New Literary Fiction
Last updated: November 19, 2024
Keep up to date with the best new releases in literary fiction here on Five Books. Our deputy editor Cal Flyn, an award-winning author herself, writes seasonal round-ups of the best new novels from 'literary' writers: from buzzed-about debuts to critics' darlings, new work from the globally recognised greats and beloved sleeper hits from writers' writers. We love it all here at Five Books.
We also cover the Booker Prize and International Booker Prize shortlists in depth each year—ensuring that we have all the info on the new literary novels on everyone's lips that year—as well as highlighting the finalists of other notable fiction prizes as the year goes on. Be sure to bookmark this page to stay up to date with all that's new in literary fiction.
“This one jumped out at me: it centres on the relationship between a noted novelist and his playwright daughter, as she presents a new drama written by her about the period they spent together in Sicily a decade earlier. It is, essentially, an extended study of ethical grey areas and the manner by which the sense of moral correctness shifts from generation to generation.” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Summer 2024
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Long Island Compromise is a doorstopper of a novel with a huge cast of characters. It unpicks the long lasting consequences of the 1980s kidnapping of a wealthy businessman, as well as—more broadly—the story of his Jewish-American family and their pursuit of financial and social success. Seems destined for the bestseller lists.” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Summer 2024
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Slowly, Cusk has been stripping away the layers of the novel—starting with plot, now character—to reveal its fundamental mechanisms. And so, though Parade is far from a light beach read to throw in your carry-on case as an afterthought, it’s certainly a notable new novel that pushes at the very bounds of what it means to write fiction.” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Summer 2024
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“In Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, everything is connected in a teeming, gripping, horrifying panorama of British society. In the tradition of Fielding, Dickens, and Orwell himself, the novelist gets everywhere: slipping into the Old Bailey, inviting himself to the polo, sharing a Mayfair magnum while taking notes. And, true to that tradition, Caledonian Road is absolutely contemporary: it gets to work in a world of branding and media spin, of hacking and cover-ups. It asks where the money is coming from, and who knows what, and how chasms of inequality are widening between people passing on the same London pavement” Read more...
The Best Political Novels of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Fiction
“Alva is one of the protagonists. She’s a moody, rebellious teenager who is starting to pull away from her mother, a white American woman. Alva has a dual identity—she has a Chinese father who she doesn’t know, and an American mother. Through Lu Fang, the Chinese businessman who Alva’s mother marries, we get a sweep of Chinese history, from the Cultural Revolution onwards. So it’s a book that tackles big themes and a lot of history, but always through a propulsive narrative that keeps you turning the pages.” Read more...
Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist
Monica Ali, Novelist
“It’s a gut-punch of a book, which provokes so many emotions in the reader: sorrow, rage, tenderness, laughter—it’s often funny, you know. The whole range. It balances the light and the dark. And it’s suffused with love…The ending is almost metaphysical, it’s philosophical. You stand back and think about the big picture of life and this eternal cycle that we’re in, generation after generation. It’s uplifting, actually.” Read more...
Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist
Monica Ali, Novelist
“It’s a very accomplished piece of storytelling. It weaves history, politics, and family with a profound meditation on the purpose of art. It’s very nuanced, multi-layered, gorgeously written. And it’s original—because it plays with form. Parts of the book are written as a script, fo example. And it asks deep questions about the purpose of art: whether it can be a form of resistance; whether a play written centuries ago can resonate with the lives of people in the West Bank in the present day. It’s very subtle, its outlook. Very humane. It’s generous, compassionate. It’s a book you won’t necessarily romp through. But you sink into it, and then you really reap the rewards. There’s a lot of food for thought.” Read more...
Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist
Monica Ali, Novelist
“It’s a historical novel that begins on a sheep farm in New South Wales in the 1880s. It goes right through until the 1950s. In Dolly we have a character who constantly fights against the constraints placed on her as a woman in a man’s world. And she pays a really high price for her nonconformity. She builds a business, loses everything, is forced to start over. But she never loses her fighting spirit. Grenville’s prose is just immaculate: simultaneously plain and poetic. She conjures up those very harsh and beautiful landscapes so perfectly. It’s a book that transports you to another time and place, and all of us judges fell in love with Dolly—we were there for the pain and the beauty of all Dolly’s struggles.” Read more...
Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist
Monica Ali, Novelist
“It’s an intergenerational saga set in Ireland, exploring the really messy, fraught relationship between Carmel and her daughter Nell. They’ve moved from being a very close single-mother, only-daughter unit to having quite a fractured relationship. It also encompasses the long shadow thrown over their family by Carmel’s father, Phil, who is now deceased but was a famous poet. Through Phil, Anne Enright raises a lot of questions about art. For instance: is it possible to separate the art and the artist? If the person who has produced the art has done terrible things in their life, does that affect how you view that art?” Read more...
Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist
Monica Ali, Novelist
“Once you’ve read this book, you’re never going to forget it. It’s absolutely searing, deeply moving. And it’s an utterly compelling piece of storytelling. There have been quite a few novels recently that have looked at the Sri Lankan civil war. This novel is unique in the way that it centres women’s experience of the war. She uses that lens of women’s experience to examine the impact on families, on the war of values that can tear families apart as much as the violence. And she’s unflinching in her commitment to complexity and nuanced and clear-eyed moral scrutiny of all sides of the conflict…It’s a novel that rewards multiple readings as well, because it’s packed with historical detail. It ranges in scale from the intimate to the epic.” Read more...
Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist
Monica Ali, Novelist
Kairos
by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann
🏆 Winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize
“The story unfolds around a disturbing affair between a 19-year-old student and a 53-year-old married writer in East Berlin. Initially there is intense attraction. They both love music and art. He is a kind of mentor to her. They meet in secret, it’s very dramatic. It starts with love and passion, but it’s at least as much about power, art and culture—a different kind of obsession. The discussions of music, poetry and theatre take place alongside the political upheavals. It’s a novel about the weight of history, how it impinges on our lives.” Read more...
The Best Novels in Translation: The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist
Eleanor Wachtel, Broadcaster
“It’s a midlife crisis novel (The New York Times reviewer hailed it ‘the first great perimenopause novel’) in which the protagonist, a married artist in her forties, upends her life and holes up in a roadside motel she embarks on an affair with a much younger man. If you’re ready to radically reimagine what monogamy and midlife might look like, this is the book for you.” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Summer 2024
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“In The Extinction of Irena Rey, eight translators arrive at a house deep in the primeval forest ready to translate a book by a revered Polish author. Shortly after they arrive, the writer the have come to pay tribute to disappears. It’s a strange and very funny book that offers fascinating insight into the world of the literary translator.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Sigrid Nunez’s new novel The Vulnerables is set in Covid-era New York, in which an unnamed female writer moves into a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment to look after their pet macaw, Eureka. This is, technically, her second ‘pandemic novel,’ after Salvation City (2010), which is set during a fictional flu outbreak. Previously Nunez has commented how, when the 2020 lockdowns came into effect, she had a sense of eerie premonition—’When all of this started, I thought, ‘Wait, didn’t I write a book about it?'” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It is the follow-up to her Booker-longlisted debut Such a Fun Age. Set at the University of Arkansas, it follows mixed-race student Millie as she helps an older female professor to spy on her dorm neighbours. Come and Get It has had more mixed reviews than the earlier book, but nevertheless it’s reported to be a twisty page turner packed with whip-cracking repartee.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Past Five Books interviewee Francis Spufford (Red Plenty, Golden Hill) will also arrive Stateside with a new, propulsive novel that spans genre and literary fiction. Cahokia Jazz is billed as a ‘noirish detective novel’ set in an alternate 1920s America, where the Jazz Age is swinging in the grand old Mississippian city of Cahokia. In our own reality, Cahokia was an ancient indigenous settlement abandoned in the 14th century; in Cahokia Jazz, thanks to a quirk of epidemiological history, the city not only survived but thrived and now acts as the setting of a complex murder mystery set in train by the discovery of a ‘spectacularly butchered’ body on the roof of a skyscraper. It’s been out since October this side of the Atlantic, garnering rave reviews; it will be interesting to see what Americans think of their reminagined nation.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan is a novel that handles trauma with honesty and care. There is no sugar-coating with virtue or easy beauty here. This is a story that employs a cleanly cinematic gaze to observe the plain disintegration of a family through a pattern of social circumstance, addiction and prejudice, egged on by the ruthlessness of 90s tabloid journalism – to give us a portrayal of a society both fractured and hopeful” Read more...
The Best Political Novels of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Fiction
“I have probably read Adelle Waldman’s sharp and perceptive Brooklyn comedy of manners The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. half a dozen times already, so I can’t wait for her long-awaited follow-up, Help Wanted, which will be out mid-March in the US and at the end of the month in the UK. It’s been billed as ‘a humane and darkly comic workplace caper’ following the lives of those working an early morning shift at a big-box store in upstate New York.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“The young British novelist A. K. Blakemore follows her cult hit debut The Manningtree Witches with another hard-edged historical novel, The Glutton. This new book is set during the French Revolution and is inspired by a man with an insatiable (perhaps even cannibalistic) appetite reported in an 18th-century paper. At once horrible and hallucinatory, The Glutton should appeal to fans of Ottessa Moshfegh.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“James is a reworking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrated by Jim, the escaped slave with whom Finn travels on a raft. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly noted that in this version, Jim is ‘a Black man who’s mastered the art of minstrelsy to get what he needs from gullible white people.'” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Praiseworthy is an environmental allegory set in a small Aboriginal town in the north of Australia, and—in true Wright style—bends time and space as it interweaves oral history, ancestral myth, and dystopian vision.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
My Heavenly Favorite: A Novel
by Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison
“My Heavenly Favourite is set in a small, religious Dutch farming community—drawing from Rijneveld’s own rural upbringing—and is narrated by a large animal vet in the wake of his criminal obsession with a farmer’s young daughter: a cowshit-splashed Lolita.“ Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“And in Canada the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize was won by Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience, an eerie and unsettling tale of xenophobia set in an unnamed northern country, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize earlier in the year. The Daily Telegraph declared it ‘a beautiful, riddling tale of a woman on the fringe of a rural community’ that, though ‘philosophically opaque,’ is both ‘elegant and electric.'” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
Birnam Wood: A Novel
by Eleanor Catton & Saskia Maarleveld (narrator)
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
🏆 An AudioFile Best Mystery/Suspense Audiobook of 2023
“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, Five Books Editor
“Despite its sometimes heavy subject matter—characters face poverty, racism, and tricky family dynamics—it has a ‘peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism,’ said The New Yorker: Escoffery’s inventive and experimental approach to fiction ‘is marked by ingenuity.'” Read more...
The Best Novels of 2023: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2009 debut Tinkers. This new book, his third, is a work of historical fiction inspired by the true story of Malaga, an island off the coast of Maine where former slaves made their homes alongside Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans. The self-sufficient, racially-integrated community was disbanded by the US government in 1911 when the residents were evicted in the name of public health. ‘Terrible how terribly good intentions turn out almost every time,’ as one character observes, prophetically—and sure enough this unique, rag-tag community is soon no more.” Read more...
The Best Novels of 2023: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“It’s a strange, sparse little novel about a Jain family living in Luton, England, and grieving the death of their mother. The father and youngest daughter become fixated on the sport squash, spending hours training at a local sports centre every day, driving thoughts of death from their mind with a regimen of drills, ‘ghosting’, sprints, and increasingly desperate matches.” Read more...
The Best Novels of 2023: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Look out for the new book from Jon Fosse, A Shining, which will be released 31 October in the US and 1 November in the UK. It’s a surreal, dreamlike sequence set in the Norwegian woods, in which the narrator’s car becomes stuck in a rut on a remote track. Like his remarkable Septology, which floored me last year, the English translation is by the US writer Damian Searls—who learned Norwegian specifically to translate Fosse.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
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.
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
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
🏆 An AudioFile Best Fiction Audiobook of 2023
“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
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, Five Books Editor
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.”
“It was criticised as being poverty porn, but I don’t really see that. It does risk being wildly sentimental, but I kind of like that. It’s old school. It has a confident, Dickensian snap and brio, a broad, swinging-for-the-fences ambition, and it worked for me. And the ending is the complete clichéd happy ending. Yet, because it’s such an enormous book, when you get there you feel like you’ve earned the big sentimental pay-off. I really liked it. It had me welling up.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in the American South
Xan Brooks, Novelist
“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, Five Books Editor
Small Mercies
by Dennis Lehane
☆ Shortlisted for the 2024 CWA Gold Dagger
Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane is the heart-breaking story of Mary Pat Fennessy, a tough 42-year-old from Southie in Boston. The book is set in 1974, after a Massachusetts court ruled that Boston's public schools should integrate segregated communities through busing, and violence broke out. Lehane's writing makes you feel like you're there, experiencing that hot summer half a century ago, as Mary Pat searches for her missing daughter.
“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. 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, Five Books Editor
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, Five Books Editor
“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, Five Books Editor
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
“This book does two things really well. The first is shifting to the hallucinatory world to the context of loss and grief. Lots of people experience these sorts of things following the loss of a loved one, and that happens to Benny as well. Secondly, this is a book about books. It’s steeped in books, much of it unfolds in a library, and in a way it’s about how we create different worlds constantly. We can move between them, and they shape how we think. The boundaries between these fictional worlds and the real world is much more porous and malleable than we might appreciate.” Read more...
The best books on Hallucination
Ben Alderson-Day, Psychologist
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, Five Books Editor
The Fall of Númenor
J R R Tolkien, Alan Lee (illustrator), Brian Sibley (editor)
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, Five Books Editor
“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, Five Books Editor
“In Small Rain, a poet is struck down with a rare disease and finds himself confined to an intensive care unit. The Chicago Tribune described it as ‘one of the most profound reading experiences I’ve ever had,” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
“The Nobel Prize-winner returns with what has been described variously as ‘a satirical take’ and ‘a feminist twist’ on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In Tokarczuk’s version, an engineering student retires to a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers, in Silesia, 1913. Every evening, the residents gather to drink the local hallucinogenic liquor and debate life, the universe, and everything. But there’s something unsettling going on in the woods outside the walls.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Thanks for asking. I’ve just picked up a copy of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. I loved—loved—her earlier novel of strip bars and women’s prisons, The Mars Room, which fizzed with life and humour despite its sometimes bleak subject matter. This new novel follows a female American spy as she infiltrates a French eco-terrorist group, was an instant New York Times bestseller on its release in September, and it has already been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“It’s about a teenage boy whose girlfriend mysteriously disappears. He never gets over it, and finally finds her working in a dream library in a shadowy parallel world. But she doesn’t remember him at all. Expect magical realism, dream logic, and plenty of Easter Egg surprises for longtime Murakami fans.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Every Rooney book is a major publishing event, and this latest offering—which centres on the fraught relationship between two Irish brothers—has received rave reviews almost across the board. The Guardian said it was ‘perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements.'” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“A ‘lost’ novel by the Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez will be published in English in March, ten years after his death, and reportedly against the wishes of the author himself. Márquez suffered with dementia in his final years, and may have feared the critical response to Until August, but his sons have explained that they feel this final book to be ‘the result of our father’s last effort to continue creating against all odds’ and deemed it too precious to remain hidden in an archive.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
My Work
by Olga Ravn, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell
“It’s her second novel to be translated into English; her strange, beautiful little novel The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century was a weird and haunting work of science fiction that got under my skin. Like The Employees, the chronology of My Work is scrambled. It’s ostensibly constructed of the pages of a notebook written by the narrator while in some kind of fugue state during the early days of motherhood. It will appeal to mothers, specifically, and more generally to all those interested in experimental narratives.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“The Maniac is Labatut’s first novel in English, and as with that earlier book, it exists in a conceptual hinterland somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, plaiting the two together in a deeply disconcerting manner that reflects Labatut’s preoccupation with scientists whose brilliance and obsession lead them to the very edges of sanity. This new book explores the birth of artificial intelligence and the terrifying, godlike powers it might represent. Unmissable.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“One of the biggest books of the season…is Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud. It’s a work of historical fiction—her first—set in Victorian England, and exploring art-that-imitates-life, abolitionism, and a scandalous case of identity theft that gripped the nation. It was an instant New York Times bestseller and has garnered some brilliant reviews in the three weeks it has been out so far. (The Observer said it was ‘almost flawless… her funniest novel yet.’)” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
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, Five Books Editor
“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, Five Books Editor
“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, Five Books Editor
“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, Five Books Editor
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
“Maggie writes so beautifully, just on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Her metaphors and similes are always fresh, and her characters are so deftly and fully written. I just loved this book.” Read more...
Historical Novels Set in Italy
Tracy Chevalier, Historical Novelist
“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, Five Books Editor
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, Five Books Editor
“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, Five Books Editor
“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, Five Books Editor
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.
“Every book by Wright is a literary event, in my opinion.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
Notable Novels of Fall 2024, recommended by Cal Flyn
Our deputy editor Cal Flyn compiles her autumnal literary fiction highlights: five freshly released and hotly anticipated new novels that you should have on your reading list in the fall of 2024: from Sally Rooney to Garth Greenwell.
Notable New Novels of Summer 2024, recommended by Cal Flyn
Another year, another summer stretching out before us… another reading dilemma? Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a succinct round-up of the novels that should be on your radar in the summer of 2024: highly anticipated works of fiction from well-known literary figures and ‘breakout’ books that have quickly amassed significant critical attention – to guide you on your way. See all our best novels of 2024 recommendations
Notable Novels of Spring 2024, recommended by Cal Flyn
Looking for a new book to get stuck into? Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of the most notable novels of spring 2024, including fresh titles from Percival Everett and Alexis Wright, plus the ‘lost’ final novel by Gabriel García Márquez—published a decade after his death. See all our best novels of 2024 recommendations
Notable Novels of Fall 2023, recommended by Cal Flyn
Outside it’s autumnal and the nights are drawing in. All the better for admiring the bright lights of publishing’s starriest season, when the shiniest baubles are released in time for the Christmas rush. Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up the most notable new novels of Fall 2023, including eagerly-awaited books from Zadie Smith and Jesmyn Ward, plus the buzziest new releases in literary fiction and novels-in-translation
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.
