Gayle’s Spring Picks 2024

Number one with a bullet in my picks for this spring is Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time. If you, like me (and more importantly, like Kaliane Bradley), got deeply obsessed with the television show The Terror during lockdown, this is the book for you: the cleverest, most imaginative, most well-written HMS Erebus fan fiction you’ll ever have the pleasure to read. Come for the fun time travel premise; stay for the romance! sex! postcolonial discourse! generational trauma! hot repressed naval officer! Great Plague-era lesbian navigating Tinder! If you don’t already have a debilitating crush on Commander Graham Gore, prepare yourself.

Also in my picks: Allen Bratton brings Shakespeare’s Prince Hal to 21st century London in the funny and devastating Henry Henry; Sarah Perry is on excellent form, exploring love, faith and astronomy in Enlightenment; the second novel from Holly Williams, The Start of Something, is a La Ronde for the 21st century – ten brilliantly drawn glimpses into the lives of ten people during ten interlocking sexual encounters; Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite is a fascinating and generous exploration of the generational divide as it plays out between a boomer novelist and his millennial playwright daughter; food writer Kate Young’s first work of fiction Experienced is a fun, sexy queer rom-com about working out who you are and what you want after everyone else already has; and Glen James Brown’s Mother Naked is a novel in the form of a medieval gleeman’s monologue, inspired by a single payment entered into Durham’s Cathedral rolls for the lowest-paid performer in over 200 years of records.