We’re saying hello to summer with a selection of new fiction releases that are sure to keep you gripped from park to poolside.
We all know the old adage about not judging books by the cover, but what about the impact a name can have? That’s the question posed in one of the highlights of this month’s list. There’s also a sharp, funny exploration of culture, power and consent, emotionally searing takes on relationships and family in all their forms, a thrilling ride through one friendship group’s attempts at making their fortune in cryptocurrency – and one very special sexual fetish. Enjoy!
Bring the House Down, Charlotte Runcie
Baby Reindeer meets MeToo in Runcie’s razor-sharp debut. Set over the four-week span of the Edinburgh Fringe, it’s narrated by newspaper culture writer Sophie, a young mother only recently returned to work from maternity leave who’s been sent to cover the festival with the paper’s embittered yet charming theatre critic, Alex. When Alex sleeps with a performer having just filed a brutal one-star review of her show, the actress, Hayley, retaliates with a swift, sarcastic rewrite that puts Alex at its centre, turning it into a five-star sensation overnight. As the sold-out run continues, more women come forward with tales of Alex’s sexual misdemeanours and bad behaviour, turning Alex into a pariah – and Sophie very quickly into his only friend. But her feelings towards him are far from uncomplicated. As the festival builds to its climax the stage is set for a series of personal and professional reckonings. Runcie presents all sides of the argument in her multistranded tale with depth and emotional intelligence in a novel that is both tender and furious – not to mention very, very funny – with the festival brought so vividly to life, it’s almost like being there. It’s a solid five stars all round.
The Benefactors, Wendy Erskin
Set in modern-day Northern Ireland, Erskin’s debut novel tells the story of a working-class teenage girl, Misty, who has accused three young men of sexual assault during a party. They are the sons of three very different wealthy and privileged women who come together to shield their families from the fallout of Misty’s accusations. Misty’s family, meanwhile, are looking to fight their battle in their own way. That description, however, fails to capture the astonishing feat of polyphonic storytelling Erskin deploys across the narrative, which gives a voice to dozens of the town’s residents and onlookers into the drama unfolding around them. Serving as a kind of modern-day Greek chorus, they offer observations and personal stories that add texture and detail to build a complex and nuanced picture of both the central drama and much wider issues around class and society, leaving the moral judgements and opining very much up to the reader to decide. Just brilliant.
Ever since her first turbulent flight triggered her teenage sexual awakening, Linda has believed it is her singular destiny to find and ‘marry’ her soulmate plane – by dying in a fatal crash. Despite squirrelling away every penny she earns in her job as an online content moderator to fly as often as she can, that destiny remains frustratingly elusive until friend and colleague Karina invites Linda to join her friends at vision-boarding brunch to manifest whatever her heart desires. And so we enter the weird, wild, wonderful world of Sky Daddy. Folk dials up the comedy with a perfectly straight face, taking Linda’s passions and proclivities seriously to create an absurdly sharp satire of contemporary culture that is tender, funny and wise.
The Names, Florence Knapp
Knapp’s clever debut novel plays ‘what if’ with nominative determinism in a three-stranded narrative that tests the theory that we are all, to some degree, defined by the names we’re given. It’s 1987 and Cora is on her way to officially register her newborn son’s birth. Her husband, Gordon, is determined that he be named after him, as family tradition dictates. Cora’s own preference would be to call him Julian, while her nine-year-old daughter suggests Bear. From there, the story unfolds in alternating chapters that follow Gordon/Julian/Bear’s life across the decades, revealing the impact of Cora’s decision on that crucial day. Knapp weaves the threads of her narrative seamlessly, writing with a lightness of touch that doesn’t shy away from the sensitivities of the darker aspects of her characters’ journeys – through, grief, addiction, domestic violence and more. It all adds up to a superb book-club read that’s already proving itself to be one of this year’s literary big-hitters. What’s in a name, indeed.
The Propagandist, Cécile Desprairies
Celebrated French historian Desprairies draws on her own dark family history (her mother was a propagandist for the fascist Vichy France regime during WWII) as the set-up for this, her debut novel. Set in 1960s post-war Paris, it offers a child’s eye view of its narrator’s mother, aunts and grandmother preening and gossiping and complaining during their daily descents on her family home. Both fascinated and confused by these visits, it’s not until she comes across her mother’s old identity card that the girl realises her mother had been married before and begins to piece together the family’s complicated political past – and the role its members played as supporters of Nazi Germany. Desprairies’ prose is precise to the point of scathing, but it makes no attempt to preach to or manipulate its readers. Rather, we’re invited to draw our own conclusions from its unsettling glimpse into the fascist mindset and the beliefs and entitlement that come with it. Fascinating.
Award-winning writer Sams made a justifiably big splash with Send Nudes, her debut collection of furious and funny feminist short stories. In this, her first novel, she prises out some of the ideas – around love, expectation, young womanhood and more – in a thoughtful, knotty investigation into motherhood, love and belonging. The story is narrated by Jules, who we meet at the top of the novel when she’s left quite literally holding the baby after the child’s mother does a flit from hospital, then work our way back from there – to the Gunk of the title that is the name of the rundown Brighton nightclub where Jules works alongside her womanising ex-husband, Leon. When Jules hires the young, mysterious Nim to tend bar, the pair begin to form a tentative friendship, throwing Jules’s small, disappointed life into disarray, leading to a tangled emotional reckoning that may well be the making or breaking of all of them.
Sunstruck, William Rayfet Hunter
When a young, working-class British Jamaican accepts an invitation to holiday in the south of France at the summer home of Lily, a friend from university, the experience proves to be lifechanging – not only is he introduced to a previously unimaginable level of privilege, he falls fast into a deep passionate relationship with Lily’s charismatic brother Felix. But can the intoxication of their summer romance survive a move to London and the next step into their adult lives? William Rayfet Hunter’s tale of class, race, ambition and power is richly evoked and quietly furious, building from its Saltburn-like beginnings into a roar about the state of modern Britain that never loses sight of the questions around family, friendship and belonging at its emotional core.
The Book of Guilt, Catherine Chidgey
The ghost of Ishiguro’s dystopian classic Never Let Me Go hangs heavy over New Zealand author Chidgey’s latest novel. It’s 1979 in rural southern England and in a rundown house at the edge of the New Forest, things are not quite as they seem. The building is home to identical triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William, who are tended to by three ‘mothers’ with their every move and dream noted and recorded. They are the last remaining residents of the state-funded experimental Sycamore Homes, the functions of which become gradually, creepily clear. While the boys do their best to beat ‘the bug’ that endless rounds of medicine never quite seem to quash and dream of being well enough to be sent to ‘the big house’ in Margate, we move beyond their village to meet single-child Nancy, whose loving parents keep her prisoner in her home and the member of Her Majesty’s government who has been tasked with bringing Sycamore Homes to a close. If anything, there’s almost too much going on, but Chidgey keeps control of the many strands of her narrative to weave an unsettling and affecting read.
Trinidadian author Adam’s follow up to her acclaimed debut Golden Child tells the story of a woman’s search for the daughter she gave up for adoption decades before. After becoming pregnant as a teenager, Dawn was smuggled from her Caribbean home to Venezuela to birth in secret in a bid to avoid bringing shame to her family, after which she established a new life for herself in England. Now divorced with two grown-up sons, she lives a quiet and, in many ways, contented life, but remains haunted by what might have become of her lost daughter. When she’s informed of a potential match by one of the adoption websites she uses in the hope of tracing her way back to her first child, Dawn is once again drawn into her past and the memories and regrets that have shaped her. A slow, quiet, affecting look at mistakes made, and what family – in all its forms – means.
Ordinary Love, Marie Rutkoski
Mother-of-two Emily has just separated from her volatile, emotionally abusive husband and is struggling to establish a new life for herself when she runs into Olympic athlete Gen – her one-time school friend and first love – at a party. The pair reconnect, but will they be able to move beyond their troubled history together and get a second chance at love? Rutkoski paints a vivid picture of both past and present in a sweeping, decades-spanning tale of queer desire and thwarted ambition as we plot each woman’s respective paths to their current situation. Beautifully rendered and touchingly told, this is one for romance fans everywhere.
Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong
Vuong’s lyrical and much lauded debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, turned the Vietnamese-American poet into an international literary sensation. This, it’s follow-up, is a bigger story in every sense. A sprawling tale of immigration, addiction, ill health and the impact of the failing US health system on working class Middle America, we meet college dropout and prescription pill popper Hai – a Vietnamese refugee recently returned to the rundown Connecticut town of East Gladness where he grew up – as he’s stopped from taking a fatal dive from a bridge. His rescuer? Octogenarian widow Grazina, a Lithuanian immigrant falling prey to dementia. The pair set up house together with Hai taking a job in a fast-casual food restaurant that opens us to another broad sweep of quirky, yet salt-of-the-earth characters to create a funny, moving tableau of America’s contemporary working class.
Bitter Honey, Caryl Lewis
A three-time winner of The Welsh Book of the Year Award, Lewis’s latest release is an assured, sensitively told tale of three women – estranged sisters Hannah and Sadie and an unknown younger woman – brought together by the secrets revealed in the wake of the death of Hannah’s husband, an academic and beekeeper. The novel is part-narrated through a series of letters left for Hannah that give structure to the novel and do much to inform its backstory using the ‘language’ of bees and nature’s cycle to help explain her husband’s actions to his grieving wife. The real power of the story, however, is not in the cause, but its effect as, having finally been freed in their various ways from the constraints of traditional family models and expectations, all three women develop the strength and knowledge to shape their own desires and destinies.
While trigger warnings have become a regular feature in book publishing, the disclaimer at the top of South Korean author Ryujin’s debut novel that this book ‘is not intended as financial or investment advice’, is a first for us. Then again, this modern-day fairy tale is centred on a very modern-day premise: the rollercoaster world of cryptocurrency. It tells the story of three very different friends and co-workers who work in low-level jobs at a confectionary company and yearn for financial independence. The financial risk-taker of the group, Eun-Sang, urges narrator Dahae (who is desperate to move to a bigger apartment) to throw all her savings into crypto, even while the third member of their group, Jisong, holds out. As the pair chase their way through the rises and falls of this most volatile of markets, Jisong finally joins them, only for the market to crash. The trio hold on for dear life – will they be able to take it to the moon as they dream of doing or is a sudden – and lethal – fall to earth set to be their fate?
Consider Yourself Kissed, Jessica Stanley
Australian author Jessica Stanley’s first novel to be published in the UK marries heart and head in a decade-spanning novel that parallels the ups and downs of one couple’s relationship against the ups and downs of British politics. London-based Aussie Coralie has only recently moved to London when she meets – and swiftly falls for – Adam, an ambitious political journalist and divorced single father of one, in 2013. And yes, it is as tender, funny, serious – and at times frustratingly ‘real’ (Brexit, Boris and the pandemic all get their moment on the page) – as all that suggests. Yet Stanley keeps the couple – and Coralie’s feelings – front and centre throughout in a funny, moving romantic saga for the modern age.
Failed Summer Vacation, Heuijung Hur
Another South Korean writer with an acclaimed pedigree, Hur was awarded the prestigious Korean Literature and Society New Writer Award and this, her first collection of short stories is rightly described as ‘genre defying’. From missed meetings and opportunities to surreal, almost dreamlike tales, she weaves a fascinating narrative web. And while not every one’s a winner, there’s more than enough to intrigue and delight to keep you coming back for more.