THE BEST NEW FICTION
Killing Commendatore Haruki Murakami Harvill Secker €24.99
Murakami has such a huge readership in his own country that he has been called ‘the JK Rowling of Japan’. This big, baggy novel, in an exemplary translation, helps explain his popularity. It is narrated by a thirtysomething portrait painter who is chucked out by his wife and ends up in a remote mountain eyrie, where he has a series of dream-like adventures, featuring secret passages and the like. Think Hogwarts with sushi. As the painter is older than Harry Potter, he can have sex, of course. It is a beguiling mixture.
Max Davidson
Strike Your Heart Amélie Nothomb Europa Editions €13.99
Diane’s happiness is shattered when, at the age of five, she realises that her mother doesn’t love her. She grows to be a determined, beautiful and highly intelligent young woman, but when one of her university lecturers takes her under her wing, Diane finds the pattern of her early life being repeated. Nothomb constructs an engrossing plot, but the way in which she heaps misery after misery upon her heroine becomes both wearisome and implausible.
Anthony Gardner
The Bus On Thursday Shirley Barrett Fleet €18.56
Barrett’s brilliant second novel plummets headlong into a darkly funny tale. Eleanor has survived breast cancer, is single, and hasn’t much going on in her life when she accepts a supposedly dream teaching job in Talbingo, in backof-beyond Australia. It’s then that the nightmare really begins, as she finds herself at the mercy of some very strange locals with some very worrying ways. Expect to encounter a demon-obsessed drunken priest, overly sensitive children and a handsome travelling vacuumcleaner salesman as. Eithne Farry
Melmoth Sarah Perry Serpent’s Tail €18.99
Building on the success of her best-selling The Essex Serpent, Perry serves up more stylish gothic thrills in this novel set in Prague. Helen Franklin, an English expat, has a dark secret, but there is no hiding from Melmoth, a spectral female figure who roams the world trying to confront evildoers with the consequences of their sins. It’s a Marmite book that some will adore and others will find silly. But, in an often drab literary landscape, Perry stands out as an exhilarating storyteller.
Max Davidson