younger, prettier and more stupid than herself—giving him head.) As with the earlier books, there is a lot of sex, and it’s perfectly rendered. Rooney never takes the coward’s road of soft-focus generalities, neither does she dwell on pornographic detail, but instead offers these scenes as a type of conversational culmination, where the touch of skin to skin is just one more way for two sparring partners to test their ambiguous power dynamic.
Alice finds Felix, a warehouse worker with the gift of the gab, on Tinder. The book opens with their unsuccessful first date, which fizzles into nothing. He is suspicious of her, she is cold and intimidating. On a whim, she invites him to Italy, as part of a promotional tour, where after days of chaste, tense sightseeing the weather finally breaks. He has no interest in her career, except in as much as it might benefit him—he is avaricious enough to hang around and take what he can get. They are eminently ill-suited and often cruel to one another. And yet Alice finds herself painfully attracted to him. “Oh God, I’m in love with you, I really am,” she pants at him in bed. His response: “Are you yeah? That’s good.”
In many ways, Felix is the most interesting character. He has a chequered past, a whiff of misogyny. He has never heard of Alice’s books, and seems annoyed by her success. He is the closest thing to a “normal” person in the book, and the three intellectual others are overshadowed by his raw charisma. So when Alice rails against the habit of rich, successful authors writing about “ordinary life”—“I don’t say this lightly: it makes me want to be sick”—one doesn’t know quite how to read it. It’s uncomfortable to sense Rooney’s cold, unforgiving eye coming to rest upon herself in this way.
Success has come to Rooney too easily, and made her distrust it. She should not. She is so good at summoning on the page that electric attention that can pass between two people, so exacting when she dissects those strange borderline relationships that cannot yet be fully defined, so adept at measuring the weight of what goes unsaid.
“Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species?” asks Alice. But, whether it matters or not, we do care. Of course we do. It’s what, in this sharp, clever, perfectly observed little book, I care about most. And in the novel’s epigraph perhaps we find a clue that Rooney herself has made peace with her God-given gift. She quotes Natalia Ginzburg: “there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn’t matter much to me.”
Cal Flyn, Deputy editor
“The psychological thriller that everyone is talking about this season.” Read more...
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...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“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...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Existing fans of the Pulitzer- and National Book Award-winning Gilead sequence will be intrigued to hear that Jack is the story of Jack Boughton, the bad boy son of the local Presbyterian minister, and his relationship with a beautiful and brilliant African-American woman who becomes his common law wife in segregated St Louis.” Read more...
Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“The first time that Bouraoui’s work has been translated into English: a dreamy, poetic account of Bouraoui’s coming of age as a French-Algerian gay woman, which has been a publishing phenomenon in continental Europe.” Read more...
Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“A creepy tale set in a small Southern town, in which a stranger of indistinguishable gender and ethnicity pitches up and is soon hearing the confessions of the local residents as they prepare for their ominously titled Forgiveness Festival: Rachel Cusk meets Shirley Jackson. A modern day fable about what we project onto others.” Read more...
Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Summer 2020
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“In the hands of a careless writer, A Sin of Omission might have been an impossible read, but Marguerite Poland’s restraint, whilst not sparing us, beckons us on. We trust her, and when you trust an author, you enjoy being absorbed into the world being offered, whatever the delights or otherwise of that world itself.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“In The Redeemed we, like Leo and Lottie, move from what we might call the ‘prelapsarian’ world—the established, hierarchical world measured in horse-speed—towards the noisier, speedier world of the motor, with class barriers broken, or at least breached. Through their experiences we witness the birth of something new, and the birth isn’t an easy one. Many critics describe Tim Pears’ prose as ‘lyrical’. It is, but there’s steel in the lyricism. Pears shies away from nothing. Too wise to go technicolour, he instead deploys meticulous detail to intensify emotional heft. Reading The Redeemed is like watching a master craftsman at work.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“Shadowplay employs both first and third person narrative, uses diary pages, private notes, newspaper cuttings and, occasionally, Ellen Terry’s voice. Yet it’s so smooth. Never a hiccup. Also, though the novel’s ostensibly about three titans of the Victorian theatre, it’s really a deep exploration of the exposed and the hidden, ‘the other man that every man contains’. Joseph O’Connor wants us to shiver, and we do.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“James Meek has quite simply given us something technically ambitious and glorious to read. I found myself smiling and occasionally doing that strange British thing of shaking my head in admiration. It’s punchy stuff! Meek has fashioned a language both familiar and unfamiliar, in other words a language that without losing subtlety or nuance sounds ‘fourteenth century’. But readers shouldn’t be alarmed. Two pages in and you’re fluent.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“Ambition, bravery, freshness—The Parisian, a first novel, has all three in spades. It’s a rare talent that can take on the complications and shifting identities of early 20th-century Middle Eastern politics and keep the reader charmed. But through her hero, Midhat Kamal, Isabella Hammad does that and more. It takes a remarkable eye for detail and ear for dialogue to succeed in both broad panorama and delicate miniature.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
Follow Me to Ground
by Sue Rainsford
An unusually evocative and intriguing debut novel from the Irish writer and art critic Sue Rainsford.
Follow Me to Ground has been reviewed by Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn.
Enter the Aardvark
by Jessica Anthony
A rollicking work of political satire. Enter the Aardvark lampoons the hypocrisy of the American right, in the form of Republican congressman Alexander Paine Wilson – for whom the arrival of a taxidermied aardvark in the mail triggers a chain of events that threaten to ruin his career. From the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Convalescents and the multimedia love story Chopsticks.
Our deputy editor Cal Flyn spoke to the author to find out more...
The End of October: A Novel
by Lawrence Wright
Lawrence Wright is a journalist whose account of Al Qaeda and the run-up to 9/11, The Looming Tower, has been recommended an astonishing 7 times in our interviews with experts (the other books to be reach this number of recommendations are Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Evelyn Waugh's Scoop). The End of October is a novel, but it's about a virus that starts in Asia and turns into a global pandemic. Though "eerily prescient" is one of those clichés that are too often applied to books, it does seem The End of October is indeed, um, eerily prescient.
“A new work of literary nonfiction by the author of Station Eleven, featuring a Ponzi scheme inspired by the case of Bernie Madoff. Though not a dystopian novel, the shipping executive Miranda and her boss Leon make an appearance in The Glass Hotel, marking it as taking place within the same fictional universe as Station Eleven.” Read more...
Editors’ Picks: Notable New Novels of Early 2020
Cal Flyn, Journalist
Death in Her Hands: A Novel
by Ottessa Moshfegh
The highly-anticipated new novel from the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the Booker-shortlisted Eileen is to be published on 21 April 2020. Ottessa Moshfegh, selected as one of Granta's best young American novelists in 2017, is one of the most outstanding literary talents working today, and produces darkly provocative fiction.
“Set in Lagos, it follows hardworking nurse Korede as she attempts to cover up the crimes committed by her insatiable sister Ayoola, a beautiful sociopath with black widow tendencies. As well as a crime thriller, it’s a razor-sharp dissection of gender dynamics that never feels preachy or pretentious.” Read more...
Editors’ Picks: Notable Books of 2019
Cal Flyn, Journalist
Agent Running in the Field: A Novel
by John le Carré
Agent Running in the Field is the latest spy novel from bestselling author John le Carré.
John Le Carré (real name: David Cornwell) is a very widely recommended author on Five Books. His books turn up again and again in interviews on both literary thrillers and espionage more generally. His most recommended books include The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Weather: A Novel
by Jenny Offill
The new, highly anticipated novel from the author of the bestselling Dept. of Speculation is a fantastically wise, fragmentary work of fiction about life and parenthood in the face of climatological crisis.
Three Women
by Lisa Taddeo
The hotly anticipated debut from journalist Lisa Taddeo offers intimate portraits of three women living in contemporary America: Maggie, a young woman taking her former lover—and high school teacher—to court; Sloane, a successful restaurateur and, in private, a swinger; and Lina, a woman who feels trapped in a passionless marriage.
Supper Club: A Novel
by Lara Williams
A sparkling debut novel from a young British author about a collective of hungry women who meet secretly, in the middle of the night to feast until they are sick. The project is a statement of intent: it is time, they say, to throw off restraint and take up the space that they deserve. This is a novel that will appeal to fans of Nora Ephron's Heartburn and Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends.
Supper Club was reviewed for us by Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn.
Machines Like Me: A Novel
by Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan is one of Britain's best known and most venerated novelists alive today, and his much-anticipated seventeenth book Machines Like Me takes the form a counterfactual novel, set in an alternative 1983, in which the (still living) mathematician Alan Turing has led major breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence. When 25 androids – 12 'male' Adams, and 13 'female' Eves – are released to the public, one owner finds himself in a complex love triangle with his girlfriend and android Adam.
McEwan has previously spoken to Five Books about the books that have shaped his novels.
The Cockroach
by Ian McEwan
The Cockroach by distinguished author (and Five Books interviewee) Ian McEwan is a political satire about Brexit, the shorthand used for the decision of the United Kingdom to exit the European Union following a referendum in June, 2016. Critical response to The Cockroach in the UK has been predictable: those who support Brexit hate it and those who oppose Brexit love it.
The audiobook, read by the British comic actor Bill Nighy in his customary lugubrious tone, is very, very funny.
“A darkly sardonic story based on the real-life witch craze that took place during the early years of the English Civil War, when a self-declared ‘Witchfinder General’ took it upon himself to root out malefaction, moral corruption and heresy among the women left behind by their soldier husbands, sons and neighbours. The prose is deeply sensual and immersive; darkly sardonic, written in modern English but bejewelled with period-appropriate vocabulary. Blakemore is a published poet, and that comes through very strongly. Highly recommended.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“The story centres on an unexpected pregnancy: Ames, who until recently was living as a woman, has impregnated his boss and sometime-lover Katrina. Feeling unable to cope with the idea of traditional fatherhood, he proposes an unusual solution—that they invite his ex-partner Reese, a beautiful but self-destructive trans woman, to co-parent alongside them. The result is a funny, provocative and often profound novel of ideas. I’ve thought about it a great deal since. I’d recommend it to anyone.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“The hero of this book is already dead. In the afterlife, he’s given a chance to revisit moments and places from his life, which took place during the Sri Lankan Civil War, in which the hero—who was a photographer—was ultimately killed. It’s a fantasy of a dead figure coming back, revisiting and understanding what happened, and also watching what the significance of their own life was. So at one level, it’s an enormous subject, almost a theological issue—what did this person do with their life? what does it add up to?—but it’s done, again, with enormous humour.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“That’s one of the most powerful elements of this book—the disjunction between the horror and the humour. Again, this is a historical narrative, beginning with the killing of Emmett Till in 1955, and addressing racial oppression in the United States, but with wonderful moments of fantasy, mysticism, magic, mixed with knockabout farce. It’s disconcerting, while you’re thinking about the long tradition of lynching in the South, to have these Keystone Cops moments. But it does intensify the emotional response and keeps you thinking on every page about what it is really like to live with this kind of systemic injustice over centuries.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Treacle Walker is a mysterious tale of a young boy, as he tries to make sense of the world around him. What is wonderful about the book is that it’s a journey through a landscape that cannot be grasped by reason alone. It’s about enabling the child to set off on his own journey—there’s a marvellous moment at the end, when the boy himself takes the reins of Treacle Walker’s cart and sets off on his own. It’s a bildungsroman, to use the pretentious literary term. But what I like about it is that the start point and the end point of the world can never be fully understood.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“At the centre of this book is the horror of the mistreatment of unmarried mothers and their babies by the Catholic Church in Ireland. It’s set in the 1980s—so recently, but before this scandal became known. The book, of course, is motivated and driven by the horror of what is being done to these women and their babies. But Keegan’s tone is as dispassionate as one could possibly imagine. There’s something absolutely merciless in that measured tone—it’s so much more powerful than an emotional denunciation of the cruelty of what is happening.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“The way Bulawayo uses set forms of words, or repetition, a sense of incantation that takes you into a different rhythm of thinking and living, which matches, of course, the otherness of presenting the history of Zimbabwe through fabular animals. Using animals to tell what is, in many ways, a fairly straightforward political history of Zimbabwe over the last 40 years, allows a very high degree of emotional engagement by the reader; we inhabit the space emotionally, as well as historically. And the animals do something very remarkable, I think, because they remove the question of race. The story becomes simply about how living beings treat each other. And that we found very powerful.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“The Marriage Portrait considers the marriage of Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and the ill-fated Lucrezia, 15-year-old daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, ruler of Florence.” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Exit West) returns with The Last White Man, a work of speculative fiction in which people wake up, unexpectedly, with different skin tones. Kirkus described it as ‘a brilliantly realized allegory of racial transformation.'” Read more...
The Notable Novels of Summer 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“It picks up where her previous novel, The Idiot, left off— following Harvard linguistics student Selin through a smart, witty, literary romp through her sophomore year. As the title suggests, Selin is much taken up with questions of how to live—specifically, whether ethics should trump aesthetics—but unlike Søren Kierkegaard (perhaps), she is even more concerned with parties, her college syllabus and whether or not she’s going to get laid.” Read more...
The Notable Novels of Summer 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“The book I’ve been raving about recently to anyone willing to listen is the French writer Emmanuel Carrère’s new (and somewhat controversial) work of autofiction, Yoga. It’s difficult book to sum up, but suffice to say, it begins in an easy, breezy style that feels almost free-associative, before it swirls ever faster down the plug hole. Disparate, discordant elements come into alignment, and soon Yoga reveals itself to have been entirely orchestrated from beginning to end. By the closing pages I wanted to give it a standing ovation.” Read more...
The Notable Novels of Summer 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Set in a medieval fiefdom racked by plague, drought and famine, Lapvona features a wide cast of villagers struggling to survive in the face of corruption, cruelty and the occult. Although very different in subject matter to her biggest hits, the why-dunnit noir Eileen and the comfortably numb tale of self-isolation My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Lapvona shares their macabre interest in the grotesque and the darker sides of human nature.” Read more...
The Notable Novels of Summer 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“When two unnamed twenty-somethings, a photographer and a dancer, lock eyes from across a crowded room, they find themselves irresistibly drawn to one another. Their subsequent relationship—intimate but undefinable—and artistic collaboration forms the basis of this intense and lyrical novel, which also serves as a meditation on the making of art, and the experience of being young and Black in modern Britain.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“This is a compulsively readable novel that genuinely made me laugh out loud. I think it will appeal to anyone who has spent the pandemic working from home—read: almost everyone. Reminiscent of And Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris’s workplace novel told in the third person plural, it perfectly captures the choppy, polyphonic Greek chorus of a company’s #general channel.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“‘Epic’ is the word. This is a book that really pulls off this immersive experience, creating a really richly imagined set of locations and characters and places. This is a book you feel like you can move through. You can see it, you can walk into the rooms. There’s an incredible tangibility about it that I find really powerful, and I don’t know how she does it. She has an incredible ability to make you believe in the reality of what she is describing, even in this exuberantly imaginative book. She’s swinging from the launching of a luxury liner for transatlantic voyages to show-pilots in western Montana in the 1920s and bush pilots in Alaska, to Hawaii in the 1960s and ’70s. And then, of course, there is this other narrative strand set in Hollywood in the here and now. Each of these brings you in, you live in it, and you want to see where you’re going to go next and then live in that one as well. That’s what’s so powerful about this book.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Maya Jasanoff, Historian
“Mohamed really takes advantage of the novel as the vehicle for telling this story. She certainly takes advantage of the use of time, the passage of time. The other books we’ve talked about all handle that quite differently. On the one hand, we get this extremely condensed timeline—the event happens, there’s a trial, there’s an execution, all over a short period—but within that she’s giving us this whole global story that also goes back in time through the character’s earlier life. She gives us the backstory of the victim of the crime as well. So she’s able to use this novel to give what seems like a detective story, on one hand, but then bring into it all of these other kinds of perspectives. And she’s able to mobilise our empathy in a bunch of ways.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Maya Jasanoff, Historian
“One of the things that really captured us from the first page is its incredibly wise, meditative voice. It’s looking at the legacy of a conflict that is not that well known to many people. The Sri Lankan civil war was an incredibly violent, some would say genocidal, conflict.The story is told from the point of view of a young man who has grown up in its aftermath. The book asks a question that I haven’t seen addressed in fiction, or not that I can think of, which is: what happens to all of those people who are just trying to process what happened, even if it didn’t happen directly to them?” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Maya Jasanoff, Historian
“Powers is a writer for whom the ideas very close to the surface—he makes them part of the plot. In this book he’s engaging with ideas about neuroscience and the brain, like: where does emotion reside? Where does reason reside? How do these relate to each other? And how does this fit into our ideas about what counts as ‘normal behaviour’. And he’s exploring all of that, in a landscape, a created world that is itself clearly shaped by the present realities of climate change. What is considered normal human behaviour is then understood against a global set of circumstances in which what is considered normal is being disrupted by the “abnormal” conditions of climate change. It’s a tension that I think he uses very fruitfully in the novel.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Maya Jasanoff, Historian
“There’s a kind of crystalline brilliance in the writing of the sentences that makes it quite remarkable. The book is full of these very short little snippets, these little vignettes. I think that she’s able to pull that off because she is so in command of her sentences. It’s a book that manages to be formally inventive without flaunting it, in a way that really makes sense for the story it’s trying to tell. She has, I think, created a method of storytelling that mirrors the experience of being extremely online.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Maya Jasanoff, Historian
“Isaiah Quintabe—IQ for short—is a irresistable take on the iconic Sherlock Holmes, who was a favorite of author Joe Ide growing up. Ide’s settings are razor sharp as IQ’s cases keep getting harder and the stakes higher. But it’s the main character—a scary-smart high school dropout from the hood penned in Ide’s snappy prose—who makes this story a joy to read.” Read more...
Tosca Lee, Novelist
“This is Lisa Unger showing once again why she’s a master of the genre as she deliver what readers turn to her books for time and again: a twisty, addictive thrill ride of an adventure. This is the very definition of a book you can’t put down and just one more stellar example of how authors continue to enthral audiences.” Read more...
Tosca Lee, Novelist
Blacktop Wasteland
by S.A. Cosby
*** 2021 CWA Gold Dagger Highly Commended***
Blacktop Wasteland is a thriller more than a mystery, but deserves a mention because it was highly commended by the Crime Writers' Association in its 2021 Gold Dagger awards. The chief protagonist is Bug (real name: Beauregard), a car mechanic and hotshot driver, and your heart starts sinking early in the book as his efforts to stay on the straight and narrow falter under financial pressure—even as he tries to be a good husband, dad and businessman. Still, you quickly get sucked into the action and feel oddly empowered by him and just how smart and talented he is, rooting for him even as he commits heinous crimes.
“Elizabeth Strout’s prose is so calmly, naively beguiling. The apparently simplicity of her language, the informality of the address to the reader takes you immediately into a dialogue with a character. What we admired enormously was the complexity with which the reader comes to see how little Lucy understands herself. The process of watching somebody in late middle age, rethinking their understanding of who they have been, who they are, and what they might be.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“This is the follow-up to Osman’s likeable and funny first book The Thursday Murder Club (see below) which has been a fixture on bestseller lists since its 2020 release. This new murder mystery returns to the sleepy retirement village of Coopers Chase, where our septuagenarian sleuths have returned to the jigsaw room—only to find their peace shattered again when a ghost from the past sends one of their number a letter, many years after his supposed violent end. The Man Who Died Twice looks set to charm all those who loved Osman’s earlier book; I’ve heard the second Thursday Murder Club outing even better than the first.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“The Vanished Birds, opens with an absolute classic of that intergalactic perspective—picture a very distant planet, a very low tech planet that was colonised in some distant past and is now home to generations of farmers. Every 15 years, the skies open and a fleet of ships descend upon the fields. The ships are described as being made of metal and cloth—and we don’t know whether we’re seeing this through the eyes of somebody who just doesn’t know what they’re seeing or if it’s a literal description—but it’s a very beautiful image that remind me of Sir Arthur’s famous line that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist
Tom Hunter, Journalist
“Hao Jingfang is a Chinese author, and science fiction is often discussed as a way artists and writers can use fictions as a way to write if there are issues around state censorship. All that makes the story sound very political, but the book itself is very lyrical and reflective right from its beautifully evocative opening line.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist
Tom Hunter, Journalist
“This is really good, fun, brilliantly well written, and the characters stay with you. One of our judges said that they went back and immediately started reading this one again—this, out of hundreds of books. So that’s praise.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist
Tom Hunter, Journalist
“the premise of The Animals in that Country is that there is a pandemic, but it’s a virus that enables humans to start to understand the speech of animals. But not in a Doctor Dolittle way, when we can just chat to them. It’s more like the Wittgenstein idea that ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.’ I think it was that breath of imagination that really appealed to the judges. How would you imagine animal speech? They also talked about the joy of the writing in this book. The imaginative feat of trying to understand how an animal might communicate, and what that communication might be.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist
Tom Hunter, Journalist
“If you liked Blade Runner, that noir flavour of science fiction, then this is the one for you. Think crumbling societies, dispossessed populations, outlawed technologies and a (very on trend) deadly plague to name just a few of the challenges our protagonists will be facing here.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist
Tom Hunter, Journalist
“We’ve got here a young heroine. She’s Afro-Caribbean, she’s autistic. She’s at high school, but this high school is very special in that she attends a school in the future, because she is a time traveler, born on February 29, during which a certain percentage of people are gifted with time traveling powers. But things are going wrong in the future. While it is aimed at younger readers, that doesn’t mean the writing is any less mature. It’s an absolute page turner.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist
Tom Hunter, Journalist
“In this novel, Africa has not been subjected to the horrors and traumas of European colonisation and it seems as if technology has developed faster than in our world. There’s been some disaster in what we call London, a couple of centuries before the novel, around the time of the Regency. An Ark has been built—essentially a fortress—to protect the chosen citizens from poverty and the fall out of the disaster. The central character, Markriss Denny, aspires to join this elite and has discovered he can astral project himself. But he pretty quickly discovers that the Ark isn’t a utopia, and that he is part of a struggle which could destroy everything.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist
Andrew M. Butler, Film Critics & Scholar
“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
“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 16th 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, Biographer
“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, Biographer
The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century
by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken
“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, Biographer
When We Cease to Understand the World
by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West
“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, Biographer
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories
by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
“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, Biographer
At Night All Blood Is Black
by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis
“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, Biographer
“This dazzling work of experimental fiction explodes the literary conventions in its recreation of its protagonist’s anxious, polyphonic stream of consciousness over the course of a single day, in the wake of a sexual assault. That might sound like hard work, but it’s an absorbing and often playful book, which made a deep impression on me.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“This isn’t your typical whodunnit. This is a haunting look at a community of women—not just the victims, but the family, friends and neighbors surrounding the victims—their circumstances, and the setting in which their stories take place. It hops between 1999 and 2014, and is that rare crime novel that compels not just by its plot, which advances with its shifting points of view, but by its insight into gender, privilege, and power.” Read more...
Tosca Lee, Novelist
“Ishiguro’s literary trick is that the world Klara knows is limited by what she can see or what she is told about. As readers, we might have a better idea of some of the things she doesn’t realise—what she has got herself into, say—but the narrative might not go where we expect or perhaps hope. We’re assembling Klara’s world alongside Ishiguro. And the idea of the Sun as potentially a God is fascinating; in science fiction it could, of course, be a superior being.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist
Andrew M. Butler, Film Critics & Scholar
The Thursday Murder Club
by Richard Osman
***Shortlisted for the 2021 Edgar Allan Poe Awards***
The Thursday Murder Club is a relentless parody of a classic, cosy murder mystery, written by British TV presenter and comedian Richard Osman. It is laugh-out-loud funny at times, though it’s hard to know how well that humour travels beyond UK borders, so it may be worth reading a sample before committing. It’s a light and enjoyable read, set in an upscale retirement village, with the upshot that many of the main protagonists are aged 70+, which is oddly empowering.
“Two young cousins on the brink of puberty create an imaginary world for the two of them to share. When Natsuki and Yuu’s blossoming romance causes consternation among relatives, they are torn apart; Natsuki never truly recovers.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist, recommended by Neil MacGregor
The Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best original novel written in the English language. We asked the art historian Neil MacGregor, chair of this year’s judging panel, to talk us through the six novels that made the 2022 shortlist—and why fiction can be a most effective means of engaging us emotionally in social and political crisis elsewhere.
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022, recommended by Cal Flyn
Fall is a busy time in publishing, as the biggest names in fiction prepare to release new books in the months leading up to Christmas. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up some of the most notable novels of Fall 2022—including two new books from the great American novelist Cormac McCarthy and a sumptuous work of historical fiction from Maggie O’Farrell.
The Notable Novels of Summer 2022, recommended by Cal Flyn
If you’re looking for a new book to keep you entertained or intellectually excited over the summer break, we’ve got you covered. Five Books’ deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of the notable new novels of summer 2022, from snappy debuts and fantasy epics to the latest book from the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Notable Novels of Spring 2022, recommended by Cal Flyn
If you’re nervous of what 2022 has in store for us, you’re not alone. But at least there will be plenty of excellent new books to read. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of the notable novels of spring 2022, including exciting new work from Sheila Heti, Ali Smith and Marlon James.
The Best Novels of 2021, recommended by Cal Flyn
It’s been another vintage year for fiction. As book sales continue to soar, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn talks us through her personal highlights: the best new novels to be released in 2021. Her recommendations include a workplace comedy that unfolds through the medium of Slack, a “darkly sardonic” story of a 17th-century witch trial, and a witty novel-of-ideas examining trans parenthood.
The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist, recommended by Maya Jasanoff
This year the Booker Prize finalists include new work from previous shortlistees Richard Powers and Damon Galgut, a sweeping historical novel by Maggie Shipstead, and a fragmentary account of a life lived ‘extremely online.’ Maya Jasanoff, Harvard historian and chair of the 2021 judging panel, talks us through the best fiction of the past year.
The Best Thrillers of 2021, recommended by Tosca Lee
Looking for a fantastic new thriller to read? We asked Tosca Lee, the bestselling author, to talk us through the International Thriller Writers 2021 shortlist. With their amazing characters, palpable tension, unique voices and incredible plot twists these thrillers achieve what every reader is looking for: a book they can’t put down.
Notable Novels of Fall 2021, recommended by Cal Flyn
Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of the notable novels that need to be on your literary radar in Fall 2021, including the hotly anticipated new book from Sally Rooney—set to dominate bestseller lists in the coming weeks—as well as eagerly awaited follow-ups from Richard Osman and Elizabeth Strout, and a return to more traditional fiction from Karl Ove Knausgård.
The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist, recommended by Tom Hunter
Every year, the director of the Arthur C Clarke Award talks us through their six book shortlist. The 2021 crop of the best science fiction books features a “deliciously pulpy” space opera, a time travel story for young adults, and a cacophonous tale of talking animals. What they all have in common is that they are by debut authors, says Tom Hunter: they represent a new generation of sci fi writing.
Notable New Novels of Summer 2021, recommended by Cal Flyn
Foreign holidays are still looking unlikely for most of us this summer, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to find a spot in a park or garden to relax in the sun with a good book. Here, author and Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn highlights some of the most notable new novels of summer 2021 to help you narrow down your reading options.
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1
At Night All Blood Is Black
by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis -
2
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories
by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell -
3
When We Cease to Understand the World
by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West -
4
The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century
by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken -
5
In Memory of Memory
by Maria Stepanova, by Sasha Dugdale -
6
The War of the Poor
by Éric Vuillard, translated by Mark Polizzotti
The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist, recommended by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist, recommended by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Every year the International Booker Prize judges read dozens of novels from around the world, which are newly translated into English. Here Lucy Hughes-Hallett—award-winning author and chair of this year’s judging panel—talks us through the six books that made their 2021 shortlist of the best world literature.
Notable Novels of Spring 2021, recommended by Cal Flyn
Fiction fans can expect “an embarrassment of riches” in spring 2021, according to Cal Flyn, deputy editor of Five Books and author of the forthcoming Islands of Abandonment. From buzzed-about debuts to the latest novel from the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, we are spoilt for choice this season.
Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020, recommended by Cal Flyn
After coronavirus-induced chaos threw publishing schedules out of whack earlier this year, fall 2020 is shaping up to be a bumper book season. But with hundreds of new titles flooding onto the shelves, it can be hard to identify those that are most deserving of your time. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn highlights some of the most anticipated new novels of the coming weeks.
The Best Science Fiction of 2020, recommended by Tom Hunter
Sci fi is booming, says Tom Hunter, the director of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, as he discusses their 2020 shortlist: six novels that embrace classic sci fi narratives, while subverting or reimagining them for a contemporary audience.
The Funniest Books of 2020, recommended by Pippa Evans
Comedy offers escapism and a way of processing our emotions during stressful times, says the comedian Pippa Evans—who this year served as a judge for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Here she talks us through the books shortlisted for the title of the funniest book of 2020, and explains how she found herself researching pig deliveries.
Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Summer 2020, recommended by Cal Flyn
No writer could resent you losing track of the new novels being published into the chaos of summer 2020 – with the world on lockdown and protestors taking to the streets. But fiction can offer respite from a relentless news cycle, writes Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn – and an opportunity to consider our own lives and choices through the prism of others’.
The Best Thrillers of 2020, recommended by Anthony Franze
Every year, the International Thriller Writers awards highlight the best new thrillers of the previous year. Anthony Franze, administrator of the awards and an acclaimed thriller author in his own right, talks us through their 2020 shortlist for the best new thriller published in hardback.
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1
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree
by Shokoofeh Azar, translated by Anonymous -
2
The Adventures of China Iron
by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre -
3
Tyll
by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin -
4
Hurricane Season
by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes -
5
The Memory Police
by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder -
6
The Discomfort of Evening
by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison
The Best Fiction in Translation: The 2020 International Booker Prize, recommended by Ted Hodgkinson
The Best Fiction in Translation: The 2020 International Booker Prize, recommended by Ted Hodgkinson
Broaden your reading horizons. Much of the most exciting, playful and inventive new fiction can be read in translation, says Ted Hodgkinson, chair of the judging panel for the 2020 International Booker Prize. Here he talks us through their shortlist of six novels.
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1
The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of September 11, 2001
by Garrett Graff -
2
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
by Tony Kushner -
3
Becoming
by Michelle Obama -
4
Charlotte's Web
by E.B. White & Garth Williams (illustrator) -
5
The Dutch House
by Ann Patchett -
6
The Testaments: A Novel
by Margaret Atwood
The 2020 Audie Awards: Audiobook of the Year, recommended by Mary Burkey & Robin Whitten
The 2020 Audie Awards: Audiobook of the Year, recommended by Mary Burkey & Robin Whitten
Every year, the Audie Awards celebrate the best audiobooks published over the previous year. Veteran audiobook reviewer Robin Whitten of AudioFile Magazine and Mary Burkey, who has served on multiple audiobook judging panels, explain what makes a good audiobook and talk us through the brilliant books that were finalists in the 2020 ‘Audiobook of the Year’ category.
