Books Check out five new novels coming your way this week
We preview five new novels coming your way in the next few weeks, from gripping thriller to comic capers and a literary take on the fragility of life and relationships
This Happy by Niamh Campbell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Some four months after her marriage, Alannah sees a familiar gure on a Dublin street and is immediately catapulted back six years to the tumult of her rst true love. But will that chance sighting of the landlady who rented a cottage to her onetime lover trigger a sea-change in her life? Campbell’s debut novel, written in arresting tattoo prose, began life, as the author has said, as a series of monologues defending ‘the decisions love compels us to make’. This teasingly forensic negotiation of love in all its guts and glory augurs a bright future for this young Irish writer.
The Heart of Summer by Felicity Hayes-McCoy (Hachette Ireland)
The latest in HayesMcCoy’s Finfarran series (named after the ctional village on the coast) has 50-something Hanna Casey looking forward to a new chapter in her life following the break-up of her marriage. Together with boyfriend Brian, the resilient librarian has moved into their shiny new home in picturesque Hag’s Glen. Summer yawns before them with the promise of lazy lunches and possibly an exotic foreign holiday. Then Brian’s adult son moves in, Hanna meets someone from her London past and suddenly the future doesn’t look all that rosy any more.
The Weekend by Charlotte Wood (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Woods’ latest, shortlisted for the Stella Prize in her native Australia, opens with the eating of lambs brains, stirring in the narrator a sense of revulsion as well as intimations of her own mortality. Jude is one of four women (Adele, Sylvie, Wendy), whose life-long friendship is thrown out of kilter when Sylvie dies. Can the remaining trio, as di erent as day from night, keep the show on the road or will bitter secrets, painful memories and a weekend of too much wine tear them apart without the anchoring presence of Sylvie?
Guilty
by Siobhán MacDonald (Constable)
Professor Luke Forde, a successful heart surgeon, lives in an awardwinning house in County Clare with his glamorous new girlfriend. But following an ominous dream, he discovers the word ‘Guilty’daubed on the side of his boat-house and reads a terrifying death notice in the local newspaper. Has his recent estrangement from his highpowered politician wife anything to do with these events? And can his therapist sort out the chaos in Luke’s life? From its dramatic opening, we dive into the recent past for a twisty tale of ruthless ambition, family dysfunction and cold-blooded vengeance.
Unfiltered
by Sophie White (Hachette Books Ireland)
It’s the morning of Ali Jones’ father’s funeral. Ali wakes with a song in her head: the e ervescent God Only Knows by the Beach Boys. And she remembers the past and what she would have been without her dad. But Ali is also assailed by another thought. She is pregnant (having faked a pregnancy to gain more Instagram followers) by her sort-of boyfriend, Sam, who most likely will never see her again. And with that we’re o , headlong into another comic yarn set squarely in these social media times and featuring thoroughly modern Ali and her pal, Queen of the In uencers, Shelly.