THE BEST NEW FICTION
Luster Raven Leilani Picador £14.99
While buzzy US debuts are always ten-a-penny, this wild dark comedy is absolutely the real deal. It’s narrated by a young black New Yorker who, homeless after getting fired from her publishing job, finds herself in a bizarre ménage à trois with a middleaged white couple struggling to raise their adopted black daughter.
Leilani’s live-wire sentences are a giddy joy, crafted with mischievous perfection and full of smart things to say on hot-button issues.
Anthony Cummins
The Charmed Wife
Olga Grushin Hodder &
Stoughton £17.99
The wife of the title is none other than Cinderella, just not as you know her.
Some 13 years and two kids into her ‘happily ever after’, she now wants her royal hubby dead. A grizzled old witch has just the spell, but at the last minute, Cinderella opts for a divorce instead, catapulting her into a very different life. This whimsical, elaborately plotted novel does for fairy tales what Bridgerton has done for Regency England.
Hephzibah Anderson
Hurdy Gurdy Christopher Wilson
Faber £14.99
Of the Covid-inflected novels expected this year, few will be as weirdly entertaining as this cautionary tale. Set in the year 1349, its narrator is a young novice friar blindsided by the coming of the plague. He must minister to the sick but, as the pestilence spreads, has to rely on traditional cures whose efficacy he doubts. What hope for science in an age of superstition? Lepers, talking pigs and one-legged robbers adorn a freewheeling narrative.
Max Davidson
Exit
Belinda Bauer Bantam Press £14.99
Felix Pink is an Exiteer. An elderly widower himself, he assists the terminally ill to take their own lives. He believes he’s doing the right thing, until one day he helps to kill the wrong man. What follows is nowhere near as depressing as one might fear. Instead this is a cunningly plotted thriller with more than a dash of Joe Orton-like black comedy. Bauer confirms her status as one of our most consistently inventive crime novelists. John Williams