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 new novels from popular authors as well as the most buzzed-about debuts. For best-of-the-year recommendations curated by our deputy editor, Cal Flyn, we also have a list dedicated to the best fiction of 2023.
The Sanctuary
by Andrew Hunter Murray
A new, high-concept novel from the bestselling author of The Last Day. In The Sanctuary, a billionaire philanthropist is building an island utopia in a post-apocalyptic Britain—this is a work of atmospheric speculative fiction with the twisty plot of a thriller.
The Running Grave
by Robert Galbraith
Out later this year is The Running Grave, the 7th book in Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling)'s Cormoran Strike series, one of the most enjoyable crime fiction series out there. It features Cormoran Strike, a British war veteran-turned-private investigator, and Robin Ellacott, who starts out as a temp but becomes his business partner. In The Running Grave (according to JK Rowling via Twitter), Robin goes undercover to join a religious cult on behalf of a client who is worried about his son. The books in this series tend not to be fast-paced thrillers, but get you into the daily lives of the main characters, with the plot/mystery driving the story forward. If you haven't read any of the books yet, it's best to start with the first, The Cuckoo’s Calling, published exactly a decade ago.
These Days
by Lucy Caldwell
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
Lucy Caldwell's fifth novel is set during the Belfast Blitz, a series of four devastating major air raids on the Northern Irish city in 1941. It's "an under-told chapter in the fiction of my city," as Caldwell reflected; researching the book felt like "a strange, intense sort of solace" during the early days of the Covid crisis. The novel focuses on two sisters, Audrey and Emma, whose comfortable middle-class existence is shattered during the attacks. While announcing the shortlist for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, the judges noted that "the juxtaposition of the horrific and mundane and the authenticity of detail makes this novel an exceptional study of the terrors and consequences of war."
Red Team Blues
by Cory Doctorow
This is where we're at with global capitalism at the moment: if you want to catch criminals, it's time to become a forensic accountant. Marty Hench is the hero of Canadian blogger and activist Cory Doctorow's new novel (book one of a series), with the action revolving around cryptocurrency and Silicon Valley. A great way to combine reading a thriller and learning how the world works.
Read about the audiobook of Red Team Blues and why it's not available on Audible.com
Birnam Wood: A Novel
by Eleanor Catton
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
“Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize for her novel, The Luminaries. This is very different. It’s also set in her native New Zealand, but it’s a kind of environmentalist thriller. It’s extremely witty, extremely pacey, and incredibly well crafted. It’s about the fight over a particular patch of threatened ground in rural New Zealand. A group of guerrilla gardeners wants to use it for their organic ecological project but it’s also in the sights of miners and developers. The clash between them is executed with incredible panache, wit, surprise and suspense.
This is a book which on its back cover has an endorsement from none other than Stephen King, which I think tells you about the narrative drive that Eleanor Catton achieves here. It’s enormously enjoyable and, of course, it raises all of these profound questions about who should control the land and how it can be protected from environmental degradation.”
“One of the biggest books of the season must be Eleanor Catton’s hotly anticipated third novel Birnam Wood. Pitched (somewhat unexpectedly) as a psychological thriller, it follows the members of a guerilla gardening group as they take over an abandoned farm in cautious partnership with a paranoid American billionaire with plans to build his own survivalist bunker.” Read more...
The Notable Novels of Spring 2023
Cal Flyn, Journalist
Pineapple Street: A Novel
by Jenny Jackson and narrated by Marin Ireland
“It is funny, but it is surprisingly empathetic. It’s about a family of real estate moguls. They’ve got three kids and you’re hearing the perspective of the two daughters and the daughter-in-law. One daughter has gone off on her own, she’s married a successful businessman and she is not involved in the family business or working. The other daughter is taking the family’s money but is working for nonprofits doing good works. Then you’ve got the daughter-in-law, who is married to the son who works in the family business. She is a graphic designer from Rhode Island (where I live) and gives her perspective on this family. It’s full of privilege. None of the characters should be likeable, but yet somehow they are.” Read more...
Best Audiobooks of 2023 (so far)
Michele Cobb, Publisher
“It’s about a lawyer. She has a messy life. She goes on a date, moves in with the guy, and gets sucked into his life in Brooklyn and ends up in a gun cult. I like that true crime aspect to things. It’s a work of fiction, but here she is, in a bad relationship. She doesn’t realize she’s come into the survivalist group and some problems are going to arise from this. How does she get her life back?” Read more...
Best Audiobooks of 2023 (so far)
Michele Cobb, Publisher
I Have Some Questions for You
by Rebecca Makkai and narrated by Julia Whelan and JD Jackson
“This one was fun for me because I love a good mystery, but it also has a true crime podcast focus. It’s about a woman who is a podcaster. She went to high school in New Hampshire—a made-up boarding school—and she returns to teach some classes. It turns out a student had been murdered while she was there and someone who worked at the college was convicted of the murder. Now as a teacher, with her students, she reinvestigates, ‘What actually happened to her classmate? What happened to the person who was ultimately convicted of her murder?’ It was an intriguing listen. The main character’s life is a mess. Her husband is going through a scandal. You’ve got the layers of the mystery, her personal life and her returning to a place where she didn’t have the best experience.” Read more...
Best Audiobooks of 2023 (so far)
Michele Cobb, Publisher
Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers
by Jesse Q. Sutanto and narrated by Eunice Wong
“This is about a very fun character. She’s called Vera Wong and she runs Vera Wang’s Tea House in San Francisco. That’s on purpose: she wants to ghost off the name Vera Wang—but her teahouse is not very successful. She comes down one morning and there is a dead body. She sets out to figure out who the murderer is. She works through four different suspects—you’ve got the journalists, the brother of the dead man, his widow—and she gets to know each of them. She’s really trying to figure out who did it by inserting herself in their lives, which is a unique way to approach solving a mystery.” Read more...
Best Audiobooks of 2023 (so far)
Michele Cobb, Publisher
Time Shelter: A Novel
by Angela Rodel (translator) & Georgi Gospodinov
🏆 Winner of the 2023 International Booker Prize
A 'clinic for the past' offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: nostalgia. Each floor of the clinic reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back to their preferred time and the reader into European history. Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel, is the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov's third novel, and the first Bulgarian book to be nominated for the International Booker Prize. The judging panel said it was "an inventive, subversive and morbidly humorous novel about national identities and the seductive dangers of memory and nostalgia." Time Shelter was first published in Bulgaria in 2020.
“Set at the end of a long hot summer on Long Island, we follow a manipulative 20-something as she infiltrates the social circles of the American elite. Cline is an able storyteller and a master narrator of the inner lives of amoral young women. Another hazy, intriguing tale from the author of The Girls, her bestselling 2016 novel of cult-motivated murders in 1960s California.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction
“This is a real blockbuster of a novel with stunning energy, enormous humor, wit and sheer narrative drive. It’s a retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, from the title onwards. In fact, it follows Dickens’s plot fairly closely but Kingsolver moves the action to poor, rural Virginia, to the lives of country dwellers who in American culture have always been dismissed as hillbillies. In a way, it’s a great celebration and reclamation of that so-called hillbilly identity.
But it’s more than that because as the young hero Damon (or Demon) grows up, he becomes embroiled in one of the greatest social crises of contemporary America, which is opioid addiction. It becomes an issue-driven book, but the great disaster of mass addiction in his rural community never overwhelms his voice. It never dampens the wit and the sheer exuberance of the storytelling. In the end, it’s a book about some very, very dark social processes, but at the same time it’s still absolutely uplifting, exhilarating and enjoyable.”
“I’ve been to parts of Appalachia; I do a lot of library outreach. It’s dirt-poor. If you were transported there from New York or Atlanta, you would think you were in some sort of alternate universe, because the poverty is so extreme. The neglect, the drugs, and the opioid crisis—all of those are crimes. The kid in Demon Copperhead is in such a horrible situation that he’s taken away from his family…It’s his attitude that makes it so engaging. The book is dark, but it’s not overwhelmingly dark and horrible because he has such a great sense of humor.” Read more...
Crime Fiction and Social Justice
Karin Slaughter, Thriller and Crime Writer
“The influential American comedian Steven Wright, known for his deadpan one-liners, has also ventured into fiction for the first time with Harold, an absurdist, stream-of-consciousness novel set over a single day in a third-grade classroom, as thoughts flit through the mind of an eight-year-old boy.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“I’m excited about Megan Nolan’s second novel, Ordinary Human Failings, which will be out in July. This is her follow-up to the incisive Acts of Desperation, which took the form of a post-mortem of an obsessive, power-imbalanced relationship. This new book follows an ambitious news reporter whose investigation into a child’s sudden death on a 1990s London housing estate leads him to an Irish immigrant family with a notorious reputation. But are they at fault? Nolan specialises in the creation of emotional landscapes so bright one can barely look at them.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Alice Winn’s In Memoriam—a love story set during the tumult of the First World War—came roaring out of the starting gates and straight into the bestseller lists. In it, two heartsick schoolboys are forced to confront their feelings for one another amid the horror of war. In it, two heartsick schoolboys are forced to confront their feelings for one another amid the horror of war. It’s been endorsed by such literary grandees as Maggie O’Farrell and Garth Greenwell; The New York Times has also described it as both ‘devastating’ and ‘tender'” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“There’s…a new book from Salman Rushdie, Victory City, his fifteenth novel. It’s a fantastical epic, which opens in 14th-century India and features a nine-year-old orphan selected by the goddess Parvati to be her human vessel. The Times has described it as “a total pleasure to read, a bright burst of colour in a grey winter season,” full of “lush, romantic language.” (Rushdie, who is still recovering from a brutal knife attack last summer, is reported to be in daily contact with Hanif Kureishi, the acclaimed British writer who suffered a serious spinal injury in December and remains in hospital in Rome).” Read more...
The Notable Novels of Spring 2023
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“The actor Tom Hanks has published a second book, his first novel, which offers a behind-the-scenes account of the creation of a blockbuster movie: The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. It’s received somewhat mixed reviews (The Washington Post described it as “thoroughly engaging”; The Guardian said it was “a bland busman’s holiday”) but has already garnered plenty of column inches and will certainly find a large audience. (Hanks’ first book, a collection of short stories in which typewriters featured prominently, is reported to have sold 234,000 copies in the UK alone.)” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
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
“The literary event of the season must surely be the publication of Cormac McCarthy’s first new books since the devastating, Pulitzer Prize-winning, post-apocalyptic The Road in 2006. McCarthy returns now with not one, but two linked novels, which together tell the story of Bobby and Alicia Western, a brother and sister pair tormented by 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.” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“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
***🏆 A Five Books Book of the Year ***
“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
Young Mungo
by Douglas Stuart
Young Mungo is Douglas Stuart's eagerly awaited follow-up to his Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling debut Shuggie Bain. It centres on a love affair between two Glaswegian men, from either side of the sectarian divide. Having come of age in a violent, homophobic community, Mungo and James find peace—and each other—in a racing pigeon loft. A Romeo and Juliet story set in 1990s Glasgow, it is a powerful and deeply moving tale of passion, poverty and toxic masculinity.
“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
The Fall of Númenor
by Alan Lee, Brian Sibley (Editor) & J R R Tolkien
The Fall of Númenor is a collection of Tolkien's writings on the Second Age of Middle-earth, put together by British writer and Tolkien expert Brian Sibley and illustrated by Alan Lee. This is the period before the adventures of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (which take place in the Third Age of Middle-earth). Númenor is the island where the Dúnedain live and from whom Aragorn—the king in The Return of the King—is descended.
The book may be distantly connected to the Amazon Prime series The Rings of Power, also set in the Second Age of Middle-earth.
“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
“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
Small Worlds
by Caleb Azumah Nelson
“Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson is a book about family, about music, about growing up in a Ghanaian family in South London—specifically, in Peckham. It’s very lyrical, it’s very tender. It has a wonderful eye for the idealism and vulnerability of youth. It’s also about growing up as a black Londoner and the challenges that even in the time it is set—in the early 2010s—still confronted any black kids in a community like that. Its political content is not strident. It’s not on the surface. It’s deeply embedded in the process of celebrating family life and, also, the music that for this character and for his friends represents a very specific kind of liberation. It’s about memory and freedom and the kinds of love that bind a community together and, for me, that’s certainly political enough.”
Biography of X
by Catherine Lacey
The counterfactual aspect of the book came out of a need to create a world in which two women could be married without it being an issue, and in order to create a world in which a woman could be powerfully creative during the 20th century in America without having to first account or apologize for her gender. Before I wrote anything I had this sense of X, a brazenly creative yet deeply flawed woman, and the woman who loved her and their relationship. I could see and feel it so vividly, but I didn’t want the plot to be encumbered by the sexism of the 20th century. So I tried to envision a different, but still deeply flawed, world where they could create and love and suffer on their own terms—more or less.
The Best Counterfactual Novels recommended by Catherine Lacey
Lucy By the Sea
by Elizabeth Strout
Lucy by the Sea is Strout’s most recent novel of her Lucy Barton books. It is a moving story of Lucy’s experiences of lockdown and Covid-19; being uprooted from her life in New York, living with her ex-husband William, and worrying about her children. While it is best to read Strout’s Lucy Barton books in sequence, they do stand alone.
“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
“How to explain The Trees? It has so many disparate ingredients, which should not work together, but absolutely do. It is a gritty examination of the legacy of extreme racism and lynching in the Deep South. It’s a revenge thriller. It’s a buddy cop farce. It’s a detective novel with shades of the supernatural. And, well, it’s one of the best, most readable, funniest, and most hard-hitting novels I have ever read.” Read more...
Editor’s Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“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
“And—okay, fine, technically not a novel, but—I should also note that George Saunders (who won the Booker Prize in 2017 for his brilliantly funny and surreal first novel Lincoln in the Bardo) has a new book out in mid-October. In Liberation Day, Saunders returns to his first love—the short story—and transports us into a hell-themed amusement park and a near-future police state. (If you can’t wait, make sure you’ve read his storytelling masterclass A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, adapted from a course on Russian short stories that he has taught at Syracuse University for twenty years.)” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Namwali Serpell won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction in 2020 for her rowdy, polyphonous speculative novel The Old Drift. She returns now with The Furrows, an elegiac and uncanny story of grief, unreliable memories and mistaken identity. When Cee Williams watches her brother Wayne die in her arms, aged 12, something so powerful passes between them that she passes out; when she awakes, his body is gone. This lost brother haunts her for the rest of her life, appearing in the faces of strangers, and dying over and over again in her mind. The Financial Times said that it ‘confirms Serpell’s place as one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today.'” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Personally, I’m particularly excited about Our Share of Night by the Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez, who was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021 for her utterly unsettling collection of literary ghost stories The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. This new novel, also translated into English by Megan McDowell, is a gothic horror set partly during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, but which also embraces elements of occultism and the supernatural. Clocking in at more than 700 pages, this is an intimidating tome that simply pulsates with negative energy. That’s a recommendation, in case I’m not being clear.” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
The Marriage Portrait: A Novel
by Maggie O'Farrell & narrated by Genevieve Gaunt
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction
“I liked what Claire Allfree had to say about it in The Times: “So headily perfumed is her prose it works on the reader almost like a drug.” Sound good? Then I suspect this historical romance (of a kind) will work for you.” Cal Flyn in Notable Novels of Fall 2022
“O’Farrell’s novel is richly atmospheric and deeply researched, although she has altered some historical details for narrative effect. It met with a somewhat mixed critical reception on publication but has found a wide and largely appreciative fan base. If you enjoy lushly descriptive historical fiction, this will be the book for you.” Read more...
The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist
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
Either/Or
by Elif Batuman
Either/Or, Elif Batuman’s second novel, continues Selin’s story as she enters her second year at university. Selin ruminates over her summer in Hungary, the people she met, her teaching job, and, more importantly, Ivan. The humour that the reader appreciates in The Idiot, both in terms of observation and self-deprecation, imbues the novel. Selin gains confidence and tests boundaries. Despite the ambivalent title, Selin makes stronger resolutions.
“This is a book that made me think: wow, I didn’t know we were allowed to do that. For all sorts of reasons—some moral—but many of them literary. Carrère does not hesitate to put his personal failings on display—nay, to parade them, in this book. Yoga charts his mental breakdown, after several self-congratulatory years of career success and marital bliss. His dramatic self-destruction spools out in slow motion—but there is something liberating in that for the reader, to see a writer dissect their own inner workings so mercilessly and under such a clear, bright light.” Read more...
Editor’s Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year
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
“Abdulrazak Gurnah—who won the 2021 Nobel Prize for his ‘uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism.’ His latest novel, Afterlives, is set in what is now Tanzania (then Tanganyika) during the period of German rule around the turn of the 20th century, following a large cast of characters facing oppression of various kinds during the run-up to the First World War.” Read more...
The Notable Novels of Summer 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
Oh William!
by Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout returns to Lucy Barton’s story in Oh William, but now with a focus on her later life and her relationship with her ex-husband, William. Lucy and William reconnect, forcing Lucy to reflect upon their relationship, and their future.
Notable Novels of Summer 2023, recommended by Cal Flyn
New novels are piling up ready for summer 2023—but which of them should go straight to the top of your reading list? Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of some of the most notable fiction titles of the season, including eagerly anticipated novels from Emma Cline and Naoise Dolan, plus a fictionalised account of the making of a blockbuster movie by Tom Hanks.
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.
