Contemporary Fiction Books

Book SynopsisThis is a story of silenced histories, of dark secrets in a land of midnight sun. Finnish Lapland, 1947: Inkeri arrives in remote Enontekiö on a journalistic assignment, but her real motivation is more personal - this is where her husband was last seen before he disappeared during the war. As her probing questions meet with silence and hostility, Inkeri begins to investigate the fault-lines in this small community. Her burgeoning friendship with a young Sámi girl helps her piece together why the town does not want to dwell on the past, as traces of disturbing crimes emerge from the pristine landscape of snow and ice.Trade Review'Reveals so much more about a war we thought we knew that it feels like a potted epic' - Guardian'Evocative... an amalgam of detective story and history, which absorbs the reader from start to finish' - TLS'A beautifully written novel and a thriller that will keep readers turning the page to find out the truth about this disgraceful chapter of Finnish history' - Harvard Review'A strong, intense thriller plot... depicts the controversial landscape of 1940s Lapland ambitiously and beautifully' - Helsingin Sanomat'Beautiful... a chapter in history that has rarely been visible in fiction... Rautiainen succeeds in describing the history of Finland's colonization and also gives a voice to the Sami' - Loostas

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Book Synopsis'Meet Sweden's Sally Rooney' The Times 'A wry bestseller that reads like the effortlessly chic European cousin of Fleishman is in Trouble'Telegraph 'Thrilling, brilliant and immense in the best possible way... teeming with ideas and digressions on literature, art, history and love' Francesca Reece, author of Voyeur 'Compelling, tense and moving - I loved this smart and subtle exploration of modern motherhood and womanhood' Daisy Buchanan, author of Insatiable 'Vibrating with intelligence and style' Emily Temple, author of The Lightness ________________ In the long run, it was impossible to hide the fact that Cecilia had one day decided to leave her children and her husband, to take off and never come back. Martin Berg is slowly falling into crisis. Decades ago, he was an aspiring writer who'd almost finished his novel, his girlfriend was the wildly intelligent and beautiful Cecilia Wickner, and his best friend was the up-and-coming artist Gustav Becker. But Martin's manuscript has long been languishing in a desk drawer, Gustav has stopped answering his calls, and Cecilia has been missing for years - ever since she vanished from his life, leaving him to raise their two young children alone. So who was Cecilia? Martin's eccentric wife, Gustav's enigmatic muse, an absent mother - a woman who was perhaps only true to herself. When Martin's daughter Rakel stumbles across a clue about what happened to her mother, she becomes determined to fill in the gaps in her family's story. But she can't escape the simple question at the heart of it all: How can anyone leave someone they love? ________________ '[Collected Works] will suck you in and refuse to let go' LitHub 'A richly evocative work from a major new talent' Kirkus Reviews 'A sweeping and complex drama of family, art and sacrifice... Readers will be captivated' Publishers Weekly '[A] warm, engaging and funny novel about the inebriation of youth and the sobriety of middle age... a thoroughly enjoyable book' Aysegül Savas, author of White on WhiteTrade Review'The hottest debut of the year! If Klas Ostergren and Donna Tartt had had a love child, who grew up in Gothenburg and became an author, well, there you have Lydia Sandgren' - Akademibokhandeln'A masterpiece, just as bold as any Donna Tartt novel, but at the same time calm and precise... Everything is captured. Tender, and terribly convincing' - Expressen'Lydia Sandgren has written this year's most talked about - perhaps the millennium's most talked about - debut' - Dagens Nyheter'Neat as in a perfectly composed pop song - catchy, bombastic, irresistable...What's left to say, therefore, is just that we hope that it doesn't take another ten years for Sandgren to write her next book' - Weekendavisen (Denmark)'Lydia Sandgren is a debut author, but she writes this novel as if she's done nothing else for decades' - Svenska Dagbladet

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Book Synopsis'HOW CAN ANYONE LEAVE SOMEONE THEY LOVE?'Martin Berg is falling into crisis. Decades ago, he was an aspiring writer, his girlfriend was the wildly intelligent Cecilia Wickner, and his best friend was the hellraising artist Gustav Becker. But Martin's manuscript is now languishing in a drawer, Gustav has stopped answering his calls, and Cecilia has vanished - leaving him to raise their children alone. Cecilia: an eccentric wife and absent mother, a woman who was perhaps only true to herself. When Rakel stumbles across a clue as to why her mother left, she sets out to fill the gaps in her family's story and discovers that some questions have no clear answers...

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Book Synopsis'A rich, surprising and devastating story of a female institution long-forgotten' Marj Charlier, author of The Rebel Nun A heretical text, a vengeful husband, a forbidden love... It's 1310 and Paris is alive with talk of the trial of the Templars. Religious repression is on the rise, and the smoke of execution pyres blackens the sky above the city. But sheltered behind the walls of Paris's great beguinage, a community of women are still free to work, study and live their lives away from the domination of men. When a wild, red-haired child clothed in rags arrives at the beguinage gate one morning, with a sinister Franciscan monk on her tail, she sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter the peace of this little world-plunging it into grave danger.Trade Review'Brilliantly juggles history and fiction' - Le Figaro'Sensitive and subtle in substance, carnal and poetic in form... A luminous novel' - Huffingtonpost.fr'Leads us with brio into a little-known Middle Ages of strong, erudite, supportive, and generous women' - Page des libraires

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Book SynopsisSaroja and Kumaresan are young and in love. After meeting in a small southern Indian town, where Kumaresan works at a soda bottling shop, they quickly marry before returning to Kumaresan's family village to build a new life together. But they are harbouring a dangerous secret: Saroja is from a different caste than Kumaresan, and if the villagers find out, they will both be in grave peril. Faced with venom from her mother-in-law, and questions from her new neighbours, Saroja tries to adjust to a lonely and uncomfortable life, while Kumaresan struggles to scrape together enough money for them to start over somewhere new. Will their love keep them safe in a hostile world?

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Book SynopsisIn Lucky Breaks, we encounter anonymous women from the margins of Ukrainian society, their lives upended by the ongoing conflict with Russia. A woman, bewildered by her broken umbrella, tries to abandon it like a sick relative; a beautiful florist suddenly disappears, her shop converted into a warehouse for propaganda; hiding out from the shelling, neighbours read horoscopes in the local paper that tell them when it's safe to go outside. In stories of linguistic verve and dark, absurdist wit, Yevgenia Belorusets writes of how trauma seeps into the mundane, telling surreal, unsettling tales of survival in a shattered country.Trade Review'[Lucky Breaks] is a book in Russian about the war in Ukraine that does not describe combat operations and that forbears to generalize in any way... The tender and terrible stories of Yevgenia Belorusets, where bogeyman tales of childhood dress in the language of Jean Genet, and the documentary dilates into the epic, become the history we all have in common' - Maria Stepanova, author of In Memory of Memory'Women... find themselves constructing surreal narratives in an attempt to capture the strangeness of living a life under bombardment.' - Daily Mail'Ukraine's Catch-22... an uncompromising tableau of individuals dislodged by conflict some years before Russia's full-scale invasion... Humour is not a way out for these women, but it does allow the reader a way in... these are stories that stay with you' - The Telegraph'A tantalisingly oblique collection... as sharp and fragmentary as the shards of lives upended.' - Catherine Taylor, Irish Times

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Book Synopsis'A tense and exhilarating read' Le Figaro 'You'll devour this novel' Express 'This novel brings you to the rawest edges of what our humanity becomes when we're far from civilisation' Lire __________ A gripping story of survival set against the stark backdrop of the Antarctic Ocean, a couple shipwrecked on an island must trust each other with their lives A young couple sets out on a journey by yacht around Cape Horn, but the adventure of a lifetime soon becomes a fight for survival. When they are stranded on a freezing, desolate island in the South Atlantic Ocean, they find themselves having to rely on each other as never before. Will their relationship survive until help arrives-and will they? A stunning, harrowing tale of endurance from an expert in sailing, Suddenly tells the story of the people we become when faced with the awesome power of the natural world.Trade Review'Isabelle Autissier sails through literature the way she sails the ocean: with vigor, precision, and determination. . . . The result: a tense and exhilarating read' - Le Figaro'There's no question about it: Isabelle Autissier is an excellent writer. . . . When it comes to describing nature, there's no one like her. . . You'll devour this novel' - Express'With a realism that will take your breath away, this novel brings you to the rawest edges of what our humanity becomes when we're far from civilization. . . . Alone at the helm, without ever losing sight of north, Isabelle Autissier proves that in addition to being a peerless sailor, she is also a great novelist' - Lire'Unfolds like a thriller . . . Icy, captivating, punctuated by questions about nature's deepest instincts-Isabelle Autissier steers this novel to perfection. Get on board' - L'Obs

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Book SynopsisTHE TIMES HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR A FINANCIAL TIMES TRANSLATED FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR __________ It is 1941, and Antwerp is in the grip of Nazi occupation. Young policeman Wilfried Wils has no intention of being a hero - but war has a way of catching up with people. When his idealistic best friend draws him into the growing resistance movement, and an SS commander tries to force him into collaborating, Wilfried's loyalties become horribly, fatally torn. As the beatings, destruction and round-ups intensify across the city, he is forced into an act that will have consequences he could never have imagined. A searing portrayal of a man trying to survive amid the treachery, compromises and moral darkness of occupation, Will asks what any of us would risk to fight evil.Trade Review'A brilliant, uncomfortable exploration of the moral compromises necessary to live alongside evil' - The Times, Historical Fiction Book of the Year'I loved this book. Will is a vivid, complex, and captivating novel about the grubby moral compromises of life under occupation' - Bart van Es, author of The Cut Out Girl'A masterful book, a gripping epic, necessary and gorgeously written' - Stefan Hertmans, author of War and Turpentine'Constantly grapples with what the ordinary man might do when faced with a horror so huge that to resist might threaten his very survival. Olyslaegers bravely explores moral compromise, betrayal and collaboration - and throws our polarised times into sharp relief' - Observer'It is Will's inner darkness that drives this book, and it lends a ferocious energy to the narration... Olyslaegers seems intent on pulling the scales from our eyes' - Guardian

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Book SynopsisPaula Modersohn-Becker was a pioneer of modern art in Europe, but denounced as degenerate by the Nazis after her death. Sue Hubbard draws on the artist's diaries and paintings to bring to life her singular existence, her battle to achieve independence and recognition and her intense relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Not only do we discover Paula's vibrant personality and rich legacy of Expressionist paintings, but also come to understand something of the corrupted ideologies of the Third Reich. Written with the eye of a painter and the soul of a poet this moving story is a meditation on love, loss, memory and, ultimately, hope.Trade Review'A triumph of literary and artistic understanding, a tour de force: Masterly, moving and beautifully written. Hubbard goes where few dare go, and succeeds. You are the less for not reading it' - Fay Weldon'A moving and rare, heart-warming take on Paula Modersohn Becker's life' - Nicholas Serota'A writer of genuine talent' - Elaine Feinstein'Haunting' - John Berger'Hubbard deserves a place in the literary pantheon near Colm Toibin, Anne Enright and Sebastian Barry' - American Library Association

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Book SynopsisA spellbinding, darkly poetic literary novel that plunges us into the inner life of America's first female serial killer 'This fascinating, off-kilter novel about a female serial killer is an unexpectedly thrilling read' Karl Ove Knausgaard Seventeen-year-old Brynhild is in a fever - she can't quiet the screaming world inside her. When an intense affair ends brutally, she flees Norway for America at the end of the nineteenth century in search of a new life. Changing her name first to Bella, later to Belle, she is driven from any potential refuge by an unbearable tension that won't let her keep still. As Belle seeks release in a series of men, her yearning for an all-consuming love erupts into violence. In this breathtaking novel, Victoria Kielland imagines her way into the tumultuous inner life of the Norwegian woman who became Belle Gunness - America's first known female serial killer. Written in prose of wild, visceral beauty, My Men is a radically empathetic and disquieting portrait of a woman capable of ecstatic love and gruesome cruelty.Trade Review'This fascinating, off-kilter novel about a female serial killer is an unexpectedly thrilling read' - Karl Ove Knausgard'One of the best young authors we have... Kielland makes Brynhild tragic rather than cold-blooded' - Morgenbladet'Gripping, unique, and amazingly well-written' - Vart Land'Unusual and extraordinary' - Klassekampen'What this rich and poignant novel does is try to get as deep as possible to the core of a person who struggles with what she is doing to the world and to herself. My Men is a literary achievement of the highest order' - De Standaard, 5 stars

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Book SynopsisA spellbinding, darkly poetic literary novel that plunges us into the inner life of America's first female serial killer'This fascinating, off-kilter novel about a female serial killer is an unexpectedly thrilling read' Karl Ove KnausgaardSeventeen-year-old Brynhild is in a fever - she can't quiet the screaming world inside her. When an intense affair ends brutally, she flees Norway for America at the end of the nineteenth century in search of a new life. Changing her name first to Bella, later to Belle, she is driven from any potential refuge by an unbearable tension that won't let her keep still. As Belle seeks release in a series of men, her yearning for an all-consuming love erupts into violence.In this breathtaking novel, Victoria Kielland imagines her way into the tumultuous inner life of the Norwegian woman who became Belle Gunness - America's first known female serial killer. Written in prose of wild, visceral beauty, My Men is a rad

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Book Synopsis'An intimate story from the family archive, a story that is also the infamous history of our continent' Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive'Powerful and searing' Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever DreamA provocative autobiographical novel that reckons with the legacy of colonialism through one woman's family ties to both colonised and coloniserIn an ethnographic museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her unusual inheritance. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts, the spoils of European colonial plunder. As she peers through the glass, she sees sculptures of Indigenous faces that resemble her own - but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener.In the wake of her father's death, Gabriela begins delving into all she has inherited from her paternal line. From the brutal trail of racism and theft that Charles

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Book Synopsis'A mesmerising debut. Dark, twisted and bracingly empathetic' Diana Reid, author of Love and Virtue Winner of the 2017 Hankyoreh Literary Award ---------------- Who is Jina? The stupid woman who ruined a young man's promising career? The weird loner whose university boyfriend thinks she has a victim complex? The naïve country girl who ignored a friend's cry for help? The survivor? To answer these questions, Jina will have to return to Anjin University and the toxic culture that destroyed the lives of many female students - including one, Ha Yuri, who died tragically and mysteriously not long before she left. ---------------- PRAISE FOR ANOTHER PERSON 'Immaculately crafted, shocking and moving' Sang Young Park, author of the International Booker-longlisted Love in the Big City 'Dark Academia the way I like it... smart and full of suspense' Hanna Bervoets, author of We Had to Remove This Post 'Sharp social commentary and amazing, complex female characters. An unusual, unpredictable thriller' Simone Campos, author of Nothing Can Hurt You NowTrade Review'Dark Academia the way I like it: Another Person is one of those novels where you're never sure who you should be rooting for, or if you should be rooting for anyone at all. Smart, and full of suspense, it will keep you guessing until the end.' - Hanna Bervoets, author of We Had to Remove This Post'Sharp societal commentary and amazing, complex female characters. An unusual, unpredictable thriller' - Simone Campos, author of Nothing Can Hurt You Now'This is not a remote-controlled weapon aiming at us from a distance. This is a novel standing right before us like a stone-age axe, hacking at our blunted hearts. A novel not like a drone, but like dynamite; more like a dagger than an arrow. In an ever-more misogynistic society, day after day feminism plots its self-transformation-Another Person is its latest weapon. I love Kang Hwagil's direct and primal writing style. I love her perseverance and courage, not to gracefully skirt around a topic, but instead to shout out, 'This is not okay' - Cheong Yeoul, writer'This novel exposes and interrogates. Another Person's protagonists Yuri, Jina and Sujin-as well as the countless women within the 'brackets' of the Korean context-are screaming out... This is a novel that will spark debate.' - Young-Sook Kang, author of Rina'A novel so immaculately-crafted, shocking, and moving, it's hard to believe it's the author's first; this is what Kang Hwagil's ANOTHER PERSON is to me' - Sang Young Park, author of the International Booker-longlisted Love in the Big City'A confronting and timely book about consent, toxic masculinity, sexual assault and how women are treated in South Korea, by one of the country's most prominent feminist writers' -Independent

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Book SynopsisWhat did the disintegration of the Soviet Union feel like for the people who lived through it? Award-winning writer Sasha Salzmann tells this story in a remarkable novel about two women in extraordinary times As a child, Lena longs to pick hazelnuts in the woods with her grandmother. Instead, she is raised to be a good socialist: sent to Pioneer summer camps where she's taught to worship Lenin and sing songs in praise of the glorious Soviet Union. But perestroika is coming. Lena's corner of the USSR is now Ukraine, and corruption and patronage are the only ways to get by - to secure a place at university, an apartment, treatment for a sick baby. For Tatjana, the shock of the new means the first McDonald's in the Soviet Union and certified foreign whisky, but no food in the shops; it means terrible choices about how to love. Eventually both women must decide whether to stay or to emigrate, but the trauma they carry is handed down to their daughters, who struggle to make sense of their own identities. Glorious People is a vivid depiction of how the collapse of the Soviet Union reverberated through the lives of ordinary people. Engrossing, rich in detail and unforgettable characters, this is a captivating love letter to mothers and daughters.Trade Review''A story of several generations of women that poignantly demonstrates the imprint of history on people's lives, often with tragic consequences. Salzmann conveys the emotional turmoil and agonizing choices their characters make with exquisite nuance and sensitivity. Their distinctive voice, elegant prose and engaging narrative result in a marvelous work'' - Victoria Belim, author of The Rooster House'Glorious People is hypnotic, sweeping, and more relevant than ever. The mothers and daughters of Glorious People will stick with you long after you turn the last page of this mesmerizing, sharp, and devastating novel. They are searching for meaning and belonging as immigrants, mothers, wives, professionals, and citizens of a complex and ever-changing world. This novel offers a fresh take on the Soviet diaspora that offers both a meaningful critique and a semblance of much-needed hope for the future.' - Maria Kuznetsova, author of Something Unbelievable'In an unflinching examination of mother-daughter ties, Salzmann recreates the lost and newly found world, populating it with powerfully drawn, unforgettable characters. Masterful and haunting' - Elena Gorokhova, author of A Train to Moscow'[Salzmann] writes in a broad, timelessly epic style. There is a quiet sovereignty here that gives one great hope that we are reading one of the next great German storytellers' - Suddeutsche Zeitung'A brilliant book... [that] vibrates with the pleasure of narrating' - Neue Zurcher Zeitung

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Book SynopsisAward-winning author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen returns with a powerfully compelling thriller about a mother who begins to suspect her teenage son of committing a terrible crime

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Book SynopsisA feverish vision of McCarthy-era Hollywood...Los Angeles, 1950. Over the course of a single day, two friends grapple with the moral and professional uncertainties of the escalating Communist witch-hunt in Hollywood. Director John Marsh races to convince his actress wife not to turn informant for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, while leftist screenwriter Desmond Frank confronts the possibility of exile to live and work without fear of being blacklisted. As Marsh and Frank struggle to complete shooting on their film She Turned Away, which updates the myth of Orpheus to the gritty noir underworld of post-war Los Angeles, the chaos of their private lives pushes them towards a climactic confrontation with complicity, jealousy, and fear. Night for Day conjures a feverish vision of one of the country's most notorious periods of national crisis, illuminating the eternal dilemma of both art and politics: how to make the world anew. At once a definitively American novel, echoing Philip Roth and Raymond Chandler, it also nods to the mythic landscapes of Dante and the iconoclastic playfulness of James Joyce. With as much to say about the early years of the Cold War as about the political and social divisions that continue to divide the country today, Night for Day is expansive in scope and yet tenderly intimate, exploring the subtleties of belonging and the enormity of exile-not only from one's country but also from one's self.Trade ReviewImmersive... Flanery is an accomplished novelist. [He] writes with skill and conviction. * Guardian *Flanery's funniest and most entertaining... novel * TLS *Craftsmanlike * Sunday Times *Patrick Flanery is an exceptionally gifted novelist. * Philip Gourevitch, New Yorker, on Patrick Flanery *Flanery is a master of puzzling, alarming and even terrifying storytelling. * A.S Byatt, Guardian, on Patrick Flanery *A passionate, gripping, brilliantly voiced and scintillatingly intelligent novel... I Am No One will get under your skin. * Neel Mukherjee, on I am No One *

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Book SynopsisWhen a group of international activists arrive on the Faroe Islands, intent on stopping the traditional whale hunts, tensions between islanders and protestors run high. And when a woman is found viciously murdered only hours after a violent confrontation, the circumstances seem purposely designed to increase animosity between the two sides.As English DI Jan Reyna and local detective Hjalti Hentze investigate, it becomes increasingly clear that the murder has other, more sinister aspects to it, and that crucial evidence is being hidden. Neither policeman knows who to trust, or how far some people might go to defend their beliefs.Trade Review"As the action builds to a thoughtful and satisfying resolution, Ould plants the seeds of the conclusion to his Faroes trilogy, which fans will eagerly anticipate." - Publisher's Weekly Starred Review "An absorbing literary procedural for readers who prize an exotic sense of place." - Booklist "Ould's strange, remote setting and the even stranger people make for an intriguing read, especially combined with a hero who is almost as prickly as his forefathers and yet manages to solve even the most complex crimes." - Library Journal "Masterful...a thoroughly fun read with an unusual setting, great dialogue, excellent major and minor characters and a captivating storyline. Highly recommended." - Bookgasm "an interesting mystery on its own merits. The background of the Faroes is an added bonus, giving it a unique flavor. I definitely recommend it." - The Soap Boxers "A tense thriller....a particularly delightful read for readers who crave for stories similar to those of Henning Mankell and Elizabeth George." - Mystery Tribune "a commanding, almost otherworldly, setting, and the author certainly knows how to bring it to life" Kittling Books "A subtle and satisfying read; absolutely pick this one up for the fascinating weave of multiple storylines and bleak atmosphere - another must-read in a brilliant series" The Crime Review

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Book SynopsisWhen the farmer wakes at dawn, he can already feel the heat of the day rising and the silence from his wife hanging heavy in the air. As he sets out across his parched fields to find a missing cow, his mind starts to turn over the dreams he harbours, the cares he and his wife both carry alone, and the uneasy sense that something is about to change. Written with clarity and depth, this is a powerful novel about the fragility of life and the small, unseen moments upon which fate twists.

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Book SynopsisTake three strangers who all want something more. The Polish shift worker struggling to get a foothold in the new country; a fisherman who needs to make good on a promise to his best friend; and the middle man, determined to make up for lost time and take a little of what he deserves. When a chance comes along, each man must weigh the risk - and then keep his nerve as events take on their own unstoppable momentum. Tightly plotted and sharply observed, this is a gripping story of desperation and duty, and the brutal struggle to progress.

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Book SynopsisA terrible event leaves Sean Phillips disfigured when he is only seventeen. In the weeks following the incident he creates an adventure game he calls the 'Trace Italian', where players awake in an apocalyptic America and make their way to safety across an irradiated landscape, decision by difficult decision. The years pass and Sean lives a quiet life enriched by his games. But when a pair of teenage sweethearts try to seek the Trace in the real world their actions prove fatal, and Sean is forced to confront the dangers of his creation and its origins in his own troubled past. A beguiling story of contingency, solitude and escape, Wolf in White Van is a heart-stopping debut from a musician and songwriter known for the transcendent power of his words.

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Book SynopsisAddlands is the moving and engrossing story of the Hamer family and their home, the Funnon Farm, deep in the hills of the Welsh borders. There is Idris, proud and insular, a man of the plough and the prayer sheet, haunted by the First World War. Then there is the boy Oliver, who grows to be a near mythic giant in the community, a fighter, a drinker, inescapably rooted in their hard, remote valley. And there is Etty, Oliver's mother, the centre of this close constellation, who navigates old ways and new technologies as she struggles to ensure her family's survival. From the ancient silence in the hills to the encroaching roar of modernity, spanning seventy years, Addlands tells of human and animal; it speaks of the land and lets the land speak for itself. It is as vast and complex as a symphony but as pure and moving as a solo voice in an empty church.Trade ReviewA truly ambitious mixture of social realism, folklore, Romanticism and imagistic paean to nature. To say it's Poldark meets Dylan Thomas is to undersell Bullough's clout as a serious writer, but in truth you could approach it either as a made-for-TV nourish romp or a cutting-edge work of art, and love it either way -- Melissa Katsoulis * The Times *The [characters] are realised so fully, and with such vitality, that there seems no doubt about the blood running through their veins... Bullough has a flair for alchemical descriptions, thrillingly repurposing adjectives and verbs... He also clearly savours the tang of his characters' tongues [with] occasional, gloriously unexpected sunbursts of humour -- Stephanie Cross * Observer *Tom Bullough's story of one family's struggle in a world of continuity and change is beautifully imagined and exquisitely told - passionate, lyrical, profound, sad, and sometimes, too, when you least expect it, very funny -- Carys Davies, Frank O’Connor Award-Winning author * The Redemption of Galen Pike *Addlands is a gorgeous and painstaking evocation of the land and those who work it. Bullough's writing is a joy - disciplined, observant and musical, blissfully free of cliché -- Andrew Miller, author * Pure *Addlands is a mesmerisingly beautiful novel, a haunting fusion of person, place and history -- Gerard Woodward, author * The Seacunny *The visionary intensity of Addlands is always thrilling, often moving. Bullough handles a complex narrative with seemingly effortless skill and bravely chronicles ancient patterns of living whose future is insecure. He is turning the Welsh-English border into his own magical kingdom -- Peter ConradiMarrow-deep in its connection to place yet global in its thematic exploration and significance, Addlands does what literature should unstintingly aspire to do: make individual lives the essential stuff of epic. In crystalline, perfect, and stunning prose, Tom Bullough sites, convincingly and movingly, the entire history of these islands in a small section of Radnorshire. The presence of this book - in shops, in libraries, in homes, in the minds of its readers - will improve the broken, atomised world. It's an astonishing work of words -- Niall Griffiths, author * A Great Big Shining Star *This is the book we have been waiting for from Tom Bullough, a complete work of art, astonishingly beautiful, deeply moving and gripping from first to last. Addlands appears to be a tale of the Welsh borders, told through the battles, loves and losses of its Heathcliff hero, Oliver, but it is much more - the story of how the land made us all, and how the last century has changed us. Zola would have saluted it, and pressed copies on his friends -- Horatio Clare, author * Down to the Sea in Ships *An absolutely splendid book... Bullough roots the reader in the Welsh landscape, which like all inhabited landscapes is a place in flux - he wants us to make it our home, to get a sense of its light and shadow and textures. Of this place he's made a world that is rich and absorbing. Every time I'd pick up Addlands to read, I did so with relish - to return to these pages is to come back to terrain so lushly imagined that it feels luxurious to spend time there.' -- John Darnielle, New York Times bestselling author * Wolf in White Van *Bullough's quiet insistence on the link between language and landscape crucially shapes the novel. His unapologetic use of the local dialect is a source of power, lending a rich and (to most readers) unfamiliar music to his prose. -- Jem Poster * Guardian *Spanning 70 years on a remote hill farm in the lost Welst county of Radnorshire, Addlands is a quiet novel of enormous power [and] a haunting study of change and continuity... A quiet hymn to place, an exploration of the way in which our relationship to it makes us who we are. -- Melissa Harrison * Financial Times *An elegy to the changing countryside, and the ordinary heroism of those wedded to it, hard-working and hard-playing, and the inevitable losses and gains as time marches on. -- Anne Goodwin for blog * Annethology *[Addlands] has an elegant structural conceit... The narrative is, to coin another genre, Elegiac-Georgic... At its heights the prose glimmers and shimmers. -- Stuart Kelly * Spectator *With a profound sense of place it traces the lives of three generations through change - the arrival of electricity, and later, second homers - and continuity. -- Summer books round up * Financial Times *We all come from somewhere, and we carry that place within us all of our lives. Never before have I seen this quirk of existence so beautifully brought to the page as in Addlands, the lyrical and intense story of a family and where they are from. -- Book of the month * Bookseller *Bullough has written a novel of sublime attention and done so with great authority. Quietly passionate, dexterously evocative and engrossing, Addlands is indisputably relevant. It deserves to be recognised as such. -- Martha Sprackland * Caught by the River *This lyrical novel, set in rural Wales [...] captures the intertwining lives of ordinary people with the natural world... Written with a poet's eye for evocative detail, Bullough's powerful tale evokes the bleak, brooding beauty of his native landscape... [while] his liberal use of local words... take you into another world... Addlands is an immensely enjoyable and haunting story - but keep a handkerchief nearby. -- Rebecca Wallersteiner * Lady *[Addlands] is a character study of a place and time and how the people moving through it leave their strange marks on its surface. -- James Tookey * 3:am Magazine *Set in Wales, this powerful novel tells of two generations of a farming family from the war to the present day. Bullough burrows under the skin of his characters, but what sticks in the reader's memory is the richly detailed evocation of landscape and the haunting melody of his prose * Mail on Sunday *[Bullough's] unapologetic use of the local dialect lends a rich music to his prose... Bullough is positioning himself within a tradition of rural writing that, while registering the loosening of our ties to the land, continues to draw on the energies offered by those ties. If he sounds an elegiac note, he also makes it clear that we're far from finished, either with the land of with our evolving versions of pastoral -- Jem Poster * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisThis Living and Immortal Thing inhabits a world of medicine, research, cancer and death. Its disillusioned and often darkly funny narrator is an Irish oncologist, who is searching for a scientific breakthrough in the lab of a New York hospital while struggling with his failing marriage and his growing alienation within the city's urban spaces. Tending to the health of his laboratory mice, he finds comfort in work that is measurable, results that are quantifiable. But life is every bit as persistent as the illness he studies. As he starts a new treatment on his mice, he meets a beautiful but elusive Russian translator at the hospital, his estranged wife gets in touch and his supervisor pressures him to push ahead professionally. And always there is the pull of family, of the place he considers home. Shot through with Duffy's haunting, beautiful descriptions of the science underlying cancer, which starkly illustrate the paradox of an illness with a persistent and deadly life force at its heart, This Living and Immortal Thing shows how the cruelty of the disease is a price we pay for the joy and complexity of being in the world.

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Book SynopsisAdrift in lives of possibility and limitation, the flawed, struggling and sympathetic characters of these desperate, eerie stories seek refuge from meaninglessness and boredom in love, art, friendship, drugs, and sex. A journalist is either the guest or captive of a reclusive former tennis star at his mansion in the French hills; a terrible storm forces a man and a woman, who may be his therapist, to flee New York together; the artistic ambitions of a banker are laid bare when he comes under the influence of two strange sisters. Unflinching, funny and profound, Prodigals maps the degradations of contemporary life - from the deification of celebrity, to the impotence of violence, to the psychological debts of privilege, to the loss of grand narratives - with unusual insight, sincerity, and passion. It is a fiercely honest and heartfelt look at what we have become, the comedy of our foibles, and our longing for home.

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Book SynopsisCertain states are hard to shake, or so Catherine Lacey's characters find in these twelve tales of love, loss and longing. A grieving wife gives away the shirts her husband has left behind. A flirtatious widow takes a honeymooning couple to see her husband's grave. A businessman working for a shadowy organization known as 'The Company', checks-in to a room in a strange and remarkable hotel.

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Book SynopsisWELCOME TO THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIMENT Mary is out of options. Estranged from her family and beset by phantom pain, she signs up for 'The Girlfriend Experiment' - a mysterious project masterminded by a famous Hollywood actor who hires a collection of women to fulfil the different roles of a relationship. Mary is to play the Emotional Girlfriend, alongside a Maternal Girlfriend, a Mundane Girlfriend, an Angry Girlfriend and, of course, an Intimacy Team. Each woman has her debts and her difficulties, her past loves and her secrets. As Mary and the actor are drawn ever closer together, the nature of the experiment changes, and the Girlfriends find themselves exposed to new perils, foremost among them love.

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Book SynopsisFrom the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of A Passage North Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature Dinesh and Ganga meet and marry in the final days of the Sri Lankan civil war. For months their lives have been pared back to the essentials: eat, sleep, survive. Now, as the army draws ever closer, they begin to explore their new and unexpected connection - a fragile light to keep the war at bay.Trade ReviewVery seldom in a reading life does a novel alter your sense not only of literature but of the world. This extraordinary debut is of that class: a novel of consciousness unrelenting in its devotion to the imperiled body; an exquisite, unbearably moving work of art equally alive to brutality and tenderness. Anuk Arudpragasam has written a great book. I will never forget it -- Garth Greenwell * author of What Belongs to You *Anuk Arudpragasam's novel is a work of furious, hypnotic beauty -- honest and unsparing in its engagement with the consequences of war, and brilliantly tender and generous in its portrayal of love -- Dinaw Mengestu, author * All Our Names *A closely-focused hypnotic novel of serious intensity -- Romesh GunesekeraAn essential book, and not just because its setting and its subject matter are essential, but because it is so awake to - in fact haunted by -elements of experience that rarely make it onto the page. The Story of a Brief Marriage examines the violence and tenderness of human beings in a time of war, but one suspects that Anuk Arudpragasam could choose to write about anybody, in any circumstance, and through his pen one would feel the mysterious tug of time upon their senses and the nakedness of their minds before the world -- Kevin Brockmeier, author * The Illumination *This small story of a brief marriage sends out ripples far beyond its parameters: it bears witness to the lives and suffering of those thousands of men, women, and children who perished in the last days of Sri Lanka's civil war, whose numbers are still uncounted and who lie in unmarked graves. When future generations want to understand, in human terms, what happened, they will read this graceful masterpiece -- Shyam Selvadurai, author * Funny Boy *Anuk Arudpragasam's The Story of a Brief Marriage opens with some of the most extraordinary pages I have come across in recent years and then continues to amaze. Unafraid to look its huge subjects - death, war, life, love - straight in the eye, it nonetheless remains marvelously, miraculously light on its feet. Arudpragasam writes with courage, precision and tenderness. You feel it in every sentence. Read this novel. See what he has done -- Laird HuntI loved The Story of a Brief Marriage. I loved the delicacy in the language, which seemed to me to have the quality of thought unfolding. This is a novel written with such care, such devoted noticing: it's a special writer whose mind alights on the way a thumb was "still hurting from holding the scissors", or how climbing a ladder you sometimes feel "nothing but the run around which your toes are curled". -- Sunjeev Sahota, author * The Year of the Runaways *An essential book, and not just because its setting and its subject matter are essential but because it is so awake to - in fact haunted by - elements of experience that rarely make it onto the page. The Story of a Brief Marriage examines the violence and tenderness of human beings in a time of war, but one suspects that Anuk Arudpragasam could choose to write about anybody, in any circumstance, and through his pen one would feel the mysterious tug of time upon their senses and the nakedness of their minds before the world -- Kevin Brockmeier, author * The Illumination *The Story of a Brief Marriage contains a series of mesmerizingly visceral scenes. It's short and riveting, but I had to read it slowly to give its deep power time to unfold, the sublime beauty of love and the stark cruelty of war evoked through the truths or the body. It's an amazing novel. I can't forget it. -- Kate ChristensenWith care and precision, Arudpragasam delivers a deeply contemplative, psychological portrait of war and how quickly language and memory fall away in the face of constant terror. Arudpragasam writes in long, breathless passages, following the trail of Dinesh's apprehensions about sex, survival, and intimacy. For all the bombs that devastate Dinesh's country, this novel offers instead the 'strange, weightless stillness' or trauma's emotional aftermath. An incisive glimpse into the brutality of war and then tender, human urge to connect in the face of death and destruction. * Kirkus *Anuk Arudpragasam's extraordinary debut shies away from nothing in its unassuming approach and narrative -- wishes and hopes for life, love and safe place called home. Cast against the upheaval wrought by a particular conflict in a very particular (single day's) time, this story is one with resonance for so many other conflicts that our world presently knows and suffers. This book is beautiful, brave, quietly profound -- Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book CompanyThe horrors of the world's constant wars have been well chronicled in many recent novels and The Story of a Brief Marriage takes its rightful place among them as one of the best. This spare work conveys not only the indiscriminate loss of life but also the abandonment of all hope and feeling. As young Dinesh and Ganga struggle to maintain their humanity in the face of circumstances they cannot control, it makes the inevitable ending that much more poignant and heart rending -- Bill Cusumano, Square BooksThe Story of a Brief Marriage is astounding. Anuk Arudpragasam has done something so brilliant and so simple I'm still reeling. He's written a book about the great subjects, love war, life, and death. But he's done it through the lens of the body. So close you will feel it in your own body. I've been waiting decades for this book. I think I started writing because I wanted to read this book. -- Nayomi Munaweera, author * What Lies Between Us, Island of a Thousand Mirrors *In Dinesh, Arudpragasam creates a wholly empathetic and doting character... The author crafts flowing, beautifully sentences that put readers in the middle of the camp with Dinesh and Ganga. Dinesh finds beauty in the worst of situations, which contributes to making this debut moving and hopeful. * Publishers Weekly *Beautifully descriptive... Haunting... This gorgeously written novel is similar to Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadows of the Banyan in the way it captures intimate human experiences in the face of war. * Booklist *A devastating novel... it's unlike anything I've read -- Kamila Shamsie * Guardian *

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Book Synopsis'I wake up and I have to make the right choice,' he said. Master-stylist Ben Marcus returns with a wonder-cabinet of brain-rearranging stories. From the horrifyingly strange to the deeply touching, each story is a literary masterclass unlikely to leave the reader unchanged. From parent/child relationships thrown agonisingly off kilter, to intensely moving scenarios of dependence and emotional crisis; from left-alone bodies to new scientific frontiers, Ben Marcus is the great chronicler of the contemporary uncanny and the peculiar future. Piece by piece, he takes us apart.

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Book Synopsis'A pure joy to read' Guardian '...a dastardly hysterical take on modern day rhetoric and the eternal ridiculousness of it all. More than a 'must read,' Hark is a 'must believe!'' Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout 'Madcap and full of love, laughter and unexpected beauty (not to mention the world's greatest bone marrow smuggling scheme), if Hark doesn't make you stalk Sam Lipsyte and try to break up his marriage, then you are not human.' Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story 'The world needed more Sam Lipsyte and Lipsyte, knowing this, perhaps, has given us Hark. It's a stellar work by a great satirist, an uncanny observer, a keen stylist, a truly fine and thrilling writer.' Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers In an America convulsed by political upheaval, cultural discord, environmental collapse and spiritual confusion, many folks are searching for peace, salvation, and - perhaps most immediately - just a little damn focus. Enter Hark Morner, an unwitting guru whose technique of "Mental Archery" - a combination of mindfulness, mythology, fake history, yoga, and, well, archery - is set to captivate the masses and raise him to near-messiah status. It's a role he never asked for, and one he is woefully underprepared to take on. But his inner-circle of modern pilgrims have other plans, as do some suddenly powerful fringe players, including a renegade Ivy League ethicist, a gentle Swedish kidnapper, a crossbow-hunting veteran of jungle drug wars, a social media tycoon with an empire on the skids, and a mysteriously influential (but undeniably slimy) catfish. In this social satire of the highest order, Sam Lipsyte, author of the bestselling novel The Ask and master of the form, reaches new peaks of daring in a novel that revels in contemporary absurdity and the wild poetry of everyday language while exploring the emotional truths of his characters - men, women and children seeking meaning and dignity in a chaotic, ridiculous and often dangerous world.

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Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 'What a phenomenal ear she has, and how remorselessly funny she is - My Phantoms is unmissably good' Kevin Barry, author of Night Boat to Tangier Helen Grant has always been a mystery to her daughter. A twice-divorced mother-of-two she has sought intimacy in all the wrong places. Her daughter Bridget sees her once a year and considers the problem contained. But as she looks back over their fractious relationship, she is forced to confront cruelties inflicted on both sides. My Phantoms is an insightful and painfully funny account of a family strained to breaking point, and a reckoning with the damage we do over the course of a life. My Phantoms was a Book of the Year in the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Irish Times, the Guardian, The White Review, the Evening Standard, the Big Issue, the TLS, the Week and the New Statesman.Trade ReviewWhat a phenomenal ear she has, and how remorselessly funny she is - My Phantoms is unmissably good -- Kevin Barry, author of * Night Boat to Tangier *'My Phantoms is the funniest and bleakest book I have read in a long time. It's also the most moving - unexpectedly, perhaps, as it sets about capturing the awful comedy of a particularly English kind of sourness: one that takes perverse delight in disappointment and calamity. Gwendoline Riley's talent for making characters live, and her skill for identifying the essential moment, word or gesture, is immense' -- Chris Power, author of MOTHERSDevastated by this novel. Gwendoline Riley can draw character like nobody else. The weight each pristine, witty sentence carries! This is life, its aches, its silences, its love, what is carried and left unsaid. Her prose is so sharp you could cut yourself on it -- Elizabeth MacnealI read My Phantoms with great pleasure. It's a wonderful combination of achingly sad and subversively funny, simultaneously sharp and tender, and always finely observed. The dialogue is pitch perfect. The relationships are agonising. It's a subtle book, with big themes lightly drawn and precisely rendered, about how to live and how to love -- Monica Ali, author of Brick LaneA writer of singular vision * Guardian *Take up the gauntlet with Gwendoline Riley: it's worth it -- Alex Clark * TLS *[Riley] fixes her parents on the page with darkly comic precision, mercilessly attendant to their tics and repetitions... Deliciously uncomfortable -- Justine Jordan * Guardian *Riley's novels get under your skin. My Phantoms is unsettling for many reasons - the way it picks at the scab of unconditional love, the way it interrogates questions of inheritance and influence. More than anything, though, it's the fact that it chips away at the compact between reader and narrator... devastating, bleak, unforgettable -- Alex Preston * Observer *Insidiously powerful... There's a lot of sentimental, affirmative fiction about femininity out there at the moment. This jagged little novel stands as a bracing corrective -- Claire Allfree * Evening Standard *Riley is a laureate of the stilted, and the dialogue crackles with repetitions, unsaid ellipses, contradictions... There is a great deal of psychological perceptiveness in this slim novel... [My Phantoms sets] itself apart, and is vital, and dashing -- Stuart Kelly * Scotsman *By some way Riley's best book, a crisply devastating record of a mother-daughter dynamic * New Statesman *A masterpiece in compression... My Phantoms leaves us with a precise and bleak-humoured portrait of the phantoms that can haunt a family -- N. J. Stallard * Literary Review *One for anyone who has struggled with their relationship with their mother. Riley dials up the tension as she skewers familial love * i Paper *Gwendoline Riley's unsentimental fiction hovers on the edge of comedy and bleakness... My Phantoms is a distilled psychological tour de force from an exceptional writer -- Madeleine Feeny * Spectator *Riley misses nothing, and her icy evocations of dysfunction and distress are unforgettable -- Dinah Birch * TLS *Riley has the ability to draw out the subtle workings and cruelties of relationships and psyches, and wrest them into compact, hard-hitting stories -- Baya Simons * FT *Deeply sad and uncomfortable but savagely funny, too... Riley's prose echoes the repressed trauma that suffuses the novel - spare and elegant -- Gwendolyn Smith * i Paper *My Phantoms is completely devastating -- Joanna Kavenna * Oldie *A riveting, merciless little novel * Sunday Times *One of those books in which nothing much happens and everything happens... a brilliant brief, acerbic, witty, dark read that I can't recommend heartily enough -- Rose Ruane * BBC Scotland *Unsettlingly funny and sharply observant... With notes of Sally Rooney's style in its tightly-written dialogue -- Emily Chudy * Independent *My Phantoms effectively captures the ennui of our times... raw ingenuity -- Rabeea Saleem * Irish Times *Unflinching and excruciating, but at times grimly hilarious -- Leo Robson * New Statesman *Riley's seventh novel is a slender, quietly savage riposte to the sentimentality that so often defines depictions of family bonds * Mail on Sunday *A novel of squirmy, excruciating humour but also poignancy and pathos... Riley's ear for how people speak, and how to render that in the artifice of the novel, has never been deployed more successfully -- Stuart Kelly * Yorkshire Post *A brilliant novel... Riley has always been especially skilled at psychological minutiae -- Sophie Atkinson * New Left Review *Short but exceptionally hard-hitting -- Alex Clark * Financial Times *As droll as it is unnerving -- Joanna Taylor * Evening Standard *Unsettlingly funny and sharply observant -- Murray Scougall & Sally McDonald * Sunday Post *Bleak, tough-minded, reeking with irony * Private Eye *A short, sharp shock of a novel [...] funny and devastating * Guardian *· A masterpiece of cruel precision and vivid emotional realism about a thwarted mother-daughter relationship [...] A genuinely extraordinary book -- Mark O'Connell * Irish Times *A slim but brilliant novel - managing to pull off caustic humour and heartbreaking sadness, often within the same line - and it confirms Riley as one of the most talented young writers in the UK today * Financial Times *Riley's writing is precise; her ability to pick up on human fallibility merciless... A work of genius * Big Issue *

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Book SynopsisIt is the long, hot summer of 1963 and New York is filled with lovers, dreamers and protestors. Young African-American women grow out their hair and discover the taste of new freedoms. Young men, white and black, travel south to fight against segregation, praying for a society in which love is colour-free. Written in the late 1960s and early 1970s but overlooked in Kathleen Collins's lifetime, these stories mark the debut of a masterful writer whose electrifying voice was almost lost to history.

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Book SynopsisSeb's beautiful, beloved wife Leda has been killed by a swan. Sorting through her belongings after her death, he comes across a packet of unopened letters from Olaf, a man whom Leda had never mentioned. Floundering professionally and sunk by grief, he decides to travel to Leda's home village in Latvia to patch her story together. But with each new person that he turns to for answers, Seb is met instead by more questions about Leda, her past and their life together. A darkly funny, seductive novel that confronts the black undercurrent of possession inherent in love, Strange Heart Beating is a breathtaking debut from an author whose vision is both acerbic and tender.

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Book SynopsisIt is 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall came down. Jonathan Fabrizius, a journalist living in West Germany, is asked to travel to the contested lands of former East Prussia - where the Nazi legacy lives on in buildings and fortifications - to write about the route for a car rally. It's a plum job, but his interest is piqued by a personal connection. Here, among the refugees fleeing the advancing Russians in 1945, he was born. Homeland is a nuanced work from one of the great modern European storytellers, in which an everyday German comes face to face with his painful family history, and devastating questions about ordinary Germans' complicity in the war.

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Book SynopsisIreland is flooded, derelict. It never stops raining. The Kid in Yellow has stolen the babba from the Earlie King. Why? Something to do with the King's daughter, and a talking statue, something godawful. And from every wall the King's Eye watches. And yet the city is full of hearts-defiant-sprayed in yellow, the mark of the Kid. It cannot end well. Can it? Follow the Kid, hear the tale. Roll up! Roll up!

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Book Synopsis'CENSUS is a vital testament to selfless love; a psalm to commonplace miracles; and a mysterious evolving metaphor. So kind, it aches.' David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas A father and son who are census takers journey across a nameless country from the town of A to the town of Z in the wake of the father's fatal diagnosis. Knowing that his time is menacingly short, the father takes his son, who requires close and constant adult guidance, on this trip of indefinite length. Their feelings for each other are challenged and bolstered as they move in and out of a variety of homes, meeting a variety of different people. Census is about the ways in which people react to the son's condition, to the son as a person in the world. It is about discrimination and acceptance, kindness and art, education and love. It is a profoundly moving novel, glowing with wisdom and grace, roaring with a desire to change the world.

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE BBC NATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD 2017 Out at sea, in a sudden storm, a man is struck by lightning. When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be there is all but shattered. Now he must pit himself against the pain and rely on his instincts to get back to shore, and to the woman he dimly senses waiting for his return. With its taut narrative and its wincingly visceral portrait of a man locked in an uneven struggle with the forces of nature, this is a powerful new work from one of the most distinctive voices in British fiction.Trade ReviewI found it hypnotically compelling, as exciting as it is meditative, and adored the pared down yet powerful, rippling, sensate writing. A terrific read -- Colin Barrett, author * Young Skins *After the scalpel-sharp prose of The Dig here Cynan Jones cuts into the language even deeper: in this new novel he pares down the prose to shining shards and crystalline phrases. Cove finds this master of concision on remarkable form, telling a sleek tale about one man and a boat which lingers hauntingly in the mind. At a time when novels are getting bigger and more bloated, this goes the other way - showing us how choice words in perfect order can expand the horizon well beyond a simple line -- Jon GowerTo read Cove is to take a masterclass in taking out everything but the essentials. This is writing stripped back to the bone, and storytelling that gets under the skin. Powerful, terrifying, brilliantly done -- Jon McGregorA book distilled and elemental even by Jones's standards. It's searing, unflinching, exquisitely written - for me, his best work yet -- Tom Bullough, author * Addlands *Charting a course somewhere between Life of Pi and Paul Kingsnorth's Beast, Cove is a minimal, occasionally mysterious, man-versus-the-elements fable... there's plenty under the surface of the terse, telegraphic prose... Cove repays attentive parsing -- Stephanie Cross * Observer *Jones's brutally, beautifully distilled, almost incantatory language is entirely his own... an extraordinary novel that tugs on the ideas of home and homecoming, is full of scorchingly simple phrases [...] and is saturated with a stealthy symbolism concerning fathers and sons, man and God and the fathomless mysteries of the natural world. It's Jones's fifth book and, with its sure sense of the ineffable nature of things, speaks louder than many a novel of three times its length * Daily Mail *[Cove] packs a punch far above its weight... A gruelling, gripping read, a ragged desperate search for a safe haven... There's no slack here, every word counts in prose that's stripped back and pared down to something akin to poetry. It's Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea meets JC Chandler's maritime disaster film, All is Lost. Nature at its most brutal, and man at his most exposed, poised between 'myth'... and 'legend' -- Lucy Scholes * Country File Magazine *A narrative as stripped of detail as its protagonist is of his memories, which nonetheless proves curiously powerful -- Nick Rennison * Sunday Times *This undersung Welsh writer specialises in sinewy, sliver-thin novels that trash cosy notions about benevolent Mother Nature... Pungent with jeopardy, the atmosphere is stark and elemental, with a faint hint of allegory in the plight of the unnamed protagonist -- Anthony Cummins * Metro *Cove is the latest and most accomplished of Jones's works. It once again proves Jones's formidable talent. The book is confusing and demanding and damning and everything and anything and nothing. Above all else, however, Cove is beautiful, all too beautiful -- Ioan Marc Jones * Huffington Post *Jones's writing, although stripped back, is delicate and poetic... If Hemingway's prose resonates with universal truth, Jones's shimmers with suggestiveness and ambiguity -- Roger Cox * Scotland on Sunday *Cove is like some experiment in mortifying asceticism, an experiment so successful that every word has significance and the simplest line on the starkest page can slap you hard like a sudden wave as you try to land a kayak on a steep beach in a running swell, leaving you [...] struggling for a moment to catch your breath... It's hard not to be hyperbolic about this book. If someone told you that a Welshman had written a sort of Wales-set twenty-first-century homage to The Old Man and the Sea that somehow manages - in even fewer words - to be a bigger, more emotionally loaded book, you'd be forgiven for laughing. But you shouldn't laugh. You should buy Cove, and holding it very carefully, hunch yourself up over its pale pages, draw a deep breath, and begin to read... * Tim Hannigan blog *Arresting... Cynan Jones is a highly accomplished writer in whose hands such elemental raw materials turn strange and fugitive... Though his novels turn on sudden shocks, the real power of his prose lies in its slow accumulation of energy around dimly apprehended points of tension... Part of what's impressive about the book is that it holds its own. One might expect some level of allusiveness, an acknowledgement of literature's other lost sailors. But Jones's writing has a cool independent, aloof from others' words -- Alexandra Harris * Guardian *In a time when novels are getting more robust, replete with increasingly ostentatious, over-embellished writing, Cove comes as a breath of fresh air... In this slim novel Jones sketch[es] a formidable portrait of the fury of nature. In his visceral descriptions of the mighty sea, birds and fish, his stark, primal style is reminiscent of that of Ted Hughes' poetry. There is a cinematic thrill to his writing, which induces a sense of pulsating alarm in the reader... Cove is an extraordinary novel [and] a thrilling, immersive experience -- Rabeea Saleem * Wales Art Review *Jones plugs directly into the readers' nightmares with his fifth novel, an ultra-minimalist tale of an injured man adrift at sea in a wrecked fishing boat... pared back to the very essentials, there is not a word wasted in these short, sharp, epigraphic paragraphs that rival even Hemingway in their terseness... At only 95 pages of skeletal prose, it's as taut as trapped fishing-line, and possibly more effective when read in one sitting - though it may not be healthy to let your heart stop beating for that long -- James Robinson * Press Association *Jones strips the story down to its elemental core and of it reads like a prose poem. His vivid descriptions allow us to feel the man's physical discomfort and flagging spirit... Cove is about the dangerous, unknowable rhythms of the sea... about devastation [...] love, loss, memory and the will to live... A haunting meditation on trauma and human fragility -- Lucy Popescu * Financial Times *This is writing that forces you to pay close attention... A powerful story about one man pitted against the elements, with echoes of Hemingway... but original in its underlying poignancy; the storytelling is stripped to its bare essentials -- Kate Saunders * The Times *The writing [is] spare and economical... lyrical... short and intense -- Charlotte Runcie * Sunday Telegraph *Painful, moving, energising and intensely thrilling... Immensities happen in this slim book... wildly rewarding and utterly exhilarating -- Niall Ferguson * Spectator *Intensely vivid... startlingly original... Jones's prose - concise, rhythmical and studded with arresting imagery - enacts the rocking motion of a boat at sea. A powerful study of human vulnerability and resilience -- Juanita Coulson * Lady *Stunning -- Simon Savidge * Savidge Reads *A masterclass in concision, in trimming away everything extraneous until what remains is a short, stark, shock of a book where every word crackles with electricity... Jones' language shimmers with a suggestive poetry... The power of Jones' writing lies not in moments of shock and drama, but in the slow buildup of a dimly apprehended tension, felt in the pit of the stomach... It's in these moments of subtle horror that Cove truly grabs you -- Josh Philipps * Josh is Writing *I'll be popping this very short novel into several stockings this Christmas: it's one of the most haunting novels I've read in years. Jones's exquisitely turned sentences - more poetry than prose - force the reader to slow right down, confronting us with every tiny sinew of the man's determined efforts to survive. Jones is an uncompromising writer and the situation his protagonist faces is dire. Yet this is also a heartbreaking novel, alert to the ineffable mystery of man's aloneness in the natural world, but also sure-footed on the emotional ties that bind -- Claire Allfree, Books for Christmas * Daily Mail *Cynan Jones [is] utterly brilliant. The writing is so delicate and cruel and insightful. I don't understand why no statues have been erected in his honour yet -- Eimear McBride * TLS *Less than 100 pages long but carries more weight than most novels I read this year. It's both exciting and intense, and written with a care for each word -- John Self, Best Books of 2016 * Irish Times *Astonishing, here the story of a man getting lost at sea becomes a powerful, moving and exceptionally memorable story in about as few words as possible. Read it and then read it again -- John Owen * Country and Town House *A meditation on identity, security and memory - and the ways in which trauma corrodes these... a study of fear, isolation and disorientation -- Anna Girling * TLS *Unforgettably vivid * New European *

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Book SynopsisJames Orr - husband, father, reliable employee and all round model citizen - wakes one morning to find himself quite transformed. There's no way he can go into the office, and the doctors aren't able to help. Waiting for the affliction to pass, he wanders the idyllic estate where he lives, with its pretty woodland, uniform streets and perfectly manicured lawns. But there are cracks in the veneer. And as his orderly existence begins to unravel, it appears that James himself may not be the man he thought he was. A story that consistently confounds expectations, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr introduces a writer of extraordinary and disturbing talents.

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Book SynopsisTHE SUNDAY TIMES NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2020 'A compelling read. Carys Davies has an amazing gift' Penelope Lively From the prize-winning author of West, a collision between old and new, east and west, in a former British hill station in South India. Fleeing the dark undercurrents of his life in Britain, Hilary Byrd takes refuge in Ooty, a hill station in South India. There he finds solace in life's simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla have taken Hilary under their wing. As Hilary's friendship with the young woman grows, he begins to wonder whether his purpose lies in this new relationship. But religious and nationalist tensions are brewing and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems... 'Brilliantly crafted' Daily Mail 'An absolute triumph' Cynan Jones 'Subtle with nuance and alive with immediacy' Sunday TimesTrade ReviewThe Mission House puts another genre, Raj fiction, to fresh purposes... The prevailing tone modulates between gentle humour and low-key poignancy... Subtle with nuance and alive with immediacy, again adroitly using small-scale effects to enlarge understanding and extend empathy, the resulting novel is a masterly achievement * Sunday Times *A novel about the pitfalls of human connection in contemporary India... Davies's use of [language] reveals an ear finely tuned to subcontinental peculiarities... The Mission House is an interesting take on a familiar trope: the westerner who finds in India deliverance from the wasteland of modernity * Guardian *Brilliantly crafted... Having subtly prepared the ground, Davies finally springs the jaws of her plot, revealing, heartbreakingly, to us and the tragically blinkered Hilary, what kind of story this really is * Daily Mail *A delicately political tale that keeps the real drama largely below the surface, leaving the reader to gauge the extent of the protagonist's self-deluding solipsism * Metro *The Mission House is an absolute triumph. That rare type of book - resoundingly tender, and gently heart-wrenching. Carys Davies doesn't drop a sentence. I was deeply moved, and spellbound -- Cynan JonesAn astonishingly assured and gripping piece of work and a worthy follow-up to WEST. Davies has a voice unlike any I've read: clean, otherworldly, eerily original, and capable of devastating effect -- Julie MyersonA compelling read. Carys Davies has an amazing gift for summoning up a place, a situation, the characters. Her skill is that of brevity, nailing a personality with a few lines of dialogue, saying most by saying least -- Penelope LivelyI felt, reading this extraordinary novel, that the thorough oddity of its chief characters, their strange innocence, amounts to a revolt, on our behalf too, against the stupidity, cruelty, fanaticism and bigoted violence of the world in which they more or less successfully live their eccentric lives -- David ConstantineCarys Davies' enthralling fictions carry us across time and continents, and bring interior worlds to life -- Clare MessudTender, playful, piercing, light-footed-this is an irresistible novel -- Michelle de KretserDavies weaves her story with brevity and to devastating effect, drawing a portrait of an odd group of lonely people struggling to find a connection in a changing world * Radio Times *A wonderfully written tale of subtle repetitions from multiple points of view set in India - it has the simplicity of fairy tale, the heft of fable and contains all the human sadness and joy of misfits -- Bernard MacLaverty

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Book Synopsis'What a wonderful, strange, terrifying, brilliant novel this is' Kamila Shamsie AS THE WORLD BURNS, ONLY A DREAMER CAN SAVE IT... New York, 2000. The United Nations has just planted its flag on Mars, and a Green Party senator is about to become the first female president of the United States. At a party in the almost-Utopian world, Kate and Ben fall in love. London, 1593. Kate wakes as Emilia, mistress to a nobleman and friend to a lowly court poet called Will. Afflicted by apocalyptic premonitions, she sets out to save the world. Each decision she makes as Emilia will change Kate's life with Ben forever. 'Bewitchingly complex... Astonishing' Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent 'An electrifying novel of love, creativity and madness... Playful, tender and heart breaking' Guardian 'Elegiac and genuinely, unbelievably moving... By the time I got to the end of it, I wanted to go back and read the beginning... You've got to read this book' Helen Lewis, BBC Radio 4 Saturday ReviewTrade ReviewAn electrifying novel of love, creativity and madness... playful, tender and heart breaking * Guardian *What a wonderful, strange, terrifying, brilliant novel this is -- Kamila ShamsieExquisitely calibrated... miraculously skilful... immersively real... Like all dramas, it has a resolution, and one of such eye-popping metaphysical grandeur that I couldn't spoil it even if I wanted to -- Paraic O'Donnell * Irish Times *A writer of immense imagination and talent... quite unlike any other book you'll pick up this year -- ‘Best New Books for May 2019’ * Stylist *Richly observed and engaging... [Newman] is a writer of wild imaginings... The Heavens swiftly upends all expectations with its speculative strangeness * Sunday Times *I love The Heavens... Elegiac and genuinely, unbelievably moving... by the time I got to the end of it, I wanted to go back and read the beginning... You've got to read this book -- Helen Lewis * BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review *I tore through The Heavens and loved it... unique and brilliant -- Adam Foulds, author * The Quickening Maze *I was bewitched by the ambition and charge of The Heavens, which is at once troubling and beautiful, emotionally resonant and fantastically strange -- Olivia Laing, author of * Crudo *Newman [writes with] agility and aplomb * TLS *The Heavens, shifting restlessly between worlds, gently encouraging Elizabethan England into eccentric New York, rolling everything into a dreamy, desperate new reality, is everything we expect from Sandra Newman. It's strange but focused, beautifully written and put together, dangerously benign, comic and clever, bright as a knife -- M. John Harrison, author * Light *Reading Sandra Newman's The Heavens is like falling up a brilliant flight of stairs. Inventive and moving and surprising on every level, it's a novel that doesn't just play with time and history and certainty: it turns those things inside out. I've been haunted by its characters and ideas ever since I reluctantly finished it -- Elizabeth McCracken, author * Thunderstruck & Other Stories *Every one of The Heavens' pages feels like that first shuddering spark of attraction...quick, flirtatious * Dazed *The writing is so sleek and the pace is so nimble, nothing is belaboured... a delightful literary bon bon that really took me away, so transfixing -- Katie Puckrik * BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review *Astute, mesmeric and quite alarming, The Heavens is absolutely captivating * Press Association *Really thought-provoking -- ‘The Best Books to Read This May’ * Red Magazine *Wonderfully intriguing... thoughtful [and] gripping * Observer *

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Book SynopsisHoward Hinton and his family are living in Japan, escaping from a scandal. Hinton's obsessions are his work - speculative voyages into the fourth dimension of space - and his wife and sons, each of whom yearns to find escape from entanglement in the strange and unknown landscapes of Hinton's science fictions. A ravishing period piece of late-Victorian social, scientific and domestic life, Hinton is about extraordinary discoveries, and terrible choices. It is about those who discover and map other realms, and the implications for those of us left behind.Trade Review'A brilliant resurrectionist raid on the past as it should have unfolded. Mark Blacklock breathes new life into the tropes of detective fiction, occult mathematics and forensic science. He makes new mysteries out of reforgotten enigmas' - Iain Sinclair

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Book SynopsisA young mother speaks to her second born child. Since the drama of childbirth, all feels calm. The world is new and full of surprises, even though dangers lurk behind every corner; a car out of control, disease ever-present in the air, the unforgiving speed of time. She tells of the times before the child was born, when the world felt unsure and enveloped in darkness, of long nights with an older lover, of her writing career and the precariousness of beginning a relationship and then a family with her husband, Bo. A portrait of modern motherhood, THE CHILD is a love story about what it means to be alive and stay alive, no matter how hard the journey.Trade Review'The Child pays close, intelligent attention to motherhood and art. It's written with memorable precision and love, and I was sorry to finish it' - Sarah Moss 'I loved this book, as raw and shimmering as the early nights of motherhood; through its poetic fragments and deep thought the wonder, fear and joy of intimacy shine' - Liz Berry, author of The Republic of Motherhood

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Book SynopsisA man and a woman meet in a park. The man has a story to share, one of a past relationship that contains echoes, similarities to the woman's life too remarkable to be considered just a coincidence. And so the lines of reality begin to blur. Is the man a warning from the future? Is the woman destined to repeat the same mistakes? Who really exists? Is there such thing as fate?

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Book Synopsis'Austin Duffy's uniquely dry, laconic style adds a subversive and compelling charge to this moving and intense story of the relationship between a father and daughter. A terrific novel' William Boyd Wolf travels to New York with his daughter to scatter the ashes of his recently estranged wife, Miriam. Buffeted by the loss, his fraught relationship with his daughter and the antagonism of Miriam's conservative Jewish family, Wolf is also coming to terms with a burgeoning concern of his own: growing dislocations in his mind, and the hollowing out of his memories. Set across the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Ten Days is a tender, nuanced and beautifully crafted story of a father's reckoning with his daughter and a profound, compelling meditation on family, time and the bonds of marriage. 'An absolutely beautiful book about time and mortality, love and memory, in which heartbreaking sadness and dry humour are held in exquisite tension' Carys DaviesTrade ReviewAustin Duffy's uniquely dry, laconic style adds a subversive and compelling charge to this moving and intense story of the relationship between a father and daughter. A terrific novel -- William BoydA family epic that eddies in the wider current of history, and an incrementally devastating story of grief, guilt and memory -- Gavin Corbett, author of * This is the Way *The moral propulsion behind this sad, bittersweet tale, and its sheer cleverness, had me reading into the early hours... Duffy displays enormous skill and subtlety... [he] can delineate character well... [and] he can write beautifully too... This is a quietly wonderful novel, full of resonance yet unforgiving in its gaze, and one where, the more you look into it, the more you will find -- Sunday TimesThis novel is rooted in sadness... What this novel shows however is that no matter how unfair the world can be, life and love continues.... The writing in this book is so exquisite it helps the reader navigate the emotion and brings us to a deep understanding of Wolf's world and its challenges. Other characters too are sympathetically drawn. This is neither an easy nor a comforting read but it is thoughtful, gentle and beautifully crafted -- RTÉ guideA beautifully wrought, deeply affecting novel -- Anne Cunningham * Connaught Telegraph *An absolutely beautiful book about time and mortality, love and memory, in which heartbreaking sadness and dry humour are held in exquisite tension. I was deeply moved and feel bereft to have finished it -- Carys DaviesAuthentically rendered -- James Lawless * Irish Examiner *

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Book Synopsis'A great novel of New York' - Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs To You The new novel from the New York Times-bestselling author of High Dive The 'Father of Greater New York' is dead. Shot outside his Park Avenue mansion in the year of our Lord, 1903. In the hour of his death, will the truth of his life finally break free? Born to a struggling farming family in 1820, Andrew Haswell Green was a self-made man who reshaped Manhattan, built Central Park and turned New York into a modern metropolis. Now, at eighty-three, when he thought the world could hold no more surprises, he is murdered. As the detective assigned to the case traces his ghost across the city, other spectres appear: a wealthy courtesan; a broken-hearted man in a bowler hat; and an ambitious politician, Samuel, whose lifelong friendship was a source of joy and frustration. In a life of industry and restraint, where is the space for love? As restlessly inventive and absorbing as its protagonist, The Great Mistake is the story of a city, and a singular man, transformed by longing. 'Jonathan Lee has taken the bare facts of a nearly forgotten life and turned them into a rich and unforgettable story' - Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13 'A meditation on the meaning of success, and a magical escape from the twenty-first century that sent me back feeling wiser and more hopeful' - Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens 'A wonder and a delight' - Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's WifeTrade ReviewWily, virtuosic, very beautiful - an intimate portrait of a public man that also serves as an X-ray of America. The Great Mistake is a great novel of New York, in which the shaping of public space becomes inextricable from the loneliness, longing, and ferocious ambition of a single, damaged man -- Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to YouA great novel of 19th-century New York. A meditation on the meaning of success, and a magical escape from the 21st century that sent me back feeling wiser and more hopeful -- Sandra Newman, author of The HeavensA wonderful, compelling, finely-tuned and deeply loveable novel, with a central character who is all of those things too. Jonathan Lee has taken the bare facts of a nearly forgotten life and turned them into a rich and unforgettable story -- Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13Few writers working today have Jonathan Lee's range or eye for detail. Fewer still are capable of roaming minds and histories with such bittersweet, richly detailed ease. A wonder and a delight. -- Tea Obreht, author of The Tiger's WifeA highly satisfying mix of mystery and character portrait, revealing the constrained heart beneath the public carapace. * Kirkus *Elegiac and elegant, inviting and refined. The reader is immersed in [a] world that grows more dense with longing, regret and foreclosed possibilities... Lee's prose is thick with an emotional awareness that recalls the writing of Henry James * The Times *Not a novel of grand deeds, but of grand imagination... quietly but intently ambitious * Guardian *Seriously entertaining * Sunday Times *[A] stylish, finely wrought mashup of mystery and history, which paints a dynamic portrait of both man and metropolis * Mail on Sunday *

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Book Synopsis'Endearing... enlightening... an affecting and suspenseful portrait of contemporary Bangkok' Literary Review 'Emma Larkin richly and vividly brings her characters to life... a captivating tour de force' Alaa Al Aswany An overlooked patch of jungle behind a Bangkok city slum resonates with the hopes, dreams and fears of the local community. Those who are drawn to the plot of land - among them a homeless revolutionary, an ambitious property developer, and a lonely expat housewife - believe they can find opportunity or redemption there. But the slum-dwelling spirits who guard its secrets have other plans. With a rich cast of characters that spans Bangkok's multi-layered society, Comrade Aeon's Field Guide to Bangkok is a masterful, captivating debut, and a vivid portrayal of a forgetful city awakening to its past.Trade ReviewEmma Larkin richly and vividly brings her characters to life, revealing the drama of their existence through a multifaceted look at Thai society. Comrade Aeon's Field Guide to Bangkok is a captivating tour de force * Alaa Al Aswany *Endearing... enlightening... an affecting and suspenseful portrait of contemporary Bangkok * Literary Review *A complicated paean to a complicated city [...] an intricate portrait of contemporary Bangkok that is, at once, dystopian and magnificent * South China Post *

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Book SynopsisFirst heard on BBC Radio 4. Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage. As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life. From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, Stillicide is a moving story of love and loss and the will to survive, and a powerful glimpse of the tangible future.

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Book Synopsis'This is a wonderfully original and compelling novel that puts you in mind of John le Carré's The Night Manager... it's a thoughtful and sensitive literary thriller... intense, detailed and fast-paced, Ceremony of Innocence is an elegant and satisfying read' Observer --- When a Muslim woman goes missing, a family's entanglement with Britain's imperial legacy comes to light in this evocative page-turner. A Cambridge PHD student, Reem, has gone missing. Last seen in Egypt, her friend Fauzia is seeking answers. However, the trail soon leads back to the Wilcox Smith family, and questions about their shadowy wealth. Spanning decades, and traveling between the Shah's Iran, modern Bahrain, London and the English Countryside, Ceremony of Innocence is a vivid, engrossing story of one family''s ambition and the establishment's ruthless pursuit of power. --- 'A fascinating look at the entanglements of family and secrets against the backdrop of the long shadows of empire, combined with the international power politics of today' Catherine Hall, author of The RepercussionsTrade Review[A] blend of English country house novel and international intrigue * Daily Mail *Pulls you in from the first page... Wonderfully original and compelling * Observer *

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Book SynopsisIn this companion novel to Bodies of Light, Ally's husband Tom leaves, only weeks into their marriage, to build lighthouses in Japan. Ally, one of Britain's first female doctors, takes work at an asylum in Truro. With only letters sent across the ocean to sustain them, and with Ally now battling her old demons alone, will their marriage survive?Trade Review'Sarah Moss is one of our country's most underrated writers... [Signs forLost Children is] full of humanity, historical insight and beautiful writing...If there is one author you take a chance on this year, let it be her - it's time,and money, well spent' - Fiona Wilson, The Times'Quietly devastating... These lateral portraits of disillusionment are excellentlyrendered. Tom's journey is external and exotic ... [and] is beautifullydelivered (Moss is an effortlessly elegant writer), but in the end it is Ally'sinternal odyssey that grips... A compelling, often harrowing, occasionallyheartbreaking read' - Sarah Crown, Guardian

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