Some recent fiction to take you into the autumn: The Butchers by Ruth Gilligan is the Great Mad Cow Disease Novel we’ve all been waiting for – family secrets and dying mythologies in an Ireland on the cusp of change; Lavie Tidhar’s By Force Alone gives us the Arthur and Albion our age deserves (squalid, violent, venal, stupid) in a rollicking good adventure story that brings the legend firmly into the 21st century; a long-awaited second novel from the author of You Too Could Have a Body Like Mine, Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun reckons with capitalism and climate catastrophe in an eerie near future Los Angeles; Tice Cin’s Keeping the House, a brilliant London novel that truly feels like the living, breathing city as it exists today; and Marlowe Granados’s debut Happy Hour, a delicious romp through New York City with a millennial Sally Jay Gorce.
Looking further ahead: later this month, the excellent Peninsula Press publish their second book from Lynne Tillman, Weird Fucks – great title, fantastic cover, can’t wait; in October, Penguin Classics bring us a long overdue reissue of Buchi Emecheta’s novel of immigration and survival in 1960s London, Second-Class Citizen; and just in time for Halloween, a really horrible haunted house novel from Cipher Press, Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless.
And lastly, something delightful to keep on your bedside table and see you through the lengthening nights: Rose Macaulay’s Personal Pleasures, recently reissued by Handheld Press, is a series of short essays about life’s minor pleasures, from the everyday (‘Bed’, both ‘Getting Into It’ and ‘Not Getting Out Of It’) to the more esoteric (‘Elephants in Bloomsbury’). A real treat to dip into.
Recommended by Gayle
‘A brilliant London novel, the kind we need more of: polyphonic, multilingual, thrillingly alive with all the people, food, music that make this city what it is.’
From the publisher:
In 1935 Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was a well-established novelist, reviewer, columnist and feminist wit. She was part of the 'intellectual aristocracy' of England, but was also passionately interested in everyday life and its foolishnesses.…
From the publisher:
A brilliant novella from a legendary figure in American fictionA young woman drifts through dimly lit bars and rented rooms, reporting from the erogenous zones of New York and Europe. Encountering increasingly…
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‘An urgent novel about our very near future, and a deeply addictive pleasure’ Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies‘Magnificent and stunning’ Jeff VanderMeer, author of Hummingbird Salamander‘An…
From the publisher:
With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, Marlowe Granados’s stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York CityRefreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy…
From the publisher:
'Buchi Emecheta was the foremother of black British women's writing . . . powerful fictions written from and about our lives' Bernardine Evaristo'Most dreams, as all dreamers know quite well, do have setbacks. Adah's dream was no exception,…
From the publisher:
A dark, unflinching haunted house novel that takes readers from the well of the literary gothic, up through Brighton’s queer scene, and out into the heart of modern day trans experience in the UK.Three years ago, Alice spent one night…
From the publisher:
***WINNER of the 2021 RSL Ondaatje Prize***'I binged it like a Netflix show... It's stunning' Luke Kennard, author of The Transition______________________________A photograph is hung on a gallery wall for the very first time since it was…
From the publisher:
There is a legend...Britannia, AD 535The Romans have gone. While their libraries smoulder, roads decay and cities crumble, men with swords pick over civilisation's carcass, slaughtering and being slaughtered in turn.This is the story of…
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