BY BATTERSEA BRIDGE
Janet Davey
Anita Mostyn feels the need to take a holiday from her life. As a child, she was dismissed by her parents in favour of her self-confident brothers, and as an adult, her choices are disapproved of: the small art gallery she works for, the friends she makes, the men she sees. Mossy—lumbered with a childhood nickname that stuck—is never the 'fixed point'; not for her most recent lover, or for the mother whose approval she craves. Instead, she lives on the edges of things. On a whim, she takes up an offer to scout for holiday properties in Bulgaria, escaping the impending second wedding of her perfect brother—and a horrifying episode in her past. Poignant and absurd, sharp and wry, Janet Davey's luminous prose charts the complications of family relationships with insight and extraordinary tenderness. As Anita navigates difficult waters, we begin to understand her past, and, little by little, see her come through.
Chatto & Windus, hadcover, 9780701186920 (April)
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ISLAND OF WINGS
Karin Altenberg
On the ten-hour sail west from the Hebrides to the islands of St Kilda, everything lies ahead for Lizzie and Neil MacKenzie. Neil is to become the minister to the small community of islanders and Lizzie, his new wife, is pregnant with their first child. Neil's journey is evangelical: a testing and strengthening of his own faith against the old pagan ways of the St Kildans, but it is also a passage to atonement. For Lizzie—bright, beautiful and devoted—this is an adventure, a voyage into the unknown. She is sure only of her loyalty and love for her husband, but everything that happens from now on will challenge all her certainties. As the two adjust to life on an exposed archipelago on the edge of civilization, where the natives live in squalor and subsist on a diet of seabirds, and babies perish mysteriously in their first week, their marriage—and their sanity—is threatened. Is Lizzie a willful temptress drawing him away from his faith? Is Neil's zealous Christianity unhinging into madness? And who, or what, is haunting the moors and cliff-tops? Exquisitely written and profoundly moving, Island of Wings is more than just an account of a marriage in peril—it is also a richly imagined novel about two people struggling to keep their love, and their family, alive in a place of terrible hardship and tumultuous beauty.
Quercus, paperback, 9780857382337 (March/April); Penguin, paperback, 9780143120667
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THE WAR TOUR
Zoe Lambert
From Kandahar to Sarajevo, the forests of Lithuania to the boot camps of the DRC, Zoe Lambert's stories weave a dark and disturbing web, interlacing documentary accounts with imagined testimonies to give voice to the many silenced casualties of war: an elderly woman on a bus tells a love story drawn from the depths of Soviet history; a soldier returns from his first tour of duty unsure he deserves his hero's welcome; a Norwegian immigrant pieces together a family history fractured in the aftermath of Nazi occupation. Individually, these stories bear witness to a thirst for conflict that seems both unquenchable and foreign. But together, they bring the question of collusion and responsibility all the way back to the reader's own doorstep.
Comma Press, paperback, 9781905583287
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THE LIFE OF REBECCA JONES
Angharad Price
Translated from the Welsh by Lloyd Jones
A poetic work of fiction on the one hand, an autobiography on the other, The Life of Rebecca Jones is a powerful, meditative work on one family's passage through the twentieth century. In the early years of the last century, Rebecca is born into a rural community in the Maesglasau valley in Wales; her family have been working the land for a thousand years, but the changes brought about by modernity threaten the survival of her language, and her family's way of life. Three of her siblings are afflicted with a genetic blindness, and it is they who have the opportunity to be educated elsewhere and to find work, while Rebecca and her remaining brother maintain the family farm amidst a gradual influx of new technologies, from the waterpipe to the tractor and telephone, and ultimately to television. Rebecca's reflections on the century are delivered with haunting dignity and a simple intimacy, while her evocation of the changing seasons and a life that is so in tune with its surroundings is rich and poignant. The Life of Rebecca Jones has all the makings of a classic, fixing on a vanishing period of rural history, and the novel's final, unexpected revelation remains unforgettable and utterly moving.
MacLehose PRess, hardcover, 9780857051363 (March)
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FEAR IN THE SUNLIGHT
Nicola Upson
Summer, 1936. The writer Josephine Tey joins her friends in the holiday village of Portmeirion to celebrate her fortieth birthday. Alfred Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, are there to sign a deal to film Josephine's novel, A Shilling for Candles, and Hitchcock has one or two tricks up his sleeve to keep the holiday party entertained—and expose their deepest fears. But things get out of hand when one of Hollywood's leading actresses is brutally slashed to death in a cemetery near the village. The following day, as fear and suspicion take over in a setting where nothing—and no one—is quite what it seems, Chief Inspector Archie Penrose becomes increasingly unsatisfied with the way the investigation is ultimately resolved. Several years later, another horrific murder, again linked to a Hitchcock movie, drives Penrose back to the scene of the original crime to uncover the shocking truth. Book four in the series.
Faber & Faber, paperback, 9780571246281 (April)
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THE UNIVITED GUESTS
Sadie Jones
One late spring evening in 1912, in the kitchens at Sterne, preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honour of Emerald Torrington's twentieth birthday. But only a few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious and not altogether savoury survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor—and the household is thrown into confusion and mischief. One of their number (who is most definitely not a gentleman) makes it his business to join the birthday revels. Evening turns to stormy night, and a most unpleasant game threatens to blow respectability to smithereens: Smudge Torrington, the wayward youngest daughter of the house, decides that this is the perfect moment for her Great Undertaking. Sadie Jones, the prizewinning author of The Outcast, triumphs in this frightening yet sinister drama of dark surprises—where social codes are uprooted and desire daringly trumps propriety—and all is alight with Edwardian wit and opulence.
Chatto & Windus, hardcover, 9780701186715 (March)
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DIVING BELLES AND OTHER STORIES
Lucy Wood
Straying husbands lured into the sea by mermaids can be fetched back, for a fee. Trees can make wishes come true. Houses creak and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A mother, who seems alone and lonely, may be rubbing sore muscles or holding the hands of her invisible lover as he touches her neck. Wisht hounds roam the moors, and, on a windy beach, a boy and his grandmother beat back despair with an old white door.
Diving Belles is a luminous, spellbinding debut that introduces Lucy Wood as a spectacular new voice in fiction. In these stories, the line between the real and the imagined is blurred, as she takes us to Cornwall's ancient coast, building on its rich storytelling history and recasting its myths in thoroughly contemporary ways. Calling forth the fantastic and fantastical, she mines these legends for that little bit of magic that remains in all our lives—if only we can let ourselves see it.
Bloomsbury (UK), hardcover, 9781408816851; Mariner Books (US), paperback, 9780547595535 (August)
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VARIOUS PETS ALIVE & DEAD
Marina Lewycka
Marcus and Doro were part of a commune from the late 1960s until the early 1990s: lentils, free love, spliffs, Left politics, cheesecloth blouses, sex and cooking rotas, crochet, allotments. Their children have grown up rather different from them: primary schoolteacher Clara craves order and clean bathrooms; son Serge is pretending to his parents that he is still doing a Maths PhD at Cambridge, while in fact he is working making loads of money in banking in the City; while third child Oolie Anna, who has Down Syndrome, is desperate to escape home and live on her own. Set half in Doncaster and Sheffield, half in London and Cambridge, this is a very funny riff on modern values, featuring hamsters, cockroaches, poodles, a chicken and multiplying rabbits. Told by Marina Lewycka in her unique and brilliant combination of irony, farce and wit.
Marina Lewycka was born in Kiel, Germany at the end of the war and grew up in England. She has three previous novels, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Two Caravans and We Are All Made of Glue.
Fig Tree (UK), hardcover, 9781905490554 (March)
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THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY
Rachel Joyce
A tender, quietly comic, heartstopping and very British coming of (old) age novel from a powerful new voice in fiction.
When Harold Fry leaves home one morning to post a letter, with his wife hoovering upstairs, he has no idea that he is about to walk from one end of the country to the other. He has no hiking boots or map, let alone a compass, waterproof or mobile phone. All he knows is that he must keep walking. To save someone else's life.
Transworld, hardcover, 9780857520647 (March)
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PAINTER OF SILENCE
Georgina Harding
When she leaves the ward she feels the whiteness of the room still inside her, as if she is bleached out inside. It is the shock, she tells herself. She feels the whiteness like a dam holding back all the coloured flood of memory. Iasi, Romania, the early 1950s. A man is found on the steps of a hospital, frail as a fallen bird. He carries no identification and utters no words, and it is days before anyone discovers that he is deaf and mute. And then a young nurse called Safta brings paper and pencils with which he can draw. Slowly, painstakingly, memories appear on the page: a hillside, a stable, a car, a country house, dogs and mirrored rooms and samovars in what is now a lost world. The memories are Safta's also. For the man is Augustin, son of the cook at the manor at Poiana that was her family home. Born six months apart, they grew up with a connection that bypassed words. But while Augustin's world remained the same size Safta's expanded to embrace languages, society—and love, as Augustin watched one long hot summer, in the form of a fleeting young man in a green Lagonda. Safta left before the war. Augustin stayed. But even in the wide hills and valleys around Poiana he did not escape its horrors. He watched uncomprehending as armies passed through the place. Then the Communists came, and he found himself their unlikely victim. There are things that he must tell Safta that may be more than simple drawings can convey. Beautiful, spare and intense, Painter of Silence captures the loss and the hope of a tragic time through the extraordinary vision of a mute outsider.
Bloomsbury (UK), hardcover, 9781408821121 (March)
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A STONE'S THROW
Fiona Shaw
'Like everyone, Meg has made choices over the course of her life; for the most part, she's proud of the decisions she made, but that doesn't mean she's not without regrets, not haunted by questions of what might have been… What if her older brother hadn't gone missing when she was just a child? What if she'd married for love, rather than duty? What if she told her son why it matters so much that he, unlike her, listens to his heart? Set in England and Africa, and opening during World War Two, A Stone's Throw is a novel about family, about love, about duty; it's about the people we miss and the secrets we keep. Above all though, it's about the choices we make—and those we don't.
Serpent's Tail, paperback, 9781846688317 (April)
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MRS ROBINSON'S DISGRACE: THE PRIVATE DIARY OF A VICTORIAN LADY
Kate Summerscale
On a mild winter's evening in 1850, Isabella Robinson set out for a party. Her carriage bumped across the wide cobbled streets of Edinburgh's Georgian New Town and drew up at 8 Royal Circus, a grand sandstone house lit by gas lamps. This was the home of the rich widow Lady Drysdale, a vivacious hostess whose soirees were the centre of an energetic intellectual scene. Lady Drysdale's guests were gathered in the high, airy drawing rooms on the first floor, the ladies in dresses of glinting silk and satin, bodices pulled tight over boned corsets; the gentlemen in tailcoats, waistcoats, neckties and pleated shirt fronts, dark narrow trousers and shining shoes. When Mrs Robinson joined the throng she was introduced to Lady Drysdale's daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Edward Lane. She was at once enchanted by the handsome Mr Lane, a medical student ten years her junior. He was 'fascinating', she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man's charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, which she was to find hard to shake… A compelling story of romance and fidelity, insanity, fantasy, and the boundaries of privacy in a society clinging to rigid ideas about marriage and female sexuality, Mrs Robinson's Disgrace brings vividly to life a complex, frustrated Victorian wife, longing for passion and learning, companionship and love. (nonfiction)
Bloomsbury, hardcover, 9781408812419 (April)
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HOMESICK
Roshi Fernando
It is New Year's Eve, 1982, and the whole gang is at Victor and Nandini's house. The Godfather is on repeat upstairs. Baila music is blaring from the record player in the lounge. Poppadoms are frying in the kitchen. And Preethi, tipsy on youth and friendship and covert cigarettes out the window, just wants to belong. But what does that mean, to belong? Is it paying over the odds for a bottle of whisky? Getting lost with your impassive grandmother on the way home from school? Mourning for Elvis? Adopting a child whose skin is darker than yours? Marrying an English boy? Learning how to speak in a voice that doesn't remind you of your father? Feeling awkward at an office barn dance? Losing your lover, twice? Vowing to destroy the world and then changing your mind? Is it something else, just out of reach? From that New Year's party to a family funeral, via ghetto blasters and growing pains, through 7/7 and the world according to Charlie Chaplin, life in all of its complexity happens to Preethi, Nil, Lolly, Rohan, and their tightly knotted Sri Lankan families in south London. Tracing the fine lines of politics, tradition and community, Roshi Fernando's stunning collection of linked stories pulls us back to the knowledge of home.
Bloomsbury, hardcover, 9781408826409 (March)
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THE LAND OF DECORATION
Grace McCleen
Judith and her father don't have much—their house is full of dusty relics, reminders of the mother she's never known. But Judith sees the world with the clear Eyes of Faith, and where others might see rubbish, Judith sees possibility. Bullied at school, she finds solace in making a model of the Promised Land—little people made from pipe cleaners, a sliver of moon, luminous stars and a mirror sea—a world of wonder that Judith calls The Land of Decoration. Perhaps, she thinks, if she makes it snow indoors (using shaving foam and cotton wool and cellophane) there will be no school on Monday… Sure enough, when Judith opens her curtains the next day, the world beyond her window has turned white. She has performed her first miracle. And that's when her troubles begin. With its intensely taut storytelling and gorgeous prose, The Land of Decoration is a heartbreaking story of good and evil, belief and doubt.
Chatto & Windus, hardcover, 9780701186814 (March)
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ON THE FLOOR
Aifric Campbell
In the City, everything has a price. At the age of twenty-eight, Dubliner Geri Molloy has put her troubled past behind her to become a major player at Steiner's investment bank in London, earning $850k a year doing business with a reclusive hedge fund manager in Hong Kong who, in return for his patronage, likes to ask her about Kant and watch while she eats exotic Asian delicacies. For five years Geri has had it all, but in the months leading up to the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991, her life starts to unravel. Abandoned by her corporate financier boyfriend, in the grip of a debilitating insomnia, and drinking far too much, Geri becomes entangled in a hostile takeover involving her boss, her client and her ex. With her career on the line as a consequence, and no one to turn to, she is close to losing it, in every sense. Taut and fast-paced, On the Floor is about making money and taking risks; it's about getting away with it, and what happens when you're no longer one step ahead; ultimately, though, it's a reminder to never, ever underestimate the personal cost of success.
Serpent's Tail, paperback, 9781846688089 (March)
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A POUND OF FLESH
Alex Gray
Detective Inspector Lorimer's worst nightmare is a serial killer loose in his city. But two serial killers operating at once in Glasgow is a nightmare come to life. Is there any link between the brutal slaying of prostitutes in the backstreets of the city and the methodical killing of several unconnected businessmen? Lorimer is never one to jump to conclusions but something about these cases just doesn't add up. When the latest murder is that of a prominent politician, Lorimer finds the media's relentless scrutiny turned on his investigation. Psychologist Solly Brightman is helping with both cases, but someone within Lorimer's team is unwittingly sabotaging their efforts by leaking confidential police information. Their whispers will cost lives. As the freezing winter weather grips Glasgow, two killers are relentlessly taking lives in cold blood. For Lorimer, time is running out.
Sphere, paperback, 9781847443946 (March)
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THE PICTURE BOOK
Jo Baker
Set against the rolling backdrop of a century of British history from WWI to the 'War on Terror', this is an intimate family portrait captured in snapshots. First there is William, the factory lad who loses his life in Gallipoli, then his son Billy, a champion cyclist who survives the D-Day Landings on a military bicycle, followed by his crippled son Will who becomes an Oxford academic in the 1960s, and finally his daughter Billie, an artist in contemporary London. Just as the names—William, Billy, Will, Billie—echo down through the family, so too the legacy of choices made, chances lost, and secrets kept. Rich in drama and sensuous in detail, The Picture Book is a beautifully crafted story about parents and children, about fate and repetition, and about the possibility of breaking free.
Portobello Books, paperback, 9781846273827 (April)
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MISSING SHADE OF BLUE
Jennie Erdal
When translator Edgar Logan arrives from his home in Paris to work in Edinburgh he anticipates a period of enlightenment and calm. But with a chance meeting with the philosopher Harry Sanderson and his captivating artist wife, Edgar's meticulously circumscribed life is suddenly propelled into drama and crisis. Drawn into the Sandersons' troubled marriage, Edgar must confront both his own deepest fears from the past and his present growing attraction to the beguiling Carrie. Moving, witty and wise, The Missing Shade of Blue is a compelling portrait of the modern condition, from the absence of faith to the scourge of sexual jealousy and the elusive nature of happiness.
Little, Brown (UK), paperback, 9781408703755 (March)
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THE GRIEF OF OTHERS
Leah Hager Cohen
The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous lives. Struggling to regain a semblance of normalcy for themselves and for their two older children, they find themselves pretending not only that little has changed, but that their marriage and their family have always been intact. Yet in the aftermath of the baby's death, long-suppressed uncertainties about their relationship come roiling to the surface. A dreadful secret emerges with reverberations that reach far into their past and threaten their future.The couple's children, ten-year-old Biscuit and thirteen-year-old Paul, responding to the unnamed tensions around them, begin to act out in exquisitely—perhaps courageously—idiosyncratic ways. But as the four family members scatter into private, isolating grief, an unexpected visitor arrives, and they all find themselves growing more alert to the sadness and burdens of others—to the grief that is part of every human life but that also carries within it the power to draw us together. Moving, psychologically acute and gorgeously written, The Grief of Others asks how we balance personal autonomy with the intimacy of relationships, how we balance private decisions with the obligations of belonging to a family, and how we take measure of our own sorrows in a world rife with suffering. This novel shows how one family, by finally allowing itself to experience the shared quality of grief, is able to rekindle tenderness and hope.
Clerkenwell Press, paperback, 9781846686269
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ELEGY FOR EDDIE
Jacqueline Winspear
Early April 1933. To the costermongers of Covent Garden—sellers of fruit and vegetables on the streets of London—Eddie Pettit was a gentle soul with a near-magical gift for working with horses. When Eddie is killed in a violent accident, the grieving costers are deeply skeptical about the cause of his death. Who would want to kill Eddie—and why? Maisie Dobbs' father, Frankie, had been a costermonger, so she had known the men since childhood. She remembers Eddie fondly and is determined to offer her help. But it soon becomes clear that powerful political and financial forces are equally determined to prevent her from learning the truth behind Eddie's death. Plunging into the investigation, Maisie begins her search for answers on the working-class streets of Lambeth where Eddie had lived and where she had grown up. The inquiry quickly leads her to a callous press baron; a has-been politician named Winston Churchill, lingering in the hinterlands of power; and, most surprisingly, to Douglas Partridge, the husband of her dearest friend, Priscilla. As Maisie uncovers lies and manipulation on a national scale, she must decide whether to risk it all to see justice done
Harper, hardcover, 978-0062049575 (March)
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