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The best new books to read in June 2024

From mind-bending mysteries to sweeping family sagas, here are all the new releases to enjoy this month.

Fiction Pick

Sandwich by catherine newman.

If you are after a book to pack on your next holiday , look no further. Here is a novel which will go down as easily as a chilled poolside drink. The book is narrated by a menopausal Rocky on her family’s annual summer trip to Cape Cod. Sandwiched between her nearly-adult children and ageing parents, all of whom have descended on the coastal apartment for the week, her whole life feels as though it is in flux. Sandwich has such poignant things to say about family, marriage and parenting, while also casting a gorgeous light on those golden holiday days (even if you do spend most of the trip dragging sand around or looking for parking). A hilarious tonic of a book.

(Doubleday, £16.99)

Nonfiction pick

Broken threads by mishal husain.

In the summer of 1947, millions of lives were affected by the Partition of India . Among them were the grandparents of BBC presenter Mishal Husain, who has turned to letters, diaries and tapes in order to piece together fragments of her family history. On her father’s side were Mumtaz, a Muslim doctor, and Mary, a Catholic from an Anglo-Indian family, who fell in love in Lahore. Her maternal grandparents, Tahirah and Shahid, meanwhile, watched the events leading up to Partition unfold from Delhi. Broken Threads is a triumph of a book: at once a moving family memoir and a clear-eyed interrogation into the legacy of empire.

(4th Estate, £18.99)

Best of the rest

Parade by rachel cusk.

In the latest experimental novel from the acclaimed, Booker-nominated author of the Outline trilogy, a quartet of stories explore themes of gender and art. Featuring a man who begins to paint upside down and a woman who sculpts black spiders, Parade is a strange, brooding book.

(Faber, £16.99)

The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry

In 1891 Montana, an Irish poet named Tom pays the bills by composing letters to the prospective brides of men who can’t write. When he falls for one of these women, Polly, a forbidden love affair – and epic journey fleeing on stolen horseback – make up this unforgettable read.

(Canongate, £16,99)

Scripted by Fearne Cotton

In Cotton’s high-concept debut novel, Jade is unnerved to keep finding scripts for conversations which later play out in real life. But what is most confronting is that these scripts reveal just how much she lets everyone in her life walk all over her. Can she finally be inspired to change?

(Michael Joseph, £18.99)

The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley

From the author of bestselling The Hunting Party comes another mystery with an immersive setting, this time in a Dorset woodland manor house during midsummer. Here, the unearthing of a 15-year-old secret among old friends ends in murder.

(HarperCollins, £18.99)

Going Home by Tom Lamont

When his childhood friend dies, Teo finds himself attempting to raise the two-year-old son she left behind – with only his difficult father and unreliable friend Ben to help. Going Home is an affecting debut about fatherhood and male friendship.

(Sceptre, £16.99)

Welcome to Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal

Charlotte Walker is a zoooligist who has taken up a fellowship on the tiny island of Tuga, ostensibly to study an endangered species of tortoises, but in reality solve a secret mystery of her own. This warm and completely addictive novel is escapism at its finest.

(Chatto & Windus, £18.99)

Eruption by James Patterson and Michael Crichton

A collaboration between the bestselling thriller author and the creator of Jurassic Park , Eruption is a blockbuster novel about a volcanic eruption which might end the world – and a decades-old military secret which is about to make the situation a lot worse.

(Century, £22)

Godwin by Joseph O’Neill

From the Booker Prize-longlisted author of Netherland , a compelling novel about football, family and migration. It’s an odyssey of two brothers, who travel in search of a prodigy who they are convinced is the next Lionel Messi.

(4th Estate, £16.99)

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

In a world where there is constant rain and buildings are lapsing into flooding water, three sisters are drawn back together when their estranged father dies. Private Rites is a hauntingly good book about family , faith and the climate crisis.

(Fourth Estate, £16.99)

Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin

In 2019, Anna is a psychoanalyst living in Paris who embarks on an affair with the boyfriend of her downstairs neighbour. In the same apartment in 1972, Florence begins an affair with her psychology teacher. Scaffolding is a multi-layered, intelligent novel.

(Chatto & Windus, £16.99)

One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon

Pregnant with their second child, Jasmyn and King decide to move to Liberty, California , where their family can feel at home in a majority-Black environment. But in the world of this taut, simmering read, all is not as it seems.

(Trapeze, £20)

This is Why We Lied by Karin Slaughter

In a luxury lodge perched on a secluded mountain, Mercy had been about to expose secrets when she wound up dead. Investigator Will Trent happens to be there on his honeymoon , and now it’s a race to find the killer before they strike again.

(HarperCollins, £22)

The Suspect by Rob Rinder

The follow up to number-one bestseller The Trail, The Suspect sees a breakfast TV presenter die live on air – and it quickly transpires it wasn’t an accident. All suspicions may have landed on the celebrity chef Sebastian, but junior barrister Adam Green isn’t so sure.

(Century, £20)

The End of Summer by Charlotte Philby

How well do any of us really know the people we love? When journalists turn up on Francesca’s doorstep making awful claims about her mother, she realises that perhaps it is not so well at all. The End of Summer is a literary thriller that is as page-turning as it is elegantly written.

(Borough Press, £16.99)

Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands

Cora is a young neurodivergent girl growing up on a council estate in 1990s Scotland, hoping for a bright future against all odds. This coming-of-age tale is exquisitely written and comes with endorsements from Michael Sheen and Roddy Doyle.

(Phoenix, £18.99)

The Witness by Alexandra Wilson

When a young black man is arrested for murder, his barrister knows something isn’t right – yet she would never have expected the secret which she stumbles upon while digging around his case. A twisty courtroom thriller that is destined to become a TV drama.

(Sphere, £16.99)

Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg

Newly single and stuck in a job she hates, it is no wonder that when Iris comes across a women’s commune on a remote Kent farm, she quickly becomes obsessed. But just as she is drawn into this world, a group of men arrive on the farm and the freedom she yearned for is threatened.

(Tinder, £18.99)

The Architecture of Modern Empire by Arundhati Roy

Before she was the Booker Prize winning writer of The God of Small Things , Arundhati Roy trained as an architect. In this collection of interviews with American broadcaster David Barsamian, Roy examines the hidden structures of modern empire with her incisive interrogation of nationalism, war, neoliberalism and technology.

(Penguin, £10.99)

We Will Not Be Saved by Nemonte Nenquimo

Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, Nemonte grew up in a culture of foraging, storytelling and shamanism. 20 years later, she has emerged as one of our most important climate activists and indigenous voices. We Will Not Be Saved is her astonishing story.

(Wildfire, £20)

Looked After by Ashley John-Baptise

Growing up in the care system, John-Baptiste’s childhood was spent living with five different families. Now a husband, father, and successful broadcaster, he recounts these tumultuous experiences for the first time in this compelling, important memoir .

(Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99)

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham

On 28 January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger took off from a Florida launchpad; 73 seconds later, it was engulfed in flames, and all seven on board were killed instantly. With scrupulous detail, Higginbotham charts the series of fatal errors that led up to the tragedy.

(Viking, £25)

Under a Rock by Chris Stein

Stein’s memoir of his career in Blondie – and relationship with Debbie Harry – is so evocative that it almost vibrates with music from the era. It is also surprisingly funny and candid, and a tender love letter to his lifelong partner and friend.

(Corsair, £25)

The Secret Public by Jon Savage

This overdue history of the LGBTQ influence on popular culture takes key moments in the music and industry – from Little Richard in the 1950s through to David Bowie – to explore how gay culture went mainstream and altered pop forever.

(Faber, £22)

Off the Beat by Nusrit Mehtab

When Nusrit Mehtab first joined the Metropolitan Police, she encountered racism and misogyny at almost every turn – and as she rose through the ranks, it got worse, not better. This memoir is her startling, no-holds-barred account.

(Torva, £20)

These Foolish Things by Dylan Jones

As the former editor of GQ, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the cast of characters which appear in Dylan Jones’s memoir include everyone from David Bowie to Rihanna. These Foolish Things is the glittering chronicles of his adventures in media, music, politics and fashion.

(Constable, £25)

MILF by Paloma Faith

The Brit Award winning singer deep-dives into motherhood, identity and the expectations still placed on women today. From her experiences with IVF and heartbreak, through to her relationship with her own mum, MILF is raw and readable.

(Ebury Spotlight, £22)

‘Writing helped me put the joy back into my life’ Kevin Kwan wrote ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ when he was at a low point (Photo: Raen Badua) When Kevin Kwan was writing the novel that would eventually change his life, he had a post-it note with the word “joy” on it stuck to his computer screen. “I began writing my first novel Crazy Rich Asians at a particularly sad moment in my life,” he explains. “I had just lost my father, and I was trying to write my way out of grief. The post-it note was there to remind myself why I was writing, and it really worked. Telling those stories helped to channel joy back to my life.” In turn, this romcom set in the upper echelons of Singapore society brought joy to a vast number of other people. Published in 2013, the novel sold more than five million copies worldwide and since has been translated into over 40 languages. A Broadway musical is in development, while the 2018 film adaptation was the first major Hollywood film since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club to feature a majority Asian cast. “When I told the director Jon Chu what I did, he too decided to put post-it notes with the word ‘joy’ on every camera while filming,” Kwan says. “He even hid the word throughout the movie—it shows up on taxis, on balloons, in the most unexpected places.” Whether or not the original post-it note has survived the decade, Kwan has certainly not forgotten to continue to channel the joy into his books. His latest novel, Lies and Weddings , is a gorgeous, funny tale in which Rufus, after running into debt, is heavily encouraged by his former supermodel mother to find a rich woman to marry. “I took my love for classic novels by the likes of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, and shows like Bridgerton and Downton Abbey , and gave them a 21st century twist,” he says. “I wanted to take the traditional narrative about how a woman must marry a rich husband and turn it on its head.” He wrote it in 2021 while staying at a friend’s house in Hawaii. “I had been suffering from writer’s block, but a few days into the visit words started spilling onto the page and I was writing a chapter a day,” he recalls. “It turns out all I needed was a live volcano churning underneath my feet to start the flow of creativity.” He has learned a lot about writing since publishing his debut, which he says didn’t so much change his life as cause it to “explode”. “I never thought I could make a career out of writing, and I feel incredibly fortunate that I’m able to,” he says. “But I’ve also learnt that fame and success doesn’t necessarily bring happiness. The joy really comes from the act of creating, and the wonderful unexpected friendships that have come about as a result of my books.” Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan (Hutchinson Heinemann, £18.99) is published on 20 June

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Best books: The best new books out in June 2024

Red literary editor Sarra Manning shares her favourite new books out this month

If you're looking for inspiration for your reading list, then Red literary editor, Sarra Manning, has you covered with her pick of the best new books to read this month.

Here is Sarra's expert edit of the best new books released this month. Happy reading!

D is for Death by Harriet F. Townson, RRP: £22

(Hodder & Stoughton, out 6 June)

In 1930s London, Dora Wildwood runs away to escape from the clutches of her evil fiancé and immediately stumbles straight into a murder scene. Writing under a pseudonym, bestselling novelist Harriet Evans channels the likes of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers in her first crime novel, a passionate and surprisingly emotional love letter to the Golden Age of Crime and all the good things in life, from peppermint creams to sequinned jumpsuits. D is for decidedly delicious!

Experienced by Kate Young, RRP: £16.99

(Fourth Estate, out 6 June)

Only recently come out, Bette is devastated when her first girlfriend, Mei, instigates a relationship break so Bette can explore her sexuality and gain some experience. As she reluctantly looks for some no-strings-attached hook-ups, Bette soon realises that maybe she wants something more meaningful than sex in this very modern, very relatable take on love, relationships and found family. This is a book and a main character who will really tug on your heartstrings.

Welcome To Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal, RRP: £18.99

(Chatto & Windus, out 6 June)

Look no further, I have found your perfect holiday read! Tuga is a tiny remote tropical island, under British rule, and a great place for buttoned-up vet Charlotte Walker to hide from her problems as she studies the endangered, native tortoises. But Charlotte soon finds herself falling for a different way of life and the eccentric, idiosyncratic charms of the islanders, including the maddening Levi...

Sandwich by Catherine Newman, £16.99

(Doubleday, out 6 June)

Every year, Rocky, her husband and two children, now in their twenties, spend an idyllic week in the same Cape Cod cottage. But during seven sunny, sandy days steeped in nostalgia, Rocky’s menopausal rage and her memories of the past threaten her future happiness. For any woman juggling the demands of children and aging parents, Sandwich is a beautifully written read that will resonate and break your heart before putting it gently back together again.

Under Your Spell by Laura Wood, RRP: £8.99

(Simon & Schuster, out 20 June)

A fizzy, magical romcom featuring a heroine to root for and a hero to swoon over. When Clemmie casts a break-up spell, it leads to a one night stand with sexy rock star, Theo, but then she just can't get rid of him, and does she even want to? Fans of Emily Henry will adore this sexy, tender and funny story, and I can't wait for whatever Laura Wood writes next.

One Of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon, RRP: £20

(Trapeze, out 13 June)

A chilling dystopian thriller set in an exclusive Californian community called Liberty, which is founded on the principles of Black excellence. Jasmyn and her husband King are thrilled to move to a town where their young family can thrive and everyone from the mailman to the paediatrician is Black. But is there something sinister going on behind Liberty’s picture perfect façade?

The Ministry Of Time by Kaliane Bradley, RRP: £16.99

(Sceptre, out 14 May)

Oh my God, this debut novel broke me in such a beautiful way! A junior civil servant is selected to be the “bridge” to Victorian Arctic explorer, Commander Graham Gore (my newest book boyfriend,) one of several “expats” plucked from history by the government. As she helps him navigate the 21st century, what unfolds is a tense, compelling thriller as the sinister truth about the project emerges, and a tender, doomed and very sexy love story. This is already a serious contender for my book of the year.

Funny Story by Emily Henry, RRP: £18.99

(Viking, out now)

Another absolutely pitch perfect romcom from EmHen, which I think is her best one yet. Daphne is devastated when she’s ditched by perfect Peter just months before their wedding as he’s fallen in love with his best friend, Petra. Daphne moves in with Petra’s ex, Miles, who has a room to rent and knows just what she’s going through and of course they start fake dating to make their respective exes jealous. Expect top notch banter, sizzling chemistry and a hero you’ll adore (despite his yellow Crocs!)

I Hope This Finds You Well By Natalie Sue, RRP: £16.99

(The Borough Press, out 23 May)

This darkly funny debut novel will resonate with anyone who’s worked a soul-crushing corporate job. Office loner Jolene despises her co-workers but when an IT error gives her access to their computers, she soon realises that they’re just as unhappy as she is and now has the intel she needs to forge new connections with them. But with job cuts looming will Jolene also use her new found knowledge to her advantage?

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors, RRP: £16.99

(Fourth Estate, out 23 May)

Three sisters deal with the unexpected death of their fourth sister in different but equally self-destructive ways in the second novel from the author of the cult bestseller Cleopatra And Frankenstein . A year after their bereavement, Avery, Bonnie and Lucky will only be able to find peace if they can stop fighting with each other, which is easier said than done. A lyrical, poignant and visceral exploration of sisterhood and grief.

Hold Back The Night by Jessica Moor, RRP: £16.99

(Manilla Press, out 9 May)

This powerful and thought-provoking novel follows Annie in 1959 at the start of her nursing career at a mental hospital, which administers a brutal aversion therapy to homosexual patients. We meet Annie again, now a young widow and mother, in the 1980s when she opens up her home to men with AIDS who’ve been shunned by their families and the medical establishment. And finally in 2020 when the pandemic and the death of her friend and fellow nurse forces her to reflect on her past.

The Next Girl by Emiko Jean, RRP: £14.99

(Viking, out 9 May)

In a deserted region of Washington, girls keep disappearing. The mystery thickens when teenager Ellie Woods is found two years after going missing but refuses to answer questions about her ordeal. For Detective Chelsey Calhoun whose own sister went missing twenty years ago, the investigation will uncover unexpected secrets and a puzzle she has to solve before the next girl goes missing in this atmospheric and twisty slow burn thriller.

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Literary Review

The current issue, march 2012 issue - out now.

In This Issue: John Gray on Tony Judt’s Thinking the Twentieth Century • Elaine Showalter on the first Pop Age • Donald Rayfield on Belarus • Praveen Swami on Sharia law • A C Grayling: What are Universities For? • The Letters of Joseph Roth • Jane Ridley on the Queen • Seamus Perry on the poetry of translation • Jonathan Fenby on Mao • Richard Holloway on religion for atheists • John Sutherland on growing old • Frances Wilson on cruelty and laughter and much, much more…

View Contents Table

‘This magazine is flush with tight, smart writing.’ Washington Post

Literary Review covers the most important and interesting books published each month, from history and biography to fiction and travel. The magazine was founded in 1979 and is based in central London.

Literary Review covers the most important and interesting books published each month, from history and biography to fiction and travel. The magazine was founded in 1979 and is based in London.

Highlights from the Current Issue

June 2024, Issue 530 Peter Davidson on Renaissance spies * Rosa Lyster on Richard Flanagan * Philip Snow on Zhou Enlai * William Whyte on Oxford Dons * Gyles Brandreth on diaries * Munro Price on Belle Epoque Paris * Barnaby Crowcroft on Abdel Nasser * Jonathan Keates on Adèle Hugo * Alex Goodall on theatrical culture wars * Sophie Duncan on queer Shakespeare * Tim Hornyak on nuclear war * Mike Lanchin on US borders * Alpa Shah on Narendra Modi * Miles Pattenden on Roman roads * Peter Oborne on cricket * Andrew Crumey on the Space Shuttle Challenger * Sophie Mackintosh on Joyce Carol Oates * Paddy Crewe on Kevin Barry * Stevie Davies on Hiromi Kawakami * and much, much more…  and much, much more…

Peter Davidson

On her majesty's secret service.

In the 17th century, the Uffizi offered its visitors a rather more diverse range of exhibits than it does now, among them weapons made by some distant precursor of Q Branch. The Scottish traveller James Fraser on a visit to Florence in the 1650s recorded what he saw: ‘A rarity, five pistol barrels joined together to be put in your hat, which is discharged at once as you salute your enemy & bid him farewell … another pistol with eighteen barrels in it to be shot desperately and scatter through a room as you enter.’ It is not possible to go very far in the divided Europe of the early modern period without coming across some instance of the many kinds of covert activity that are chronicled in this genial and immensely readable work. The spirit of the age is captured in an extraordinary line in the poem ‘Character of an Ambassador’ by the Dutch polymath and diplomat Constantijn Huygens, which says that ambassadors are ‘honourable spies’...  read more

More Articles from this Issue

Rosa lyster, by richard flanagan.

H G Wells and Rebecca West are standing in front of a bookcase, talking frantically at each other about matters of literary style, moving closer and closer until they kiss. The physicist Leo Szilard is somewhere near the British Museum, staring down the street and watching the traffic lights change. A man in a Japanese prison camp is waiting to see if he will die of hunger or exhaustion, or be murdered by his guards when American forces invade. Post-kiss, an overwhelmed Wells darts off to Switzerland...  read more

H   G Wells and Rebecca West are standing in front of a bookcase, talking frantically at each other about matters of literary style, moving closer and closer until they kiss. The physicist Leo Szilard is somewhere near the British Museum, staring down the street and watching the traffic lights change. A man in a Japanese prison camp is waiting to see if he will die of hunger or exhaustion, or be murdered by his guards when American forces invade.  

Post-kiss, an overwhelmed Wells darts off to Switzerland in an effort to get away from his feelings for West (he is married and forty-six; she is alarmingly free-spirited and nineteen). There, he begins work on The World Set Free , a mediocre novel in which he predicts the invention of the atomic bomb. It is The World Set Free that Szilard is thinking of while watching the traffic lights change near Russell Square, conceiving of the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. It is just such a chain reaction that leads to the deaths of tens of thousands of people when an atomic bomb is detonated over Hiroshima.  

Gyles Brandreth

Full disclosure.

‘I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.’ No one knows who came up with that line first. It might have been Lillie Langtry. It could have been Margot Asquith. What we do know is that the line was made famous by Mae West, who gave it to her character Peaches O’Day in the script for her 1937 film Every Day’s a Holiday. Every day is a diary day for me and has been since 1959, the year I turned eleven and my great-aunt Edith (a Lancashire infant school headmistress) gave me a shortened (and thoroughly expurgated)...  read more

‘I   always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.’ No one knows who came up with that line first. It might have been Lillie Langtry. It could have been Margot Asquith. What we do know is that the line was made famous by Mae West, who gave it to her character Peaches O’Day in the script for her 1937 film Every Day’s a Holiday .

Every day is a diary day for me and has been since 1959, the year I turned eleven and my great-aunt Edith (a Lancashire infant school headmistress) gave me a shortened (and thoroughly expurgated) edition of the diaries of Samuel Pepys. Inspired by Pepys’s example, I have been keeping a daily account of my life (and the passing scene) ever since.

Philip Snow

Zhou enlai: a life, by chen jian.

Few modern political leaders have been more versatile than Zhou Enlai. A journalist and recruiter in Paris in the early 1920s for the infant Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he reappeared repeatedly over the next few decades: as director of political affairs for the National Revolutionary Army set up to rid China of its warlords; as the spymaster managing the CCP intelligence network after the rift between the CCP and the Chinese Nationalist Party in 1927; as the Red Army’s chief decision-maker...  read more

Few modern political leaders have been more versatile than Zhou Enlai. A journalist and recruiter in Paris in the early 1920s for the infant Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he reappeared repeatedly over the next few decades: as director of political affairs for the National Revolutionary Army set up to rid China of its warlords; as the spymaster managing the CCP intelligence network after the rift between the CCP and the Chinese Nationalist Party in 1927; as the Red Army’s chief decision-maker during the celebrated Long March; as the CCP’s representative in dealings with the Nationalists and foreign envoys during the Japanese invasion of China; as premier of the new People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 until his death in January 1976. A life of Zhou Enlai, in other words, can be nothing less than an exploration of China’s history during the greater part of the 20th century. Chen Jian has drawn on such an astonishing wealth of sources in Chinese archives and elsewhere that it is difficult to see how his biography could ever be bettered.

Much of Chen’s book presents Zhou as the benevolent statesman whom people both within and beyond China have been accustomed to visualising over the years: the habitual moderate of Mao Zedung’s regime, reconciling factions and sometimes stepping in to protect potential victims of Mao’s political campaigns. In 1967, we are told, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he faced down an extremist mob clamouring for the head of the foreign minister, Marshal Chen Yi, declaring that they would drag Chen away for denunciation over his dead body. He is said to have taken equal care to safeguard some of China’s most precious historical treasures, deploying a garrison in the Forbidden City to prevent that magnificent palace complex being torn down as a useless remnant of the ‘old’ culture. On another occasion he received a deputation of Mao’s fanatical Red Guards and explained to them patiently why their plan to switch the traffic lights in Beijing to make green stand for stop and red for go might not be a good idea. After the premier died in 1976, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Chinese citizens poured spontaneously onto the streets and wept.  

Sophie Duncan

Straight acting: the many queer lives of william shakespeare, by will tosh.

Will Tosh’s Straight Acting opens with a fleet-footed history of Shakespeare’s sexuality as presented in the scholarly literature and closes with Tosh’s own conclusion that Shakespeare was ‘bi rather than gold-star gay’. In between are seven chapters that reimagine Shakespeare’s life – and the lives of early modern men – as profoundly queer. The result is a creative and capacious book that moves smoothly between recorded and speculative history...  read more

Will Tosh’s Straight Acting opens with a fleet-footed history of Shakespeare’s sexuality as presented in the scholarly literature and closes with Tosh’s own conclusion that Shakespeare was ‘bi rather than gold-star gay’. In between are seven chapters that reimagine Shakespeare’s life – and the lives of early modern men – as profoundly queer. The result is a creative and capacious book that moves smoothly between recorded and speculative history: we see Shakespeare browsing classical erotica in the churchyard of St Paul’s, then, in the italicised sequences that open each chapter, imagine him dazzled by the gender play in John Lyly’s Galatea , and politely avoiding the sexual advances of a tipsy gay lawyer at Gray’s Inn. Along the way, Tosh, who is head of research at Shakespeare’s Globe, offers persuasive readings of expressions of same-sex desire in Shakespeare’s writing. This is by any standard a lively and accomplished biography of Shakespeare.

We see the making of young Shakespeare, his breeching and his education, the latter centred on ‘intoxicatingly ardent’ classical depictions of male love and devotion, which would shape his own artistry. In a chapter on 1580s London, ‘The Third University’, Tosh presents a city of young writers engaged in literary and sometimes sexual collaboration. Shakespeare’s relationships with Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe and Richard Barnfield are deftly sketched; Tosh’s depiction of plague-obsessed Nashe particularly lingers. Barnfield even gets a bedroom scene, albeit not with Shakespeare, which calls to mind a line of Dorothy L Sayers’s: ‘what’s a poet? Something that can’t go to bed without making a song about it.’

William Whyte

History in the house: some remarkable dons and the teaching of politics, character and statecraft, by richard davenport-hines.

For those who fancy studying there, choosing an Oxford college can seem a daunting task. On paper – and online – they all present themselves as essentially the same. Their prospectuses uniformly claim that candidates will find them friendly, inclusive, supportive. Inevitably, they have at least one image of a suitably varied mix of students walking past ivy-covered walls. There’s almost always...  read more

For those who fancy studying there, choosing an Oxford college can seem a daunting task. On paper – and online – they all present themselves as essentially the same. Their prospectuses uniformly claim that candidates will find them friendly, inclusive, supportive. Inevitably, they have at least one image of a suitably varied mix of students walking past ivy-covered walls. There’s almost always someone using an iPad to signal modernity too. Yet for all the apparent homogenisation, different colleges do feel different. Some are large and impressive; others are small and intimate. A few are very old and the latest was founded only a few years ago.  

Christ Church is, without a doubt, the grandest of the grand. It is not the oldest or the richest. At various periods in its history, it was not absolutely the smartest either. But it is irrefutably swanky. Originally created to celebrate the wealth and power of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, it was refounded by Henry VIII and has educated (or, at any rate, enrolled) no fewer than thirteen British prime ministers. Endowed with ample estates after inheriting the substantial remains of an ancient priory and having erected over the years a series of grandiose new buildings, it seems more like a university campus than a college. Its chapel, for heaven’s sake, is also Oxford’s cathedral.

Paddy Crewe

The heart in winter, by kevin barry.

The Heart in Winter, Kevin Barry’s first novel in five years, opens in Butte, Montana. It is the last decade of the 19th century and Butte, having been established as a mining camp in 1864, is now on the cusp of becoming one of the largest industrial cities in the American West. As with most boom towns of the period, its growth has been characterised by a furious influx of hopeful prospectors from across the globe, all of whom have little choice but to collide – in a simmering, spitting brew of class and culture...  read more

T he Heart in Winter , Kevin Barry’s first novel in five years, opens in Butte, Montana. It is the last decade of the 19th century and Butte, having been established as a mining camp in 1864, is now on the cusp of becoming one of the largest industrial cities in the American West. As with most boom towns of the period, its growth has been characterised by a furious influx of hopeful prospectors from across the globe, all of whom have little choice but to collide and create – in a simmering, spitting brew of class and culture – an entirely new strain of society.

Perhaps the best-known artistic endeavour to capture this radical process is David Milch’s Deadwood , the HBO series that ran between 2004 and 2006, garnered eight Emmys and one Golden Globe, and was controversially axed after its third series. Set in South Dakota fifteen years prior to the date when Barry’s novel opens, Deadwood was Milch’s attempt to sift through the layers of chaos that attend the formation of a new territory, and to examine who will come out on top and who will be left behind.

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By nadine akkerman & pete langman, jennifer potter, the extinction of irena rey, by jennifer croft, kevin power, by jenny erpenbeck (translated from german by michael hofmann), munro price, city of light, city of shadows: paris in the belle epoque, by mike rapport, alfred dreyfus: the man at the center of the affair, by maurice samuels, kathryn hughes, george’s ghosts: the secret life of w b yeats, by brenda maddox, from the archives, from the march 2020 issue, peter conrad, warhol: a life as art, by blake gopnik.

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The best books to read this month

From gripping thrillers to literary gems, here are some brilliant reads out this month.

With longer, lighter days, there's hopefully more time for reading. Whether you want a page-turning thriller , a gripping historical novel or a feel-good read , we've got some great choices out this month.

Sandwich by Catherine Newman

Newman’s debut We All Want Impossible Things was one of my favourite books of last year, and I would recommend this new one just as highly. A holiday in the house on Cape Cod that her family has stayed in for years leaves fiftysomething Rocky grappling with a long-held secret. This explores the compromises of a long marriage and the bittersweetness of children leaving home so beautifully.

Maybe, Perhaps, Possibly by Joanna Glen

The author of word-of-mouth hit All My Mothers returns with a magical, moving story about two misfits who might find happiness together, if they can learn to trust each other. Addie has lived most of her life on the tiny island of Rokesby, but she wants more; Sol is grieving his mother’s death and a terrible betrayal by his father.

Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg

Iris is feeling lost when she meets the mysterious Hazel and moves into her womenonly commune, chasing promises of solace and sisterhood. At first it seems idyllic, but as flashbacks reveal exactly what happened at the cult-like Breach House, the sense of dread builds. An extremely accomplished debut.

Welcome To Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal

A slice of sunshine in book form! Newly qualified London vet Charlotte takes up a fellowship on a tiny South Atlantic island to study endangered tortoises – but she’s also there to try to track down her dad who she knows very little about. The descriptions of the island and its community are particularly gorgeous.

Welcome to Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal

Lucky Day by Beth Morrey

This is a must-read for all people-pleasers! After receiving a bump to the head on the way to work, fortysomething Clover has somewhat of a personality change and, rather than saying yes to everything as she usually does to keep the peace, starts to speak her mind – with explosive results. I loved this funny, thought-provoking read.

Going Home by Tom Lamont

Following a shocking tragedy, Téo finds himself living back in his childhood home with his elderly father, Vic, and caring for the two-year-old son of a school friend. Told in four voices, this is a bittersweet and moving debut that beautifully explores male friendship and what it means to be a father.

Someone In The Attic by Andrea Mara

Someone in the attic by andrea mara.

Anya is relaxing in her bath when she hears a noise upstairs – and 30 seconds later, she’s dead. So begins this super-creepy, addictive thriller, which layers mystery upon mystery. Not one to read late at night!

How To Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley

I’ve been a fan of Pooley’s writing since her first novel, The Authenticity Project . She’s just brilliant at writing comic ensemble pieces – in her charming new novel, a ragtag group of over-70s band together (along with a teenage dad and his toddler) to save their local community centre. Warm, witty perfection.

How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley

Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands

An electrifying debut that reminded me of Shuggie Bain . Fourteen-year-old Cora lives on an estate in a run-down Scottish town with her disabled mum and a string of her boyfriends. If that sounds depressing, it’s not at all; hope and humour lift it up

The Burial Plot by Elizabeth Macneal

Another gripping Victorian thriller from the author of The Doll Factory . After a robbery gone wrong, Bonnie flees London to be a maid in a widower’s neo-Gothic mansion – but is she just a pawn in someone’s plan?

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Peter Parker, Wayne Hunt, Nicholas Lezard, Mark Mason and Nicholas Farrell

33 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Peter Parker takes us through the history of guardsmen and homosexuality (1:12); Prof. Wayne Hunt explains what the Conservatives could learn from the 1993 Canadian election (9:10); Nicholas Lezard reflects on the diaries of Franz Kafka, on the eve of his centenary (16:06); Mark Mason provides his notes on Horse Guards (22:52); and, Nicholas Farrell ponders his wife’s potential suitors, once he’s died (26:01). Presented and produced by Patrick Gibbons.  

The wry humour of Franz Kafka

How do you see Franz Kafka? That is, how do you picture him in your mind’s eye? If you are Nicolas Mahler, the writer and illustrator of a short but engaging graphic biography of the man, you’d see him as a sort of blob of hair and eyebrows on a stick. The illustrations of Completely Kafka may look rudimentary, but they work. In fact they’re similar in style to the doodles Kafka himself would make in his notebooks. If you were Kafka, you’d see yourself as a spindly man, head on desk, leaning on your hands, arms bent, in a posture of defeat and exhaustion. That image is chosen for

China’s role in Soviet policy-making

Why should we want to read yet another thumping great book about the collapse of the Soviet empire? Sergey Radchenko attempts an answer in his well-constructed new work. Based on recently opened Soviet archives and on extensive work in the Chinese archives, it places particular weight on China’s role in Soviet policy-making. The details are colourful. It is fun to know that Mao Tse-Tung sent Stalin a present of spices, and that the mouse on which the Russians tested it promptly died. But the new material forces no major revision of previous interpretations. Perhaps the book is best seen as a meditation on the limitations of political power. Stalin and

A tragedy waiting to happen: Tiananmen Square, by Lai Wen, reviewed

Lai Wen’s captivating book about growing up in China and witnessing the horrific massacre in Tiananmen Square reads like a memoir. The protagonist’s name is Lai, and her description of her parents is utterly convincing – the pretty, bitter housewife mother, jealous of the opportunities her daughter has; the father permanently cowed after being briefly interned by the government decades earlier. In a letter at the end, the author explains that her story is faction – embellished fiction. So how much is true? We will never know. I find this slightly irksome. I so admire writers like Henry Marsh, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk who are prepared to irritate

The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown

Elizabeth I died at Richmond Palace on 24 March 1603 at the age of 69 after a reign of 45 years. Her health had been poor from the early 1590s onwards: arthritis, gastric disorders, chronic insomnia and migraines were just some of the ailments which plagued her. Yet, uniquely among English monarchs, she refused to make provision for the succession. James I made great efforts to ensure that his escape from the Gunpowder Plot would not soon be forgotten From Tudor to Stuart is Susan Doran’s enthralling account of the behind-the-scenes manoeuvres of those who had a viable claim to succeed the Virgin Queen. The group included the Habsburg Isabella

My summer of love with God’s gift

When the author and podcaster Viv Groskop first visited Ukraine, she travelled there from Moscow, on a long train that ran eventually beside a field of sunflowers. They were, she recalls in her lovely and modestly scaled memoir, like a ‘blast of sunshine screaming: “Welcome to Ukraine! You are no longer in Russia!”’ The year was 1994, and Groskop had been in the former USSR for a little under a year. A modern languages undergraduate at Cambridge, she had decided to take her year abroad in St Petersburg. Until she got there, she had barely thought of Ukraine. It was one of a bunch of newly independent states; it hadn’t

Will the photo of your lost loved one be replaced by a chatty robot?

They didn’t call Diogenes ‘the Cynic’ for nothing. He lived to shock the (ancient Greek) world. When I’m dead, he said, just toss my body over the city walls to feed the dogs. The bit of me that I call ‘I’ won’t be around to care. The revulsion we feel at this idea tells us something important: that the dead can be wronged. Diogenes may not have cared what happened to his corpse, but we do; and doing right by the dead is a job of work. Some corpses are reduced to ash, some are buried, and some are fed to vultures. In each case, the survivors all feel, rightly,

My brilliant friend and betrayer, Inigo Philbrick

‘Inigo has never asked me not to write this book, but I had come to wonder whether I would have had the courage to write it were he not imprisoned,’ confesses Orlando Whitfield in his coruscating memoir of his friendship with Inigo Philbrick. He was the art dealer whose meteoric career exploded in spectacular style when he was convicted, aged 35, of wire fraud in 2022. Imagine Whitfield’s alarm on hearing that Philbrick had been released from prison in time for publication. By ‘flipping’ art works, Philbrick increased his earnings from ‘£35k a year to £35k a month’ Philbrick, who owes $86,672,790 in restitution payments, will have ample opportunity –

Heroines of antiquity – from Minoan Crete to Boudica’s Britain

She must have been a powerful swimmer. Her name was Hydna and she grew up in the port town of Scione on the northern coast of the Aegean. It was 480 BC, and the Graeco-Persian Wars were raging. The Persian fleet was anchored off Thessaly in eastern Greece, waiting for a great storm to blow through. Hydna and her father were waiting too. When night fell they dived off the harbour wall and into the dark, cold sea. For hours, the two of them swam towards the Persian ships. No one saw them approaching. No one saw them cut, one by one, the anchor ropes. Untethered, the ships were at

Visitants from the past: The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley, reviewed

If you could resuscitate a hunk from history, who would you choose? The secretive Whitehall ministry in Kaliane Bradley’s striking debut is working on time travel, facilitating the removal of various Brits from their own era to (roughly) ours. The candidates were all due to die anyway, so the risk of altering history is minimal. Curiously, the boffins do not pick Lord Byron, but a naval officer on the doomed Franklin expedition to the Arctic, lost in the search for the Northwest Passage. Each time traveller is assigned a ‘bridge’ – someone to both monitor and help them adapt to 21st-century London. Lieutenant Graham Gore is paired with a young

The glamour of grime: revisionist westerns of the 1970s

In 1967, the unexpected worldwide success of Bonnie and Clyde blindsided the Hollywood film industry, which then spent the next half decade attempting to adapt to the changing tastes of the new youth audience it had apparently captured. No matter that the picture took a pair of vicious, sociopathic thrill-killers who in real life were about as appealing as the Manson family and reinvented them as glamorous Robin Hood figures, there was obviously money to be made, and the studios wanted a slice of it. The road movies of the 1960s and 1970s were often modern-day westerns in disguise While Peter Biskind’s 1998 study of the late 1960s and 1970s

The legacy of Franz Kafka

51 min listen

June 3rd marks the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death. To talk about this great writer’s peculiar style and lasting legacy, I’m joined by two of the world’s foremost Kafka scholars. Mark Harman has just translated, edited and annotated a new edition of Kafka’s Selected Stories, while Ross Benjamin is the translator of the first unexpurgated edition of Kafka’s Diaries. They tell me what they understand by ‘Kafkaesque’, the unique difficulties he presents in editing and translation, and the unstable relationship between his published works, his notebooks and his troubled life.  

Conn Iggulden: Nero

43 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Conn Iggulden, probably the best selling author of historical fiction of our day. This week Conn publishes Nero, the first in a new trilogy about the notorious Roman emperor. He tells me about how he learned to write historical fiction, his years-long path to overnight success, and the advantages (and disadvantages) of having an audience comprised of men who can’t seem to stop thinking about the Roman Empire.

What’s really behind the Tories’ present woes?

The problem is, we really need a Tory party. Whether we have one at the moment is another question. Political debate requires a significant and trustworthy proponent of personal freedom, of the limits of government, of personal responsibility, of strict limitations of government expenditure, of independent enterprise which may succeed through a lack of intrusive state control or may fail without hope of public rescue. Not everyone will share those values. But I think everyone should accept that it’s proved catastrophic that those values have apparently disappeared from public policy. History rhymes, but does not repeat itself. The lessons of previous periods when major economic policies of an interventionist sort

How Margaret Thatcher could have saved London’s skyline

Looking around London on the eve of the millennium, it would have been difficult to think that the UK government had an adviser on architectural design. The 1990s had been a dismal decade. Yet such a body existed in the quaintly named Royal Fine Art Commission, refounded in 1924. The original Commission had been created as a way of giving Prince Albert, recently married to Queen Victoria, something to do – contriving the decorative scheme for the new Palace of Westminster. Fresco, the chosen medium, was not ideal in that damp position beside the Thames since the plaster took three years to dry; and the Duke of Wellington did not

Was the flapper style of the 1920s so liberating?

I had held Beauty’s sceptre, and had seen men slaves beneath it. I knew the isolation, the penalty of this greatness. Yet I owned it was an empire for which it might be well worth paying. —Olivia Shakespear, Beauty’s Hour (1896) All the Rage is a perfect title for a book about terrible beauty. The phrase means what’s fashionable at a particular time; but rage is a violent, sudden anger, stemming from the same Latin word that gives us rabies – mad, passionate, dangerous. Beauty, and its attainment, preservation and curse, are all things Virginia Nicholson chronicles and analyses in this compelling history spanning a century and focusing on its

A walled garden in Suffolk yields up its secrets

In the hot summer of 2020, during the Covid pandemic, Olivia Laing and her husband Ian moved from Cambridge to a beautiful Georgian house in a Suffolk village and began work on restoring the neglected, extensive walled garden behind it. She was vaguely aware that the garden had been owned and loved by the well-known garden designer and plantsman Mark Rumary, who had died in 2010. He had been the landscape director for the East Anglian nursery of Notcutts, and I remember him as a genial man overseeing extensive, award-winning tree and shrub exhibits at the Chelsea Flower Show in the 1980s. I once owned a copy of the Notcutts

Abba’s genius was never to write a happy love song

Memories. Good days. Bad days. In 1992, U2 mounted their Zoo TV tour. U2 being U2, the gigs were over-earnest affairs, their showbiz razzmatazz never emulsifying with their agitprop posturing. But disbelief was colloidally suspended the night the show hit Stockholm – and U2 were joined on stage by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulväeus for a cover of ‘Dancing Queen’. In truth, that evening’s take on one of Abba’s meisterwerke was a lumpen affair. Bono had to drop his voice an octave for what ought to be the song’s soaring refrain. And while Björn looked happy enough strumming a few chords on an acoustic guitar, Benny, at a keyboard the

A haunting mystery: Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry, reviewed

As ghosts go, Maria Vaduva, who haunts Enlightenment, is not a patch on the wild, tormented figure who stalks the pages of Sarah Perry’s previous novel, Melmoth. Where Melmoth, in rage and despair, haunts everyone complicit in history’s horrors, Maria is crossly plaintive. The disappearance of this unrecognised 19th-century Romanian astronomer from Lowlands House, a manor in the fictional small Essex town of Aldleigh (where marriage has brought her), becomes the obsession of Thomas Hart. He is an unlikely columnist of the Essex Chronicle, and Enlightenment’s central character. It could be said that he is at odds with life and that achieving harmony (on Earth and in heaven) is the

Western economies are failing – but capitalism isn’t the problem

Real wages have barely increased for more than a decade. Banks have had to be bailed out, and many still exist on a form of state life support. Growth has stalled, taxes are at 70-year highs, yet governments are still bankrupt. Unless you happen to be part of a tiny plutocracy made up mostly of tech entrepreneurs and financiers, there has rarely been a point, at least since the nadir of the mid-1970s, when the economic system seemed beset by quite so many challenges as it is today. The left has smartly stepped into the intellectual space that has been created with a series of well-timed polemics, which, while they

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Best fiction of 2021

Dazzling debuts, a word-of-mouth hit, plus this year’s bestsellers from Sally Rooney, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro and more

T he most anticipated, discussed and accessorised novel of the year was Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber), launched on a tide of tote bags and bucket hats. It’s a book about the accommodations of adulthood, which plays with interiority and narrative distance as Rooney’s characters consider the purpose of friendship, sex and politics – plus the difficulties of fame and novel-writing – in a world on fire.

Rooney’s wasn’t the only eagerly awaited new chapter. Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk ’s magnum opus The Books of Jacob (Fitzcarraldo) reached English-language readers at last, in a mighty feat of translation by Jennifer Croft: a dazzling historical panorama about enlightenment both spiritual and scientific. In 2021 we also saw the returns of Jonathan Franzen , beginning a fine and involving 70s family trilogy with Crossroads (4th Estate); Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Klara and the Sun (Faber) probes the limits of emotion in the story of a sickly girl and her “artificial friend”; and acclaimed US author Gayl Jones, whose epic of liberated slaves in 17th-century Brazil, Palmares (Virago), has been decades in the making.

Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy (Hamish Hamilton) continued her series reclaiming women’s voices in ancient conflict, while Elizabeth Strout revisited her heroine Lucy Barton in the gently comedic, emotionally acute Oh William! (Viking). Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate), her first novel since the 2013 Booker-shortlisted A Tale for the Time Being , is a wry, metafictional take on grief, attachment and growing up. Having journeyed into the mind of Henry James in 2004’s The Master, Colm Tóibín created a sweeping overview of Thomas Mann’s life and times in The Magician (Viking). There was a change of tone for Colson Whitehead, with a fizzy heist novel set amid the civil rights movement, Harlem Shuffle (Fleet), while French author Maylis de Kerangal considered art and trompe l’oeil with characteristic style in Painting Time (MacLehose, translated by Jessica Moore).

Treacle Walker (4th Estate), a flinty late-career fable from national treasure Alan Garner, is a marvellous distillation of his visionary work. At the other end of the literary spectrum, Anthony Doerr, best known for his Pulitzer-winning bestseller All the Light We Cannot See , returned with a sweeping page-turner about individual lives caught up in war and conflict, from 15th-century Constantinople to a future spaceship in flight from the dying earth. Cloud Cuckoo Land (4th Estate) is a love letter to books and reading, as well as a chronicle of what has been lost down the centuries, and what is at stake in the climate crisis today: sorrowful, hopeful and utterly transporting. And it was a pleasure to see the return to fiction of Irish author Keith Ridgway, nearly a decade after Hawthorn & Child, with A Shock (Picador), his subtly odd stories of interconnected London lives.

Damon Galgut’s first novel in seven years won him the Booker. A fertile mix of family saga and satire, The Promise (Chatto) explores broken vows and poisonous inheritances in a changing South Africa. Some excellent British novels were also listed: Nadifa Mohamed’s expert illumination of real-life racial injustice in the cultural melting pot of 1950s Cardiff, The Fortune Men (Viking); Francis Spufford’s profound tracing of lives in flux in postwar London, Light Perpetual (Faber); Sunjeev Sahota’s delicate story of family consequences, China Room (Harvill Secker); and Rachel Cusk’s fearlessly discomfiting investigation into gender politics and creativity, Second Place (Faber).

Also on the Booker shortlist was a blazing tragicomic debut from US author Patricia Lockwood, whose No One Is Talking About This (Bloomsbury) brings her quizzical sensibility and unique style to bear on wildly disparate subjects: the black hole of social media, and the painful wonder of a beloved disabled child. Raven Leilani ’s Luster (Picador) introduced a similarly gifted stylist: her story of precarious New York living is full of sentences to savour. Other standout debuts included Natasha Brown’s Assembly (Hamish Hamilton), a brilliantly compressed, existentially daring study of a high-flying Black woman negotiating the British establishment; AK Blakemore’s earthy and exuberant account of 17th-century puritanism, The Manningtree Witches (Granta); and Tice Cin’s fresh, buzzy saga of drug smuggling and female resilience in London’s Turkish Cypriot community, Keeping the House (And Other Stories).

Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water (Viking) is a lyrical love story celebrating Black artistry, while the first novel from poet Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death (Canongate), is a very contemporary allegory about creativity, injustice, and keeping afloat in modern Britain. Further afield, two state-of-the-nation Indian debuts anatomised class, corruption and power: Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (Scribner) in a propulsive thriller, and Rahul Raina’s How to Kidnap the Rich (Little, Brown) in a blackly comic caper. Meanwhile, Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast (And Other Stories), a revenge western with a freewheeling spirit, is a gothic treat.

When is love not enough? The summer’s word-of-mouth hit was Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss (W&N), a wisecracking black comedy of mental anguish and eccentric family life focused on a woman who should have everything to live for. Another deeply pleasurable read, The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi (W&N, translated by Elena Pala), charts one man’s life through his family relationships. An expansive novel that finds the entire world in an individual, its playful structure makes the telling a constantly unfolding surprise.

There was a colder take on family life in Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms (Granta): this honed, painfully witty account of a toxic mother-daughter relationship is her best novel yet.

Two debut story collections pushed formal and linguistic boundaries. Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi (Fitzcarraldo) announced a surreal and inventive new voice, while in English Magic (Galley Beggar) Uschi Gatward proved a master of leaving things unsaid. Also breaking boundaries was Isabel Waidner, whose Sterling Karat Gold (Peninsula), a carnivalesque shout against repression, won the Goldsmiths prize for innovative fiction.

It will take time for Covid-19 to bleed through into fiction, but the first responses are already beginning to appear. Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat (Faber) is a bravura exploration of art, love, sex and ego pressed up against the threat of contagion. In Hall’s version of the pandemic, a loner sculptor who usually expresses herself through monumental works is forced into high-stakes intimacy with a new lover, while pitting her sense of her own creativity against the power of the virus.

A fascinating historical rediscovery shed light on the closing borders and rising prejudices of current times. In The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (Pushkin, translated by Philip Boehm), written in 1938, a Jewish businessman tries to flee the Nazi regime. The J stamped on his passport ensures that he is met with impassive bureaucratic refusal and chilly indifference from fellow passengers in a tense, rising nightmare that’s timelessly relevant.

Finally, a novel to transport the reader out of the present. Inspired by the life of Marie de France, Matrix by Lauren Groff (Hutchinson Heinemann) is set in a 12th-century English abbey and tells the story of an awkward, passionate teenager, the gifted leader she grows into, and the community of women she builds around herself. Full of sharp sensory detail, with an emotional reach that leaps across the centuries, it’s balm and nourishment for brain, heart and soul.

• Best books of the year
• Best books of 2021
• Damon Galgut
• Booker prize 2021
• Jonathan Franzen
• Kazuo Ishiguro
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Book reviews: 47 of the best novels of 2022

New releases include The Singularities by John Banville and Saha by Cho Nam-Joo

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1. The Singularities by John Banville

2. saha by cho nam-joo (trans. jamie chang), 3. bournville by jonathan coe.

• 4. Molly & the Captain by Anthony Quinn

5. Darling by India Knight

6. the passenger by cormac mccarthy, 7. demon copperhead by barbara kingsolver, 8. liberation day by george saunders, 9. lucy by the sea by elizabeth strout, 10. the romantic by william boyd, 11. the marriage portrait by maggie o’farrell, 12. carrie soto is back by taylor jenkins reid, 13. lessons by ian mcewan, 14. the ink black heart by robert galbraith, 15. haven by emma donoghue, 16. trust by hernan diaz, 17. the last white man by mohsin hamid, 18. a hunger by ross raisin, 19. acts of service by lillian fishman, 20. the twilight world by werner herzog, 21. the exhibitionist by charlotte mendelson, 22. vladimir by julia may jonas, 23. to paradise by hanya yanagihara, 24. joan by katherine j. chen, 25. the house of fortune by jessie burton, 26. the seaplane on final approach by rebecca rukeyser, 27. the young accomplice by benjamin wood, 28. the sidekick by benjamin markovits, 29. nonfiction: a novel by julie myerson, 30. you have a friend in 10a by maggie shipstead, 31. very cold people by sarah manguso, 32. trespasses by louise kennedy, 33. elizabeth finch by julian barnes, 34. the candy house by jennifer egan, 35. companion piece by ali smith, 36. young mungo by douglas stuart, 37. sell us the rope by stephen may, 38. french braid by anne tyler, 39. good intentions by kasim ali, 40. the school for good mothers by jessamine chan, 41. pure colour by sheila heti, 42. a previous life by edmund white, 43. a class of their own by matt knott, 44. our country friends by gary shteyngart, 45. scary monsters by michelle de kretser, 46. free love by tessa hadley, 47. the fell by sarah moss.

As the author of three trilogies, John Banville is “no stranger to using recurring characters”, said Ian Critchley in Literary Review . But The Singularities takes this to extremes: so stuffed is it with “old Banville protagonists” that it is close to being a “literary greatest-hits collection”. The setting is Arden House – the crumbling Irish country house from Banville’s 2009 work The Infinities . Various characters from that work are joined by William Jaybey (from The Newton Letter ) and Freddie Montgomery (from The Book of Evidence ), among others. One doesn’t begrudge Banville his “game with his readers”: The Singularities is a “pleasure to read”.

With its “assembly of characters” and country house setting, this novel seems to have the “makings of a whodunnit”, said Tom Ball in The Times . But “no one dies”, or even falls out; and, in fact, little of consequence happens. Fortunately, “you don’t read Banville for his taut plots”. You read him because, every few pages, there’s a sentence “so perfectly contrived it stops you for a moment, achingly, like a beautiful stranger passing in the street”.

Knopf 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

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The South Korean writer Cho Nam-Joo is best known for her 2016 novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 , said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The i Paper . A story of “everyday sexism”, it sold more than a million copies in South Korea and sparked a national conversation about the status of women. Cho’s latest novel, Saha , is “just as political” – though this time the focus is on class. Set in a dystopian future, the novel follows a disparate group of characters who live in some dilapidated buildings on the outskirts of “Town”, a fiercely hierarchical “privatised city-nation” where all aspects of life are tightly controlled. Offering a powerful critique of “plutocracy, systemic inequality” and “gendered violence”, the novel is “utterly captivating”.

Cho’s dystopia is “not particularly original”, and her plotting can be “surprisingly loose”, said Mia Levitin in The Daily Telegraph . But the novel’s characterisation is “touching” – and its themes are certainly powerful. At a time of rising global inequality – South Korea’s economy is dominated by “mega-corporations” – this is a book that “resonates widely”.

Scribner 240pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state-of-the-nation novel,” said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman . But one who can is Jonathan Coe. His latest charts 75 years of British history, following the lives of a single family, headed by matriarch Mary Lamb, who live on the outskirts of Birmingham, near the Bournville factory. Coe covers so much ground in just 350 pages by alighting only on key moments: VE Day in 1945; the Queen’s coronation; the 1966 World Cup; the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The result is a “piercing” satire on Englishness that is “designed to make you think by making you laugh”. This is a warm and comforting book, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times – like a “mug of hot chocolate”.

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The final section, set during Covid-19, is very moving, said J.S. Barnes in Literary Review . But much of this novel is “flat and formulaic”. The use of hindsight is clunky: when Mary visits The Mousetrap in 1953, she thinks: “I imagine it will be closing before very long.” It feels like a “procession through well-worn territory”, rather than something designed to “excite or entertain”.

Viking 368pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

4. Molly & the Captain by Anthony Quinn

Anthony Quinn is a “fine prose stylist, able to evoke the past with vivid immediacy”, said Alex Preston in The Observer . His ninth novel is a sweeping epic that consists of three interlinked sections. In the 1780s, Laura Merrymount – daughter of the Gainsborough-esque portraitist William Merrymount – strives to escape from her father’s shadow and become a painter herself. In Chelsea a century later, we meet the young artist Paul Stransom and his sister Maggie – who abandoned her own dreams of becoming an artist to care for their dying mother. And finally, in 1980s Kentish Town another artist, Nell Cantrip, suddenly acquires late-career fame. Marked by its “intricate”, immaculate plotting, this novel is a “rollicking read”.

I found the plotting a bit predictable, and the characterisation heavy-handed, said Imogen Hermes Gowar in The Guardian . But the book has interesting things to say “about women’s work and talent, and the life cycle of art”; and it is deftly put together by a writer who delights in the “granular details of an era”, while also understanding its broad sweep.

Abacus 432pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

India Knight’s new book is a “contemporary reimagining” of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love , said Christina Patterson in The Sunday Times . Updating “such a beloved novel” certainly isn’t easy – but Knight has pulled off the task with aplomb. In her version, the four Radlett children – Linda, Louisa, Jassy and Robin – are not the progeny of an English lord, but of an ageing and reclusive rock star. Desperate to protect his children from “modern life”, he has purchased a “vast Norfolk estate” – and it’s there that we first encounter Linda and her siblings, through the eyes of their cousin Franny. The narrative tracks their passage to adulthood, and their romantic entanglements – centred on “Linda’s pursuit of love”.

Darling works because, as in Mitford’s original, the details are so “bang on”, said Emma Beddington in The Spectator . Sometimes, Knight artfully tweaks them: she replaces hunting with swimming, and gives her adult characters jobs (Linda runs a café in Dalston). Mitford “diehards can rest easy: your blood vessels are safe with this faithful, fiercely funny homage”.

Fig Tree 288pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Cormac McCarthy’s first novel in 16 years explores “the very boundaries of human understanding”, said Nicholas Mancusi in Time . Investigating a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico, diver Bobby Western discovers that one passenger is missing; soon he is being harassed by government agents. But the pretence that this is a thriller doesn’t last long: chapters in which Bobby discusses the meaning of life alternate with ones in which his maths genius sister Alice experiences schizophrenic hallucinations. It’s a deeply weird book, held together by “chuckle-out-loud” humour. A companion novel, Stella Maris , focusing on Alice, does little to explain it – but together they are “staggering”.

Sorry, said James Walton in The Times , but I can’t remember a recent novel so wildly indifferent to what its readers might enjoy, or even understand. The conversations that make up the bulk of it, ranging from nuclear physics to Kennedy’s assassination, are a complete ragbag. McCarthy’s gift for description and dialogue remains undiminished, but there’s no escaping the sense that The Passenger is “a big old mess”.

Picador 400pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel is a retelling of David Copperfield , transposed to the “valleys of southwest Virginia at the height of America’s opioid crisis”, said James Riding in The Times . Demon Copperhead, the “rambunctious hero”, is “born in a trailer to a teenage single mother”, and grows up in a world of neglectful child protection services and dubious guardians. The characters are all recognisable from the Dickens novel – but appear in new guises: “Steerforth becomes Fast Forward, a pill-popping quarterback; Uriah Heep is U-Haul, a football coach’s errand boy”. Daring and entertaining, Demon Copperhead is “shockingly successful” – “like Dickens directed by the Coen brothers”.

It’s a promising premise, not least because in its extreme inequality, post-industrial America resembles Victorian England, said Jessa Crispin in The Daily Telegraph . Yet while Kingsolver closely cleaves to the story of the original, she “breaks the most important rule of working in the Dickensian mode”: the need to “show the reader a good time”. Hers is a retelling “beset by earnestness” – and as a result it falls flat.

Faber 560pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Besides being a Booker Prize winner with his only novel, Lincoln in the Bardo , George Saunders is “routinely hailed as the world’s best short story writer”, said James Walton in The Daily Telegraph . The American’s dazzling new collection – his first since 2013’s Tenth of December – shows why he garners such acclaim. As is customary in a Saunders collection, quite a few of the tales are “deeply strange”: in the title story, three people are kept permanently “pinioned to a wall”, enacting scenes from American history; another story is set in a theme park that has never received any visitors. Around half the tales, however, explore “recognisable social and political dilemmas”: two employees clashing at work; a mother’s despair about the state of America after her son is pushed over by a tramp. And whether Saunders is engaging with contemporary reality, or “taking us somewhere else entirely”, he never forgets that the most important duty of a writer is to make his work “winningly readable”.

Tenth of December was a “marvellous” collection, but unfortunately Liberation Day doesn’t hit the same heights, said Charles Finch in the Los Angeles Times . Although “the standard of Saunders’ writing remains astronomically high”, there are times here when he seems almost on auto-pilot, reprising themes and situations he has previously explored. It’s true that if you’ve read Saunders before, then parts of Liberation Day will sound “like self-parody”, said John Self in The Times . But then again, “it’s churlish to knock a true original for repeating himself”. When he’s at his best, Saunders’ “oblique, farcical, tragic” view of the world still has the ability to “take the top of your head off”.

Bloomsbury 256pp £18.99; The Week bookshop £14.99

“Elizabeth Strout is writing masterpieces at a pace you might not suspect from their spaciousness and steady beauty,” said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian . Lucy by the Sea is the third sequel to her acclaimed bestseller My Name is Lucy Barton . It takes place early during the pandemic, when Lucy and her ex-husband, William, leave New York for a friend’s empty beach house in Maine – for “just a few weeks”, he says. It is “a study of a later-life reunion between a man and woman who married in their 20s”. It isn’t “a tender tale”, as William isn’t an easy man to like, but it is “as fine a pandemic novel as one could hope for”.

Over the course of three Lucy Barton books, Strout has “created one of the most quizzical characters in modern fiction”, said Claire Allfree in The Times . Still, even this “avid fan” found herself wondering whether this instalment is “surplus to requirements”. This, sadly, is a novel that “mistakes simplistic observation for subtle insight, bathos for pathos”, and Lucy herself is “downright annoying”. I disagree entirely, said Julie Myerson in The Observer . Lucy by the Sea is a wonderful evocation of lockdown life. It is “her most nuanced – and intensely moving – Lucy Barton novel yet”.

Viking 304pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

William Boyd’s 17th novel – his first set in the 19th century – is an “old-fashioned bildungsroman” that follows its “hero, Cashel Greville Ross, through a long and peripatetic life”, said Lucy Atkins in The Sunday Times .

After growing up in Ireland and Oxford, Cashel “impulsively joins the army” and finds himself “facing the French bayonets at the Battle of Waterloo”. He subsequently “hangs out” with Byron and Shelley in Italy, spends time in east India and New England, and becomes an opium addict, an author and a diplomat. Although the authorial winks can be groan-inducing – “Shelley can barely swim”, a friend of the poet declares – it is a “masterclass” in narrative construction and its ending is “genuinely poignant”.

Boyd is “as magically readable as ever”, said Jake Kerridge in The Daily Telegraph . But amid the non-stop action and “endless verbal anachronisms”, Cashel never quite emerges as a fully rounded character. Compared with Boyd’s previous “whole life novels”, such as Any Human Heart and Sweet Caress , The Romantic feels “glaringly synthetic”.

Viking 464pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Maggie O’Farrell’s last novel, the brilliant Hamnet , “fleshed out” the lives of Shakespeare’s children, said Elizabeth Lowry in The Daily Telegraph . Her latest brings another neglected historical figure into the light – the noblewoman Lucrezia de’ Medici. In 1560, a 16-year-old Lucrezia left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso d’Este, heir to the Duke of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio. “Within a year, she was dead”; it was rumoured Alfonso had killed her. Taking these “suggestive details” as inspiration (as Robert Browning did in his famous poem My Last Duchess ), O’Farrell “constructs a convincing human drama”.

O’Farrell is a master of visual description, said Claire Allfree in The Times . A tiger moves “like honey dripping from a spoon”; through a window, the sound of sobbing drifts upwards “like smoke”. Yet the “headily perfumed” prose proves oddly dulling: rather than “springing forth messily alive”, Lucrezia seems “trapped beneath the weight” of the “relentless” description. Although it sets out to bring Lucrezia back to life, it ends up being a “bloodless book”.

Tinder Press 438pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

Taylor Jenkins Reid is a TikTok phenomenon, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph . Thanks in part to BookTok – the social media app’s books community – her novels about glamorous women finding fame and fortune have sold in their millions. Continuing with that “winning strategy”, her latest centres on a “hotshot American tennis pro”.

Carrie Soto is a former world No. 1, who has won a record 20 grand slams. Now in her late 30s, she mounts an “unlikely comeback”, prompted by the emergence of a new star, Londoner Nicki Chan. This is a “compulsive, soapy page-turner” with “more substance than the average beach read”. In short, it’s an “ace” of an “escapist romp”.

Jenkins Reid has a “nose for a cultural moment”, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times . And so this book’s appearance so soon after the retirement of Serena Williams – clearly an inspiration for Carrie – is “coincidental but not surprising”. Don’t expect “psychological depth”; “fundamentally, this is a sports story”, with whole chapters devoted to single matches. But it’s certainly very “fun to read”.

Hutchinson Heinemann 384pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Ian McEwan’s novels are often “lean, controlled enquiries” into specific historical moments, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The New Statesman : 1950s Germany in The Innocent ; the Thatcherite 1980s in A Child in Time . But his 18th is very different – “baggier and more protean” than any of its predecessors. It’s also, “to my mind, McEwan’s best novel in 20 years”. His protagonist, Roland Baines, is a baby boomer who bears a strong resemblance to his creator, were his creator “not a hugely successful novelist”. Roland spends his childhood in Libya, then “attends a state-run boarding school” in England. And like McEwan, he discovers as an adult that he has a long-lost brother. Yet his life is notable for its lack of direction: he “scratches out a living as a hotel lounge pianist, an occasional tennis coach and a hack”. Humble and wise, Lessons is “an intimate but sprawling story about an ordinary man’s reckoning with existence”.

As is often the case for McEwan’s protagonists, Roland’s life “hinges” on a single traumatic episode, said Edmund Gordon in the TLS . Aged 14, he begins an affair with his piano teacher, Miss Cornell – a relationship which, while he “isn’t exactly a reluctant participant”, nonetheless wounds him. A second trauma follows in his 30s, when Roland’s German-born wife, Alissa, abandons him and their baby son to pursue her ambition of becoming a novelist, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . While Roland is left a single parent, Alissa – somewhat implausibly – becomes “Germany’s greatest writer”. As the decades pass, the “social and domestic cavalcade of Roland’s life” plays out against the backdrop of “momentous global happenings” – from 9/11 to the Covid lockdowns. A “vividly detailed lifetime chronicle”, Lessons is a “tour de force”.

Yet it has its problems, said Claire Lowdon in The Spectator . This is a novel full of dropped storylines and non sequiturs, and McEwan can’t resist those “overbearing news bulletins” that have peppered his recent work (“The Profumo affair was only a year away” etc.). Still, Lessons is consistently enjoyable, and there’s something to be said for the “novelty” of reading a McEwan novel that feels more like “a Jonathan Franzen”. At the age of 74, his desire to try new things is impressive. “Despite the rambling and the rushed patches, here is a whole, unruly life between the covers of a single book: a literary feat of undeniable majesty.”

Cape 496pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

This new crime novel by J.K. Rowling, using her Robert Galbraith pseudonym, has Cormoran Strike, her Afghan-War-veteran-turned-private detective, getting to grips with the world of online trolls, said Joan Smith in The Sunday Times .

Strike and his partner Robin are called to investigate the stabbing to death of a woman named Edie. She was the co-creator of a YouTube cartoon featuring “ghoulish” characters cavorting in a cemetery, and the finger of suspicion falls on a gamer known as “Anomie”, who had subjected Edie to a “torrent of lurid accusation” after claiming that she’d ripped off his ideas.

While the novel works as a “superlative piece of crime fiction”, its subject matter also feels highly pointed: Rowling has herself faced accusations of plagiarism, and she has been subjected to savage online abuse for arguing that aspects of trans ideology lead to the “erasure of the word ‘woman’”.

Sphere 1,024pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is set in early 7th century Ireland, and centres on a trio of monks who build a monastic community on a tiny island, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . The men set out in their “precarious boat” after their leader Artt – a “legendary holy man” – has a “vision of an island in the western sea”. When they reach a “large rock” covered in “birds, guano and little else”, Artt is convinced it’s the place from his dream – and resolves that he and his companions will never leave. Haven may sound like a work that “few readers have been praying for”, but it proves “transporting, sometimes unsettling and eventually shocking”.

There are some “striking formal similarities” between this novel and Donoghue’s 2010 bestseller Room , inspired by the Josef Fritzl case, said Paraic O’Donnell in The Guardian . Both are works of “radical minimalism”, about people who “struggle to preserve their humanity in utter isolation”. Although Haven is “created in a muted palette”, this is a work of impressive “narrative sustenance” – and is “crowded with quietly beautiful details”.

Picador 272pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated first novel, In the Distance, centred on a “penniless young Swedish immigrant” in California, said Jonathan Lee in The Guardian . His second concerns a “character at the other end of the economic scale” – a “Gatsby-like tycoon in 1920s New York” named Andrew Bevel. Rather than tell Bevel’s story straight, Diaz embeds it in four “interconnected narratives”: a fictionalised novel based on Bevel’s life; Bevel’s unfinished autobiography; a memoir by his ghostwriter; and fragments from his wife’s “long-withheld diary”. It sounds tricksy, but it’s surprisingly readable – like a “brilliantly twisted mix” of Borges and J.M. Coetzee, with “a dash” of Italo Calvino.

The “knotty ingenuity” of this novel makes it deserving of its place on this year’s Booker longlist, said Lucy Scholes in The Daily Telegraph . It is “destined to be known as one of the great puzzle-box novels”. I doubt that, said John Self in The Times . Parts are “original and surprising”, but overall it’s “well behaved and dull”, and consumed by its own cleverness. Like the tycoon at its centre, it’s “all smart, no heart”.

Picador 416pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel begins with a transformation, said Alex Preston in The Observer : Anders wakes up one morning to find his skin has changed from white to black. This metamorphosis is not explained; instead, the focus is on its impact on the people around Anders. When he goes out, he feels “vaguely menaced”; his boss tells him he’d have killed himself had it happened to him. But then Anders finds that similar transfor­mations are taking place across the US, until eventually there is “just one white man left”. Written in “incantatory” sentences, The Last White Man is a “strange, beautiful allegorical tale”.

Mysterious transformations can be “fertile terrain” for fiction, said Houman Barekat in The Times : one thinks, most obviously, of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. But while that work resists easy interpretation, Hamid’s aims are all too obvious: this is “yet another liberal parable” about the “psychic underpinnings of racial prejudice”. Ultimately, it’s a book that says more about the “publishing industry’s anxious scrabble for topicality” than about “the human condition”.

Hamish Hamilton 192pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

Most books billed as telling us “what it means to be human” really do no such thing, said John Self in The Observer . Ross Raisin’s A Hunger is an exception. The tale of a London “sous chef in her mid-50s”, this is the fourth novel by this talented writer – and it is his most “ambitious” yet, encompassing “work and family, desires and appetites, responsibility and identity”.

Raisin has always excelled at portraying working lives, said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian : Waterline , his second novel, centred on a Clyde shipbuilder; A Natural , his third, was about a lower league footballer. Here, he captures the rhythms of kitchen life so skilfully that it “makes one realise the degree to which work is still under-charted territory in literary fiction”. Yet the novel is about much more than cooking: Patrick, Anita’s husband of 30 years, has recently developed early-onset dementia, forcing her to combine the stresses of her job with a new role as a carer “changing incontinence pads”. The result is a “deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy” novel about the “conflicting demands of work and care”.

I wasn’t impressed, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . Although Raisin’s gifts for “startling descriptive prose” are evident – notably in a bravura opening set in a walk-in fridge – the novel overall is let down by “wooden dialogue”, characters who don’t seem real, and a clumsy structure in which Anita’s present-day travails are juxtaposed with “rushed and skimpy” scenes from her early life. It may not be perfect, but this is a deft exploration of “the guilt that accompanies female ambition”, said Amber Medland in the FT . Daring in what it sets out to achieve, A Hunger is equally “impressive in its execution”.

Jonathan Cape 464pp £18.99; The Week bookshop £14.99

Lillian Fishman’s debut is one of the most “searching and enthralling” novels about sex I’ve read in years, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The New Statesman . “Eve is a 28-year-old barista from Brooklyn in a long-term relationship with Romi, a paediatrician.” Although Eve considers herself a lesbian, she has fantasies about sleeping with a “wild number of people”. When she posts nude pictures of herself online, they catch the attention of an artist called Olivia – who proves to be acting on behalf of a “tall, wealthy man in his 30s” named Nathan, who makes Eve his sexual “toy”. “Part erotic Bildungsroman, part melancholy comedy of manners”, Acts of Service is “startlingly accomplished”.

Well, I found it thoroughly tedious, said Jessa Crispin in The Times – less a novel than a crude allegory. Nathan is “basically Christian Grey from Fifty Shades rendered in marginally better prose”. Fishman’s reflections on the corrupting effects of “patriarchy” and “capitalism” have been far better expressed elsewhere. Overhyped and unoriginal, this is a disappointing addition to the “library of endless want”.

Europa Editions 224pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

For 29 years after the end of the Second World War, a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda held out on a small island in the Philippines, believing his comrades were still fighting, said Anthony Gardner in The Mail on Sunday . Now the great film director Werner Herzog, who befriended Onoda in 1997, has written an imaginative reconstruction of his experiences. Steeped in the atmosphere of the jungle, it’s an “enthralling” novel that explores the nature of time and warfare with great mastery.

Onoda’s single-minded intransigence makes him an archetypal Herzog hero, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , and this “Hemingwayesque” novella is highly cinematic, with short chapters and vivid scene-setting. But its refined prose gives it a sculptural quality too: its descriptions of the natural world are radiant. Herzog manages to inhabit the soldier’s mind, and to create a “visionary” narrative, said Peter Carty in The i Paper. Moral issues – Onoda killed a number of islanders – are somewhat sidelined, but this beautifully crafted book is a “literary jewel” nevertheless.

Bodley Head 144pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Charlotte Mendelson’s “riotous, prize-winning novels” tend to be about messy, dysfunctional families, said Leyla Sanai in The Spectator . Her fifth centres on a “monstrous” artist named Ray Hanrahan and his downtrodden wife, Lucia. Narcissistic, abusive and controlling, Ray has “quashed” Lucia’s own artistic ambitions for decades, forcing her to minister to his needs and look after their (now grown-up) children.

With an “ostentatious private view” of his work about to open, he has summoned friends and family to their north London house. The result is a “glorious ride” of a novel – one in which “Mendelson observes the minutiae of human behaviour like a comic anthropologist”.

There is a lot going on in this novel – “at times, too much” – but the overall “effect is exhilarating”, said Susie Mesure in The Times . Moving between perspectives, Mendelson cranks the drama up to a “fiery climax”. There’s a “hint of HBO’s Succession ” in this tale of a “family in thrall to a despotic patriarch”, said Madeleine Feeny in The Daily Telegraph . Mingling “eroticism, absurdity and pathos”, it’s “electric”.

Mantle 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

At first glance, this debut novel seems to be yet another post-#MeToo book “dissecting sexual trauma and queasy power dynamics”, said Laura Hackett in The Sunday Times . At a US liberal arts college, John, a senior English professor, finds himself accused of sexual impropriety by “seven students with whom he has had affairs”. But rather than adopt their perspective, the novel is narrated by John’s wife – who is anything but sympathetic towards them. She laments the fact that young women today seem to have “lost all agency”, and admits to having “enjoyed the space” that her husband’s infidelities provided. With its bracing take on sexual politics, Vladimir is an “astonishing debut”.

In its second half, the novel becomes primarily about “female appetite”, as the narrator develops an obsessive crush on a “gorgeous new junior professor”, said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian . May Jones’s “quietly captivating” voice dazzles until the end, when the novel is let down by a “heavy-handed denouement”. Still, in its willingness to tackle “complex”, provocative themes, this is “an engrossing and clever debut”.

Picador 256pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Hanya Yanagihara’s latest novel is the “keenly awaited” follow up to A Little Life , her “devastating story of irreparable human damage”, said David Sexton in The Sunday Times . It consists of three sections all set in the same New York building and taking place, respectively, in 1893, 1993 and 2093.

Part one re-imagines 19th century New York as a “liberal breakaway nation in which gay marriage is normal”. Part two, set in the “time of Aids”, focuses on a wealthy white lawyer and his young Hawaiian lover. Part three envisages an America that has been ravaged by “successive waves of viruses, every few years from 2020”. While a “less bludgeoningly powerful” work than A Little Life , it’s still “highly affecting”.

This is in many ways a “wantonly strange” work, said Claire Allfree in The Times : the convoluted narrative can be “frustratingly opaque”, and there’s a complete absence of humour. Yet there’s no denying Yanagihara’s skill at immersing us in the “emotional world of her characters”. For all its flaws, To Paradise is “frequently magnificent”.

Picador 720pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

The story of Joan of Arc – a 15th-century peasant girl from northeast France who became a national heroine – has been told many times before, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph . But in her second novel, the American writer Katherine J. Chen offers a “fresh and utterly enthralling take”. Her Joan is not a religious icon – “gone are the visions” – but primarily a “woman of action”: she’s a child of remarkable physical gifts who, through a series of “serendipitous events”, becomes a key ally of the dauphin (later King Charles VII), helping to lead his armies against the English. “Vivid, visceral and boldly immediate”, the novel has already earned comparisons with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.

At once a “mystic, martyr and war hero”, Joan is a largely “incomprehensible” figure today, said Jess Walter in The New York Times . Chen, however, has a “lively stab” at making her seem relevant – in part by imagining her as an “abused child” who uses her anger to become an “avenging warrior”. “Rich” and “visceral” in its descriptions, Joan is “stirring stuff”.

Hodder & Stoughton 368pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

In 2014, Jessie Burton’s debut novel The Miniaturist – about 18-year-old Nella Oortman’s coming of age in 17th century Amsterdam – became a global bestseller, said Gwendolyn Smith in The i Paper . Now Burton is back, with a “beguiling, tender sequel”, set 18 years later. Nella, now 37, is a widow (The Miniaturist climaxed with her husband’s execution for sodomy), who still lives in the “same grand address on Amsterdam’s Herengracht canal”. A “cold, austere place” in the previous book, the house is now suffused with “warmth and familiarity” – though it still “thrums with secrets”. “Wise and fabulously immersive”, this book, if anything, surpasses its predecessor.

I disagree, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph . Burton remains a “lovely writer”, who can craft “startlingly sculptural” sentences. But “where The Miniaturist was alive with spooky mystery”, this book lacks an “animating spirit”: characters, events and even the language seem contrived. “In seeking to bring more life to the characters in The Miniaturist, The House of Fortune somehow diminishes them instead.”

Picador 400pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Set in the Alaskan wilderness, Rebecca Rukeyser’s “wistful and sardonic” first novel is part adventure story, part coming-of-age tale, said The Irish Times . Seventeen-year-old Mira is working for the summer at a guest house run by a married couple, Stu and Maureen, alongside two other girls and a troubled chef. Much of her time is spent fantasising sexually about a boy she met the year before. Rukeyser’s descriptive prose is assured and elegant, and the story becomes increasingly tense, as Stu’s predatory behaviour towards the girls becomes apparent.

Mira’s adolescent yearning is well captured in this quirky, wry debut, said Siobhan Murphy in The Times . Rukeyser provides a “deftly juggled” mixture of merciless judgement and gentle compassion for her characters’ failings. There’s also plenty of comedy, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Sunday Telegraph, though the story becomes more “mature and melancholy” as it progresses. The Seaplane on Final Approach is about how “desire ruins everything”. And when the finale arrives, it is “catastrophic” – but it also provides “lengthy, gruesome fun”.

Granta 288pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

“Few people outside the literary world” have heard of 41-year-old novelist Benjamin Wood, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . That’s a shame, because he’s “wonderful”. Already the author of “three richly layered novels”, he has now written a fourth, The Young Accomplice , which is “his most original yet”. Set in the 1950s, it centres on Arthur and Florence Mayhood, “childless architects in their 30s” who, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, dream of creating a communal-living project on their Surrey farm. To help them realise this ambition, they invite a pair of borstal leavers – brother and sister Charlie and Joyce Savigear – to live with them; unsurprisingly, things go wrong.

Compared with Wood’s previous novels, which blended “storytelling punch with literary sensibility”, this book at times feels muted, said John Self in The Times . Wood spends a lot of time in his characters’ heads; you wish for a bit more action. Still, there are compensations: the characters feel like “real people”, who you miss when they’re gone. This is a book that “digs its claws into you and sticks there”.

Viking 368pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Benjamin Markovits’s latest novel is a “compelling account of relative failure”, said Joseph Owen in Literary Review . Brian, the narrator, is a “big fat slow” Jewish kid from Austin, Texas, who becomes childhood friends with Marcus Hayes, his high school’s basketball star. Marcus is black, and from a broken home – for a while he lives with Brian’s family – but in adulthood, when Marcus becomes an “NBA superstar”, Brian is merely a “semi-successful” sportswriter. The novel convincingly portrays Brian’s “inhibited world-view”, which is “tainted by jealousy” of his friend. The result is a “bleak, amusing, ultimately absorbing read”.

This is a novel with the “topography of a classic American story”, said Stuart Evers in The Spectator : “sport as a metaphor for the fracture of the US; friendship as a microcosm of race relations”. It feels a little dated – a bit “male and white” – and the “detailed descriptions of basketball” could put some people off. In the final act, though, when Markovits unveils “his A-game”, the novel “ignites into something compelling and emotionally resonant”.

Faber 361pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

In 2009, the novelist Julie Myerson found herself at the centre of a media storm after publishing a non-fiction account of her eldest son’s addiction to marijuana, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . The episode, she has said, drove her to a “kind of breakdown”, and she has never directly addressed it in her writing. Except that now, in a way, she has. This, her 11th novel – entitled Nonfiction – is all about “teenage drug addiction”. The narrator is a once “happily married” writer, who is looking back on her attempts to save her heroin-addicted daughter “from self-destruction”. Given her own backstory, Myerson is risking a lot with such a novel – but “the results are nothing less than incandescent”.

The title is confusing, and deliberately so, said Alex Peake-Tomkinson in The Spectator . This is Myerson’s “squarest attempt so far at autobiographical fiction”. Yet in other ways, it seems a typical work: she has always explored “her worst fears in her novels”. Although I hope she will “look beyond her own life” in future, I found this a “satisfyingly propulsive” read.

Corsair 288pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Maggie Shipstead’s “thrilling” historical epic, Great Circle , not only earned her a place on last year’s Booker shortlist, but also “proved a huge hit with readers”, said Lucy Scholes in the Financial Times . So it’s “savvy” of her publisher to bring out this collection of her short stories, written over the past 13 years. The tales vary widely in tone and setting – they transport us “from the catacombs of Paris, via an Olympic Village, to a guano island in the middle of the Pacific” – but taken together, they forcefully illustrate the “remarkable scope of Shipstead’s imagination and talent”.

While one or two of these stories seem a bit “too self-conscious”, most are superb, said Lizzy Harding in The New York Times . In the “sure standout”, “La Moretta”, a young couple’s honeymoon in Romania “transforms into folk horror à la The Wicker Man ”. Shipstead has an “unnerving ability to capture a character’s inner life in a few choice phrases”, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer . “It’s a rare writer who can create a world as convincingly over a few pages as in a 600-page novel.”

Doubleday 288pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “creepy coming-of-age tale” unfolds like a “darker version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda ”, except with “no Miss Honey coming to the rescue”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Observer . Set in an “icy” Massachusetts town in the 1980s, it is narrated by Ruthie, an only child whose family is “on the edge of poverty”. Ruthie is an assiduous cataloguer of “everything she sees” – her mother’s lumpy body, her awkward dinners with richer school friends – but she doesn’t always understand the significance of what she sees. Marked by its “pitiless, minutely observed prose”, Very Cold People is a work that “will stay with me for a very long time”.

Manguso is especially good at evoking the “constraints and cruelties” of Ruthie’s home life, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times . So successfully does she portray “boring old daily pain” that it almost seems redundant when “more dramatic plot-turns arrive” towards the end of the book. Very Cold People is at its best simply as a “compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived”.

Picador 208pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

The Irish writer Louise Kennedy only began writing aged 47, but her rise has been meteoric, said Madeleine Feeny in The Spectator . The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, her debut short story collection, was “fought over” by nine publishers. And now, with this first novel, she has written what promises to be another hit. Plot-wise, Trespasses doesn’t break new ground, said Kevin Power in The Guardian: set near Belfast in 1975, it’s about a young Catholic primary school teacher who falls in love with a posh Protestant barrister. What distinguishes it is its “sense of utter conviction”. This is a story “told with such compulsive attention to the textures of its world that every page feels like a moral and intellectual event”.

Kennedy is a superbly visual writer, and her “idiomatic dialogue gives her prose real verve”, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer : the protagonist’s mother, catching sight of Helen Mirren on a chat show, describes her as a “dirty article”. Combining “unflinching authenticity” with a “flair for detail”, this is a “deftly calibrated” and ultimately “devastating” novel.

Bloomsbury 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Julian Barnes’s latest is that “old-fashioned thing, a novel of ideas”, said John Self in The Times . It is narrated by Neil, a former actor, but is really all about Elizabeth Finch, the “lecturer on a course on culture and civilisation that Neil took decades earlier”. Finch, who is “probably inspired” by Barnes’s friend, the late novelist Anita Brookner, is remembered as an inspirational teacher, someone “who obliged us – simply by example – to seek and find within ourselves a centre of seriousness”. Neil recalls their sort-of friendship – they occasionally met for lunch – and describes his quest, in the present day, to find out more about Finch in the wake of her death. Very much a “thinky” novel, Elizabeth Finch may be “rather less fun” than most of Barnes’s books, but it “offers plenty to chew on”.

“Part of the challenge of rendering a brilliantly inspirational teacher is making them sufficiently brilliant and inspirational,” said Sameer Rahim in The Daily Telegraph . Despite Neil’s insistence on Finch’s originality, “what she actually says tends to fall flat”. “She told me that love is all there is. It’s the only thing that matters,” a classmate of Neil recalls. The novel is further let down by its baffling middle section, which consists of Neil’s “stolid student essay” on the fourth century Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, whom Finch regarded as a kindred spirit, said Sam Byers in The Guardian .

It all adds up to a “work stubbornly determined to deny us its pleasures”. I disagree, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . As a teacher, Finch “blazes with vividness”, and Neil’s essay is a “bravura exercise in nimbly handled erudition”. Elizabeth Finch “celebrates the cast of mind” – subtle, sceptical and ironic – that “Barnes most prizes”.

Jonathan Cape 192pp £16.99; The Week bookshop £13.99

Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a “sibling novel” to A Visit From the Goon Squad, her bestselling 2010 novel about rock music, “Gen-X nostalgia” and the “digitalisation of everything”, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times . Consisting of interrelated short stories which zigzag about in time, it resembles its predecessor in structure – and features many of the same characters. But at its centre is a new figure: the “Mark Zuckerberg-like” Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, has created an “implausible” device known as Own Your Unconscious, which lets users upload their own and other people’s memories, and “watch them all like movies”.

The sci-fi aspects of the book are neither new nor “particularly fully realised”, said Andrew Billen in The Times : memory uploads have been tackled better elsewhere. But this is essentially a book of short stories, and most of them are excellent and “brain-stretching”. What “really astounds is the visual brilliance of Egan’s writing across these disparate tales”. She won a Pulitzer for A Visit From the Goon Squad; I hope this book “wins another”.

Corsaid 352pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Ali Smith’s first novel since her “extraordinary Seasonal Quartet ” has a fitting title, said Alex Preston in The Observer , as it “springs from the same source as its predecessors”. Like them, it was “written and published swiftly”, to cram in recent events. It’s 2021, and Sandy, an artist, is “struggling through lockdown”. Her father is in hospital following a heart attack – and she “only has his dog for company”. Smith skilfully evokes the grim monotony of pandemic life, said Catherine Taylor in the FT – from the “regularity of testing” to “the exhaustion of medical staff”.

Much of the plot concerns Sandy’s “renewed acquaintance” with an old university friend Martina, who gets in touch to tell her about her recent interrogation by UK border police, said Philip Hensher in The Daily Telegraph . This leads to Sandy meeting Martina’s twin daughters, Eden and Lea, who are full of “millennial” rage and entitlement. Covering a “lot of contemporary ground”, Companion Piece offers an entertaining portrait of the “world we live in, by the most beguiling and likeable of novelistic intelligences”.

Hamish Hamilton 400pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Douglas Stuart’s debut, Shuggie Bain – the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize – was a “bleak autobiographical novel about a young boy caring for his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . His follow-up is “cut from the same cloth”.

Fifteen-year-old Mungo lives with his mother and two older siblings in Glasgow’s East End. “His brother, Hamish, is a Faginesque Protestant gang leader; his sister, Jodie, is a do-gooding fallen angel; and their mother, Mo-Maw, is a woman ruined by alcohol.” As the novel opens, Mungo is shooed off by his mother on a fishing trip with two menacing strangers from her Alcoholics Anonymous group, who promise to teach him “masculine pursuits”.

Interspersed with this “gruesome excursion” are chapters set a few months earlier, detailing Mungo’s first love affair, with a Catholic neighbour called James. Although this “alternating timeline” feels forced at times, this is still a “richly abundant” work packed with fine writing and “colourful characters”.

It may be felt – with some justification – that Stuart has written the same book twice, said Nikhil Krishnan in The Daily Telegraph . Yet he “makes small differences count”. Because Mungo is older than Shuggie, he is able to see in his sexuality “not just a source of difference and alienation, but a possible route to escape and emancipation”. And Stuart widens his focus beyond family life, taking in the “Jets and Sharks world” of Glasgow’s sectarian politics.

Like its predecessor, this “bear hug of a new novel” has a “yeasty whiff of the autobiographical” about it, said Hillary Kelly in the Los Angeles Times . If you adored Shuggie Bain , this book “will please you on every page”.

Picador 400pp £16.99; The Week bookshop £13.99

Joseph Stalin “never spoke or wrote” about the two months he spent in London in the spring of 1907, attending the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, said Alasdair Lees in The Daily Telegraph . Into this “psychological aperture” steps Stephan May, whose sixth novel is an “openly confected” retelling of those “few overlooked weeks”.

It begins with a 29-year-old Stalin – then known by his nickname, Koba – landing at Harwich, fresh from “a campaign of terror and banditry” in his native Georgia. In London, he stays in a dosshouse in Stepney, while better-off attendees – including Lenin – lodge in Bloomsbury. May’s Stalin is a “figure of fascinating contradictions” – an “idealist and a thug” – and the novel a “captivating thought experiment”.

Sadly, it often falls “disappointingly flat”, said Simon Baker in Literary Review . There are “samey descriptions” of London’s “awful” pubs, and May makes too much use of summary. Despite having the makings of an “exciting political thriller”, the novel isn’t convincing enough for May’s story to really grow.

Sandstone 288pp £8.99; The Week Bookshop £6.99

Anne Tyler virtually created the “family novel” genre, but has “strayed into more diverse territory recently”, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times . Fans will be delighted by the 80-year-old’s 24th novel, which marks a return to type. Set, almost inevitably, in Baltimore, it’s a multi-generational saga spanning six decades, about a “comfortingly average” family. Mercy and Robin Garrett “enjoy a smoothly conventional life” running a hardware store and raising their three children. But theirs is a family in which “certain things must never be said”, and as the decades pass, this creates division. French Braid is “Tyler at her most Tyler-ish: pleasant and inoffensive, yet surprisingly deep and moving”.

Near its end, the novel does take an unexpected turn, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . Its final chapters are set during Covid – a topic Tyler suggested she’d never write about. Typically, however, she emphasises not the pandemic’s harrowing side, but its “potential to occasion reunion and reconnection”. This book may fall short of her best work – but “at this point any Tyler book is a gift”.

Chatto & Windus 256pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “eagerly awaited” debut is being hailed as “part of a wave of novels by young men of colour exploring race, romance and mental health problems”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . Nur, a 25-year-old online journalist from Birmingham who regularly suffers panic attacks, has been with Yasmina for four years. But he has yet to tell his Pakistani parents about the relationship: Yasmina’s family is Sudanese, and Nur has never got over his “mother’s disgust when she saw him hanging out with a black girl at school”.

On the surface a “poignant romance” about the barriers standing in the way of two young lovers, Good Intentions gradually reveals itself to be a deeper novel – about how an obsession with vulnerability can “make you forget your responsibility to others”.

Ali’s characters are “well-drawn”, and “what a tonic” to have a book about race in Britain set outside the capital, said Siobhan Murphy in The Times . Unfortunately, though, the unnecessarily complex structure necessitates a lot of darting “between points on the timeline” – and this, alas makes the novel rather “confusing”.

4th Estate 352pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Jessamine Chan’s “crafty and spellbinding” debut is set in a terrifyingly plausible dystopian America, said Molly Young in The New York Times . Frida Liu is a 39-year-old single mother with an 18-month-old daughter and a stressful job. One day, in a “spell of insomnia-induced irrationality”, she leaves her daughter unattended at home while running a work errand.

Neighbours hear the toddler crying, and alert the police. Frida is sentenced to a year in an “experimental rehab facility”, where women are moulded into better mothers by practising their parenting skills on AI dolls. The school continually berates Frida for her actions: her kisses, instructors tell her, “lack a fiery core of maternal love”.

It’s no surprise that this book has been “making waves” in the US, said Madeleine Feeny in The Daily Telegraph : “questions of how we define and evaluate motherhood pervade contemporary culture”. Beautifully lucid and elegantly written, this is a “must-read” novel, said India Knight in The Sunday Times – “a Handmaid’s Tale for the 21st century”.

Hutchinson Heinemann 336pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

The Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s latest is “an original”, said Anne Enright in The Guardian . It’s a short novel about grief in which plot often gives way to “mystical” digressions that are “earnest, funny and sweet” – “a bit mad”, but in a good way.

Mira, a solitary woman in midlife, falls in love with Annie, a fellow student at their school for art criticism. Then Mira’s father dies, and his spirit joins her own inside a leaf, where they converse about “art, God, love and the transmigration of souls”, before Mira returns to “the pursuit of love”, her faith in “family and tradition” strengthened.

Billed as “a philosopher of modern experience”, Heti is known for her auto-fictional novels such as How Should a Person Be? (2010). Pure Colour is more like a fable, said Mia Levitin in the FT , in which God is an artist, and this world is his “first draft”, now “heating up in advance of its destruction”. Sadly, the book’s “meditations on grief” left me cold, and I found the prose “clunky” and “perilously close to kitsch”, with a naive, fairy-tale quality ill-suited to a story about middle age.

Harvill Secker 224pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Edmund White’s novels “forever enlarged what gay writing might do”, said Neil Bartlett in The Guardian . His latest book – “his 30th, by my count” – is an “elegant, filthy” work that “crackles with a heartfelt insistence that the old and hungry” still have much to tell us about “the dynamics of sex”.

In the year 2050, a married couple in a remote Swiss chalet decide to entertain each other by recounting their “previous sexual careers”. Constance, in her early 30s, is an “African-American orphan”, while Ruggero, her husband, is an elderly bisexual Sicilian aristocrat who is “legendarily well-connected (not to mention well hung)”.

As you’d expect, this novel is “elegantly written”, and contains many “arresting images”, said Peter Parker in The Spectator – but it’s fairly “preposterous”. The leap forward in time is merely a device allowing Ruggero to reminisce about his affair 30 years earlier with the now-forgotten writer Edmund White, then old and infirm: a “fat, famous slug”, he calls him. It is, however, all very entertaining.

Bloomsbury 288pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Unsure what to do after graduating, Matt Knott alighted on tutoring as an “easy way to make money”, said Georgia Beaufort in The Daily Telegraph . He duly joined an agency that specialised in finding “study buddies” for the children of the super-rich. With his “Cambridge degree and his floppy hair”, Knott proved a big success – and in this “very funny memoir”, he recounts his three years in the job.

His first assignment was in a house in Mayfair, where each day he sat in a “holding pool” of tutors waiting to see if he’d be picked to help a five-year-old with his homework. Other families were considerably friendlier: half servant, half family member, Knott accompanied his charges on various exotic holidays.

This amusing book sheds light on a ridiculous world of “butlers in very tight trousers” and “helicopter trips from Tuscan villas to smart restaurants in Rome”, said Roland White in the Daily Mail . In this milieu, five-year-olds eat lobster tempura for supper, and “PJs” stands for private jets instead of pyjamas. With his pleasing turn of phrase (these days he works as a screenwriter), Knott is a witty, observant guide.

Trapeze 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Gary Shteyngart’s fifth novel is set during the far-off-seeming “early days” of the Covid pandemic, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . Sasha Senderovsky, a successful Russian-born US novelist (like his creator), has retreated to his large house in upstate New York, accompanied by a group of friends. Their plan is to ride out lockdown together but, predictably, things go wrong.

Various housemates fall out with one another; “plenty of partner-swapping” occurs. If the basic conceit owes a lot to Chekhov, the novel’s boisterous, madcap comedy owes at least as much to A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Shteyngart has brilliantly captured the “almost maniacal aliveness” of the early pandemic. If anyone writes a funnier lockdown novel, “I will eat my face mask”.

There’s so much going on in this somewhat “messy” novel that at times it’s exhausting to read, said John Self in The Times . A “little more stillness” would have been welcome. Still, it exhibits Shteyngart’s trademark “feverish energy” – and the result is “often funny” and “sometimes moving”.

Allen & Unwin 336pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Michelle de Kretser’s slyly intelligent sixth novel pairs two first-person narratives,” said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . One is set in “dystopian near-future Melbourne” and follows Lyle, an immigrant who works for a sinister government agency created to deport immigrants. The other is set in 1981, and follows Lili, a 22-year-old Australian, during a carefree sojourn in the south of France. The link between the two narratives is mysterious – and even the order you read them in is “up to you”, on account of the book’s “reversible, Kindle-defying two-way design”.

The publisher has been “fastidious” in cooperating with de Kretser’s conceit, said Sam Leith in The Daily Telegraph : there are two front covers, two copyright pages, two sets of acknowledgements, and so on. “It’s sort of magnificent, and it’s also sort of gimmicky” – and it left me unsure if I was actually reading a novel, or simply two novellas yoked together. Perhaps, though, it doesn’t really matter. Filled with “apt quick literary brushstrokes and the gleam of humour”, both halves are equally “terrific”.

Allen & Unwin 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Tessa Hadley is justly lauded for “elevating the domestic novel to literary fiction” in her stories about the “shifting geometries” of middle-class families, said Mia Levitin in the FT . Free Love , her eighth novel, “adds a Sixties twist to Anna Karenina ”. Set in 1967, it centres on 40-year-old Phyllis Fischer, a well-off suburban housewife married to Roger, a senior civil servant. One summer night, twenty-something Nicky – the son of a family friend – comes to supper. He and Phyllis steal an “illicit kiss” – and embark on an affair. Leaving home without a forwarding address, Phyllis swaps her cosy life with Roger for “then-bohemian Ladbroke Grove” (where Nicky occupies a squalid bedsit). Hadley’s style is as “sumptuous” as ever, and her characterisations are superb. While this isn’t perhaps her best novel, its publication is a “cause for celebration”.

Hadley has been criticised for the “narrowness of her social concerns – her incorrigible preoccupation with Cecilias, Harriets and Rolands”, said James Marriott in The Times . So it’s gratifying that in this “beautiful and exciting” novel, she contrasts the bourgeois world with the “supremely undomesticated” 1960s counterculture.

Yet there’s a problem, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times : Hadley is far more at home among herbaceous borders than in the “pot-smoking” milieu of Nicky and his friends. Her depictions of the Swinging Sixties rarely rise above cliché – and “when she tries to capture the life of a black nurse whom Phyllis befriends, the writing becomes laboured”. You sense Hadley “itching to get back to the bourgeois suburbs” – and as this disappointing novel progressed, I wished I was back there with her.

Jonathan Cape 320pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Sarah Moss’s 2009 debut novel, Cold Earth , imagined an out-of-control virus, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . She returns to similar terrain with her latest novel – only this time with less need for invention. Set in November 2020, The Fell centres on Kate, a forty-something single mum, who “finally snaps” during a two-week quarantine period, and goes for a solitary walk in the Peak District. It’s “destined to be an ill-fated expedition”: the night draws in, Kate doesn’t return – and her absence is noticed by her teenage son Matt. With its vivid sense of “accumulating dread”, this is an “intense time capsule of a tale”.

Moss moves “gracefully” between various perspectives, said Sarah Ditum in The Times : that of Alice, an elderly neighbour; and Rob, a member of the mountain rescue team. Elegantly written and concise, The Fell is a “close-to-perfect” novel. Even though Moss has said it was written fast, the prose here feels “precision-tooled”, said Roger Cox in The Scotsman . Remarkably, in only 180 pages, she has captured “all of lockdown life”.

Picador 180pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

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The best book review sites for enthusiastic readers.

Book lovers, stop us if you’ve heard this one before: you’ve just finished a mind-blowing book and you need to hear some discussion about it. What do you do? Dive straight into the limitless realm of the Internet and search for book review sites, of course. 

Or here’s another scenario: you’ve finished reading a novel and now you’re searching for something to fill the void. Maybe you want more of the same, or maybe something completely different to switch things up. You’ll probably also scour the Internet for ratings and trustworthy recommendations. 

Fortunately, there are endless review blogs and book review sites that you can peruse. Un fortunately, not every one of them features a wide enough variety to help you. But don’t worry: we’ve got you covered with ten of the best book review sites to satisfy the bookworm in you. If you want to cut to the chase and get a personalized pick for a book review site in 30 seconds, we first recommend taking this quick quiz:

Which review community should you join?

Find out which review community is best for your style. Takes 30 seconds!

Then read on for the full explanation of all of the best book review sites out there!

1. Goodreads 

It’s impossible not to mention Goodreads when discussing book communities: it’s the Facebook of book reviews — the ultimate social media platform for bibliophiles. If you’ve somehow managed to go this long without stumbling upon this omnipresent site, here’s the run-down: you can use Goodreads to organize, display, and discuss your virtual bookshelf with other users. 

Goodreads recommendations are based on your listed interests. You can follow authors and book influencers ranging from Celeste Ng to Bill Gates . This allows you to see all their reviews, which vary from compact one-liners to critical analysis, and watch the new reviews roll in. For a quick verdict, just take a look at the star rating that they give the book. 

Also if you like to browse lists, Goodreads compiles the best and most popular books for every genre. There’s also the annual Goodreads’ Choice Awards to celebrate each year’s new releases, where you can cast your vote or peruse the list of contenders to find a new book to read. It’s a site for every kind of reader, with abundant ways to comment and interact. 

2. LibraryThing

This is the OG of all online book catalogues and discussion boards — take a look and you’ll see that it’s an oldie but a goodie. Of course, the basic functions of LibraryThing are rather similar to Goodreads: there are millions of books that readers can add to their lists, as well as review with star ratings.

While the interface harks back to the earlier days of the world wide web, LibraryThing has a secret weapon that’ll appeal to all readers, especially modern ones: their Zeitgeist . This page displays the latest crème de la crème of the whole site, from the most popular books to the hottest reviews , which you can also write with the help of a good book review template . Just a glance shows that the readers here know how to read between the lines and wield their words!

So if you’re hoping to read or share some in-depth literary thoughts with fellow sharp-minded users , LibraryThing is the site to browse. (You can even access it without creating an account!) 

3. Reedsy Discovery 

Now, if you’re searching for some hidden gems to peruse, Reedsy Discovery ’s got your back. While our blog features everything from classics to contemporary hits, Discovery’s specialty is indie publications, many of which are accompanied with succinct comments from experienced reviewers . There’s no better way to broaden your horizon! 

Moreover, if casual and creative reviews are more your cup of tea, then rejoice: the burgeoning community of readers on Discovery can leave comments, one-line reviews, and video reviews (calling all Booktubers!) on just about any book. It’s a fun and interactive way to geek out over your favorite reads and discover all the coolest new titles you won’t find anywhere else.

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4. LoveReading 

Though it’s UK-based, this prolific site caters to audiences around the world. LoveReading is strictly a reviewing site, with a base of staff writers and carefully selected contributors, so you know the reviews are top-notch. The staff often give quite personal reading experiences in their reviews, which make their recommendations very endearing, like they’re from a close friend. They even offer you presents — well, if you think of giveaways as presents! 

LoveReading covers books from every genre you can think of. They also have weekly, monthly, and yearly list features to keep you up to date with the latest stellar releases, so you’ll never be in want of something to pore over. 

5. The Millions 

In search of reviews that really dive into the themes, metaphors, and overall executions of interesting and highbrow books? The Millions has got you covered. 

Written by a collection of seasoned critics, these reviews are speckled with memorable quotes, elegant analysis, and plentiful comparisons to other works — which means extra reading recommendations for you! If contemporary and literary fictions are your go-tos, then The Millions is the site for all your lit nerd needs. 

6. SFBook Reviews 

Those who think quantity and quality don’t go hand in hand, you clearly haven’t encountered SFBook Review . The five reviewers on the team here share two common and important goals: firstly, to follow the outpour of new titles in the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres every year, and secondly, to give thoughtful reviews to as many of them as possible.

This team knows their SFF niches inside out, so their verdicts are very credible. Still, their reviews are quite friendly and personal — they discuss other related books and share their reading experiences to help you make your own reading choices. 

7. Bookpage

Bookpage features all kinds of genres: from children’s books to nonfiction, from the works of household names to debut authors, and so much more. Their format is neat and straightforward — they bring you the volumes they think are most worthwhile, recommending them to you by summarizing and concisely commenting on the prose, the theme, and the plot of each chosen book.

In addition to this, Bookpage also features author interviews and articles that unearth the deeper themes and purposes of certain books. If you’re a true book lover seeking like-minded literary aficionados, this may be the perfect place for you.

8. Book Riot 

Avid readers, you’ve probably stumbled upon Book Riot more times than you can remember. While it’s not a site that individually assesses titles, it has lists for everything — from timeless literary giants to the top books in each genre. What’s more, Book Riot has lots of thinkpieces that dive deep into the way certain titles make readers feel — be it exhilarated, motivated, or enraged — and that’s really all you need to know when deciding to embark on a new reading adventure. 

Additionally, if you’d rather listen to discussions and reviews rather than read them, you'll be happy to know that Book Riot has a range of podcasts for you to choose from. 

9. NetGalley 

NetGalley is another platform bringing you new and unconventional recommendations. They specialize in connecting authors who are publishing to readers who’d like to preview and put in their two cents. While the database of books available here are not the most expansive, those that are featured are certainly worth your time. 

Readers can benefit most from NetGalley via their book recommendation site, Bookish , where the staff reviewers update you with their recent reads and in-depth thoughts on those reads. Along with that, Bookish also has book club kits, equipped with comprehension questions and discussion points, to help readers explore stories mindfully. 

10. BookBub

While it’s very similar to Goodreads, BookBub focuses more on connecting readers to books that might suit them specifically — which is partly why you’ll see plenty of bargains and deals promoted on the site.

Because of this promotional value, BookBub has quite a strong author community. Diana Gabaldon and Gillian Flynn , for instance, are constantly recommending books on their accounts. So if you’d like to tag along with your favorite author, this is an excellent website to visit. The only drawback of BookBub is that they only have community reviews from users based in the US, and you have to sign up in order to read them. 

With these ten sites, you’ll be sure to find your little community of fellow book lovers regardless of what your interests are. Here’s to exciting TBR lists and nourished minds!

If you want to try your hand at reviewing, we’ve got a little guide to help you out ! On the other hand, if you want to plough away at your books, why not consider the Kindle Cloud Reader ?

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Three sisters uncover family secrets – while the whole world drowns

The strange new novel by Salt Slow author Julia Armfield begins as a futuristic family drama – before slipping into folk horror

Julia Armfield’s element is water. In her debut collection, Salt Slow (2019), the title story was set in a drowning world, a near-future of apocalyptic flooding. Her first novel, Our Wives Under the Sea (2022) – which won the Polari Prize last year – was the story of a couple sundered by ocean: Leah, a marine biologist, doesn’t return from an expedition to the deep sea for six months, and Miri, her wife, must deal with her absence, then the tidal forces of her return. Both books played with the supernatural, with horror, peeling back layers of the real to show the strangeness just below the water’s glittering surface. 

In Private Rites, Armfield returns to the idea of a civilisation approaching collapse, and slipping away into liquid. This novel is set in a near-future that, if you experienced this English spring, may seem eerily familiar. The rain won’t stop. The sky is always lidded with cloud. Fantasy role-playing games no longer involve battles and elves, but sunshine and a dream of normality that’s still recent enough to be recalled. Mowing the lawn in sunlight, hosepipe bans – these are objects of nostalgia. Urban quick-fixes have been installed then abandoned: for a while, cable cars ran over the rising water, but now they’ve been submerged, or are nearly there. 

One man seemed to have the vision to encompass the crisis in this changing world: Stephen Carmichael, an architect who designs expensive, climate-resistant homes, all hard edges and poured concrete, and comes across as Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright as envisioned by JG Ballard: “His structures allowed their inhabitants to ignore their surroundings, turn inward and forget, though for a price very few could afford.” As the novel opens, Carmichael has just died; it is left to his three daughters, Irene, Isla and Agnes, to reckon with his legacy – who inherits what, and why – as the environment deliquesces.

Armfield’s tale is told in the third person from the alternating perspectives of the women; occasionally a voice headed as “City” interjects with brief descriptions of life lived amid disintegration. “You can hear it if you listen; the slow dissolution, the panic becoming something else.” This dissolution finds echoes in the relationship between the sisters, which is tainted by the mistrust born of growing up in a household of secrets. The two older sisters’ mother is dead; Agnes’s mother disappeared. “They were children in a house ill-made for children and allowed the wrongness of this feeling to explain too many other strange, wrong things.” 

Carmichael’s design for the house the women grew up in – made of poured concrete floors and glass, and supported on struts that sense the rise of water then adjust accordingly – is the opposite of cosy, and it’s clear that his emotional landscape was equally stark. As a result, the women are held back in their own emotional lives, their romantic relationships stunted by coldness. This is particularly striking in Agnes’s case, as she is pulled towards affection for Stephanie, a legal temp who’s the warmest, least affected character in the novel – but resists the pull. 

Private Rites is a strange, unsatisfying novel; perhaps it’s trying to do too many things at once. It’s hard to resist the sensation that the matter that would have had the most resonance – what it was like for these girls to grow up in this household, what was really going on in the adults’ lives – happened before the novel begins. Irene, Isla and Agnes are hard to distinguish one from the other, equally expressive of a kind of bitter anomie. And Carmichael, as described, only comes across as a generic mean father: “The way he could be funny, genial, then breathtakingly cruel.” Nothing new to see there. 

The climate crisis, meanwhile, reads as background noise, a plot device that comes in handy at the end when the plot tips – puzzlingly – into something like folk horror. The themes that haunt Armfield are never fully fleshed out. At the end, certain images linger in the mind: the pylons and slack cables of the abandoned transportation system; the creaking, shifting metal legs of a house that senses the rising tide. Yet the characters, drowned by their author’s intricate intention, only sputter out.

Private Rites is published by Fourth Estate at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99 call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books

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13 best horror books that will send a chill up your spine

From bone-chilling thrillers to grisly tales, you’ll be sleeping with the light on by the end of these horror books, article bookmarked.

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There’s nothing like a good creepy story to scare the living daylights out of you – there’s a reason we’ve been indulging in ghost stories and tales of the supernatural since ancient times. If you’re a fan of a fright-night thrill, you’ll be pleased to hear we’ve rounded up the best horror books of all time.

From tormented spirits to soul-eating demons and everything in between, nearly every culture has some form of horror story designed to spark fear.

Although spooky season is still a few months away, you don’t need to wait until Halloween to pick up a book  that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. To help you whittle down the options, we’ve reviewed some of the most chilling tomes within the horror genre.

Our list is by no means exhaustive – there are thousands of excellent novels spanning all sorts of themes and genres (techno-horror or femslash, anyone?). There is also plenty of debate about what can be classified as “horror”.

For this round-up, all but one of the books we’ve chosen have some element of the supernatural, whether that be ghosts or witchcraft. We’ve also tried to include books from across the spectrum, to appeal to as many readers as possible. If the book gave us the creeps, we’ve included it.

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How we tested the best horror books

Not all books are created equal. We’ve flipped through many pages to find books that don’t rely on tropes and vague storytelling, while also keeping us engaged with the story throughout. Most importantly, we looked for stories that were truly scary and left us with a sense of unease long after we reached the final page.

The best horror books for 2024 are:

• Best horror book overall − The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell, published by Raven Books: £9.19, Amazon.co.uk
• Best for ghost stories − Ghost edited by Louise Welsh, published by Head of Zeus: £14.15, Amazon.co.uk
• Best classic horror book − We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, published by Penguin Classics: £8.96, Amazon.co.uk
• Best horror for beginners − The Shining by Stephen King, published by Hodder Paperbacks: £10.11, Amazon.co.uk
• Best weird fiction book − Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird , edited by Mike Ashley, published by British Library Publishing: £9.19, Amazon.co.uk

‘The Silent Companions’ by Laura Purcell, published by Raven Books

• Best : Horror book overall
• Pages : 384

Our list begins with Laura Purcell’s haunting work The Silent Companions . This gorgeously written novel tells the story of The Bridge, a crumbling estate in the countryside that is plagued by wooden figures that resemble the inhabitants. The eerie, and at times, downright horrifying, story is told through three timelines: the newly widowed Elsie in 1865; dairies written at The Bridge during the 17th century, and, eventually, back to Elsie, who is now rendered mute, accused of multiple murders and interred in a psychiatric ward sometime later.

All the elements of gothic horror are here – a secluded mansion in the countryside, eternal rain and creepy goings-on – but the book also hints at witchcraft and demonic happenings. While the ending is perhaps a little predictable, Purcell’s gift for creating a stifling atmosphere that slowly builds into something very sinister by the final page makes this a must-read.

Bone China (£8.27, Amazon ) is also a good option, if you find yourself wanting more of Purcell’s work.

‘White is For Witching’ by Helen Oyeyemi, published by Picador

• Best : Haunted-house horror book
• Pages : 256

You might think the haunted-house novel has been done to death (sorry), but Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching is a wonderfully tragic take on the genre. The book begins with a question: where is Miranda? Young Miri – who is suffering from an eating disorder that causes her to literally consume parts of the family home – is missing, and it appears the house, a mysterious dwelling near the cliffs of Dover, might have something to do with it.

We witness Miranda’s spiral in graphic detail, from multiple viewpoints, including her twin and the house itself, while the story is made even more chilling by impossible passageways, hints of witchcraft and a house hell-bent on consuming its victim. Oyeyemi is skilled at blending horror and tragedy, and is definitely one to read.

Shiver by Junji Ito, published by Viz Media

• Best : Graphic novel horror book
• Pages : 392

Japanese mangaka Junji Ito, considered to be a master of the macabre and the grotesque, has been scaring people with his creations since 1987. Our reviewer previously recommended Uzumaki (£28, Waterstones ), a twisted tale of a town haunted not by ghosts or demons but by spirals. However, for this round-up, we’ve decided to include Shiver , a collection of Ito’s most beloved, and chilling, stories chosen by the artist himself. Our reviewer’s favourite ones were “Marionette Mansion”, about a knife-wielding puppet with a penchant for holding grudges, and “Grease”, a story that will have you reaching for the nearest facial cleanser (and probably swearing off oil forever). This beautifully illustrated manga collection is grotesque, unsettling and, depending on which story you read, truly horrifying.

‘The Dangers of Smoking in Bed' by Mariana Enriquez, published by Granta Books

• Best : Urban horror book
• Pages : 208

If the gorgeous cover isn’t enough to give you the creeps, the many twisted tales in this book certainly will. Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, this collection of horror stories explores a nightmarish version of modern-day Buenos Aires, through the women who reside there. While fetishes for beating hearts, and madness induced by the ghosts of dead children might not be reality for most, the topics explored by Enriquez here are dark and very much real. It should be noted that, as this book deals with so many real-life horrors – more so than any other book on this list – readers should be careful if they want to avoid certain triggers. If you’re after stories that don’t shy away from the brutalities of urban living – and have the added bonus of being laced with feminism – this is the book for you.

‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (Penguin Clothbound Classics) by Oscar Wilde, published by Penguin Classics

• Best : Gothic horror book
• Pages : 252

A classic of the gothic horror genre, Oscar Wilde’s novel was considered so debauched it sent moralistic Victorians into a frenzy and was even used as “evidence” in his 1895 public indecency trial. The Picture of Dorian Gray explores the terrifying effect greed and vanity can have if allowed to consume a person. The novel tells the story of its titular character who becomes obsessed with his own portrait and sells his soul in exchange for eternal youth and beauty. One corrupt double life later, in which he indulges in every impulse (immoral or not), only his portrait shows the true evil that lies under Dorian’s flawless exterior. The horror here is very much psychological, but that’s not to say Wilde hasn’t created an eerie study of morality and decadence.

'Coraline’ by Neil Gaiman, published by Bloomsbury Publishing

• Best : Children’s horror book
• Pages : 192

If you’re looking for a way to introduce little ones to the horror genre without traumatising them, Coraline , Neil Gaiman’s novel about parallel worlds and missing children, is a great choice (an excellent one for adults, too).

The titular character is a young girl who discovers there is another world behind a small door in her house where Other Mother and Other Father live. They have buttons where their eyes should be and want Coraline to be their daughter in their fantastical world. It soon becomes clear she is in grave danger and must use all her wits to escape. If you’ve seen Henry Selick’s 2009 adaptation, you’ll know this is a wonderfully sinister tale involving creepy houses with dark secrets and sinister monsters who steal and eat souls.

'Something Wicked This Way Comes’ by Ray Bradbury, published by Orion Publishing

• Best : Dark fantasy horror book
• Pages : 288

When it comes to quintessential fantasy horror books, this is high up on the list. When Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show arrives in town, malevolent individuals appear and strange happenings occur. After being drawn in by promises of adventure, the two young protagonists, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, must fight Mr Dark and his carnival of mirrored mazes and time-twisting carousels to escape. This wonderfully creepy novel will have you hoping for the circus to come to town.

‘Nothing but Blackened Teeth’ by Cassandra Khaw, published by Titan Books

• Best : Horror novella
• Pages : 128

This wonderfully creepy novella, written by Cassandra Khaw, sees five people stuck in a haunted house in Japan because someone has decided they simply must get married in a building that may or may not have thousands of girls buried in the walls. One ill-advised séance later and all hell breaks loose – you’ll have to read it to find out what happens next. The book draws heavily on various elements of Japanese folklore and historical practices, combining them to create this claustrophobic and nightmarish take on haunted houses. Our only critique is that the book assumes the reader has knowledge of Japanese words and phrases and doesn’t really explain certain aspects. Otherwise, this a haunting (we’ll stop) read that won’t take you hours to get through.

‘Ghost’ edited by Louise Welsh, published by Head of Zeus

• Best : For ghost stories
• Pages : 816

Who doesn’t love a good ghost story? Individuals who refuse to move on from this world is a classic trope of horror fiction, but that doesn’t mean such tales are boring. This collection of 100 stories will definitely get you in the spirit for tales of disembodied souls. The collection, chosen by award-winning author Louise Welsh, includes everything from ancient tales to Victorian greats to more-modern creations. This is quite a hefty book (coming in at more than 800 pages), so, this is more of a read-under-the-covers-in-the-dark sort of thing. The range of authors in this collection is also noteworthy: everyone from Charles Dickens to Hilary Mantel feature, while surprising names such as JG Ballard and Kazuo Ishiguro offer up their best takes on ghostly spectres.

‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ by Shirley Jackson, published by Penguin Classics

• Best : Classic horror book
• Pages : 158

Shirley Jackson has long been considered a significant voice in the genre, ever since the release of her short story The Lottery in 1948. However, her final novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle is arguably her masterpiece. Sisters Merricat and Constance live as recluses in the Blackwood family home, the latter having been acquitted of murdering the rest of the family with arsenic. Both live as outcasts in society, with Constance suffering from agoraphobia, which left her unable to leave the house for six years. Jackson made a lasting career from her ghost stories, but the only spectre to be found in her final novel is that of isolation. Whether it’s the house’s smothering emptiness or their estrangement from wider society, the feeling of loneliness is all-encompassing and deeply unsettling.

Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird, edited by Mike Ashley, published by British Library Publishing

• Best : Weird fiction book
• Pages : 352

All too often, women are written out of history, and it’s no surprise the horror genre is just as susceptible. We’ve chosen to include Queens of the Abyss , an anthology that collects previously unpublished stories from the “weird fiction” genre, a somewhat vague term that refers to stories that blend elements of horror, fantasy and sometimes even sci-fi. HP Lovecraft, with his cosmic horror creations, is considered the father of weird, but many women were penning tales of the uncanny, too.

This collection has stories from Frances Hodgson Burnett (yes, of The Secret Garden fame) and a whole host of authors from the late 19th and early 20th century, so, you’ll be guaranteed to find something that floats your boat. The book itself is part of the immense “Tales of the Weird” collection published by the British Library. The series, which is on 48 books and counting, collects tales on everything from killer plants (£9.99, British Library ) to technology behaving badly (£9.99, Amazon ). The beautifully designed covers alone should be enough to make you pick up a copy and get reading.

‘The Shining’ by Stephen King, published by Hodder Paperbacks

• Best : Horror for beginners
• Pages : 512

Sometimes, you just want a straightforward horror story to get lost in, not a tome full of vague descriptions or ridiculous plots that indulge in the worst of horror’s excesses. This is where Stephen King, one of horror’s modern masters, comes in. His 1977 novel The Shining is legendary – and for good reason. Chaos and axe-wielding ensues when the Torrance family move to The Overlook Hotel, a building swimming with evil spirits, and recovering alcoholic Jack, the hotel’s new caretaker, is slowly driven to insanity by supernatural forces. King’s wonderfully sinister tale is a good introduction for those wanting to get started in the horror genre and even seasoned readers will find something in this bizarre and unsettling world. 

‘Cursed’ edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane, published by Titan Books

• Best : Anthology

Who doesn’t love a story with a good curse? Whether it’s a “plague on both your houses” à la Shakespeare or an ancient malediction rearing its ugly head, curses are the bread and butter of horror. This thrilling anthology of short stories, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane, explores them in all (gory) shapes and sizes. Both authors have done a great job curating stories from an eclectic mix of modern writers, including Neil Gaiman, Christina Henry, and Charlie Jane Anders. Our reviewer found “Skin” by James Brogden, in which a man pays the ultimate price for judging someone with a skin condition, particularly disturbing (in the best horror book way).

The verdict: Horror books

It all depends on what you want from your horror reading – are you looking for supernatural elements? Are you more interested in the themes being discussed in the story? Are you looking for things outside the box? While we’d recommend every book in this list , The Silent Companions is likely to tick most people’s boxes – it’s got horror, emotion and beautifully written prose (not to mention the stunning cover). For something a bit different, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is an excellent choice. Finally, if you’re someone who wants all the horror stories you can get your hands on, then Ghost , simply for the sheer number of its pages, is a top choice.

Need help choosing your next read? Take inspiration from the Booker Prize shortlist or the Women’s Prize for Fiction

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Historical Fiction

Grab a Lemonade and Turn Back the Clock With These Stories of Yore

The days are long, but this summer’s bounty of historical fiction will remind you that the years are short.

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By Alida Becker

Alida Becker was an editor at the Book Review for 30 years. She was the first winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for excellence in reviewing.

There are times and places when reality becomes utterly surreal. Consider, for example, the trenches of World War I, which Katherine Arden invests with a brilliantly spooky aura in THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS (Del Rey, 324 pp., $28.99). Her heroine is a Canadian nurse, furloughed after being wounded, who has returned to the Belgian battlefields in search of her brother, missing in action and presumed dead. But there are others haunting this “forbidden zone,” and at least one of them is intent on some very devilish manipulation.

The spectral voice in Katya Apekina’s tragicomic MOTHER DOLL (Overlook, 320 pp., $28) is Irina, the great-grandmother of Zhenia, a feckless would-be actress stuck in Los Angeles during the early stages of a pregnancy her husband would rather ignore. When a psychic contacts her out of the blue, Zhenia embarks on a long-distance visit to the Russian Revolution via her domineering ancestor’s tales. Irina, it turns out, is seeking forgiveness for past actions and abandonments that have warped mother-daughter relations for three generations. Will these revelations arrive in time to spare a fourth?

Apekina’s novel illuminates a crucial historical event from the perspective of a few minor players. This is also the tactic Cristina Henríquez employs in THE GREAT DIVIDE (Ecco, 336 pp., $30), set in early-20th-century Panama during the vast canal-building project. Her focus is not on the outsiders intent on reshaping the isthmus but on the local people whose lives — and livelihoods — will be reshaped in the process. Chief among these are Omar, a young workman on an excavation crew whose fisherman father dreads the changes he sees coming, and Ada, a teenager from Barbados who has smuggled herself into the country, desperate to earn money to pay for her sister’s medical care.

In Flora Carr’s THE TOWER (Doubleday, 272 pp., $28), the action is focused on smuggling out. The tower in question is part of a windswept castle on an island in 16th-century Scotland and the person in need of clandestine removal is Mary, Queen of Scots, held prisoner by her enemies, who have forced her to abdicate, leaving them to rule on behalf of her infant son. By restricting the novel to the 11 months Mary spends confined with two lowly servants and a single noble companion, Carr manages to provide fresh insight into a historical figure whose story would appear to have already been thoroughly mined.

Is there a character in English literature more easily pigeonholed — and vilified — than Lady Macbeth? In ALL OUR YESTERDAYS (Putnam, 368 pp., $28), Joel H. Morris revisits the medieval woman who inspired Shakespeare and gives her a sympathetic back story. Married in her teens to an abusive older man, this daughter of the aristocracy finds herself caught in a never-ending cycle of violence and vengeance. She and Macbeth have no children, but the son she bore to her murdered first husband figures into a curse she will try, without success, to escape.

The effort it took for the poet Elizabeth Barrett to escape her overprotective family is at the heart of Laura McNeal’s THE SWAN’S NEST (Algonquin, 320 pp., $29). An invalid confined for years to her bedroom, Barrett falls in love with the writing of Robert Browning, whose letters to her trigger an impassioned epistolary romance. Their eventual meeting and elopement are depicted from the perspectives of both the Barretts and the Brownings, yielding a delicately shaded portrait of a marriage only Elizabeth and Robert could perhaps have envisioned.

The young women in Helen Simonson’s latest novel might be affronted by such a protracted, interference-filled courtship. Set in the immediate aftermath of World War I, THE HAZELBOURNE LADIES MOTORCYCLE AND FLYING CLUB (Dial Press, 420 pp., $29) has a whole pack of them reveling in the freedoms they attained while the men were off fighting — and bristling when those freedoms evaporate in peacetime. With the same sort of affectionate wit she deployed in “ Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand ,” Simonson directs an unconventional cast through an intrigue-filled summer at an English seaside resort, yielding the closest the historical novel may come to what mystery readers call a “cozy.”

World War II was the formative experience for the Williamson sisters, nonagenarian British veterans being shepherded through various present-day commemorative ceremonies by their indulgent great-nephew in CJ Wray’s THE EXCITEMENTS (Morrow, 304 pp., paperback, $19.99). In a wild adventure that belongs on the shelf with “ Travels With My Aunt ,” discreet and dapper Archie discovers that their joint visit to Paris will reveal more of the secret — occasionally larcenous — past experiences of these doddering but hardly dotty ladies.