THE BEST NEW FICTION

I Couldn’t Love You More

Esther Freud Bloomsbury €19.60 Freud’s first novel in seven years takes its cue from her own family history. What if her unwed mother hadn’t been able to hide her pregnancy from her strict Irish Catholic parents? What if they’d put her in a home and taken away her child? Nimbly interweaving the voices of three generations, Freud brings empathy and eloquence to her examination of the mother-daughter bond.

Hephzibah Anderson

Things Remembered And Things Forgotten

Kyoko Nakajima Sort Of Books €14 A widower finds solace in his wife’s cookbooks; a broken sewing machine becomes a symbol of post-war reconstruction; a man visits his brother with Alzheimer’s; an art gallery lies hidden in Tokyo’s backstreets. By turns touching and humorous, sensual and surprising, the ten delicately crafted stories here are a subtle reckoning with the devastations of Japan’s past. Exquisite and profound. Simon Humphreys

The Rules Of Revelation

Lisa McInerney John Murray €13.99 McInerney concludes her trilogy about Irish lives with an explosive evaluation of class, gender, parenthood and guilt. When exiled drug-dealer turned musician Ryan returns home to record an album, he awakens his ghosts: old flames, vengeful trolls, muck-raking journalists. Like Cork itself, he’s combustible, caught between the past and the future. A little uneven, but McInerney’s prose retains its bite.

Madeleine Feeny

Before The Ruins

Victoria Gosling Serpent’s Tail €15.99 Gosling’s atmospheric debut takes a familiar theme – the way the things we do as teenagers reverberate in later life – but treats it with care and empathy. The action moves between present-day London and a summer-long treasure hunt in an abandoned manor house 20 years earlier. The plot burns slowly: it’s the finely drawn characters, especially the spiky narrator Andrea, that linger in the memory.

John Williams