2020 vision of new hot reads
FICTION
VETERAN writers retreat into the past in some of this year’s most eagerly awaited novels. HERE WE ARE (Scribner, £14.99, February) is a tender love story from former Booker Prize winner Graham Swift, about a troupe of entertainers in
1950s Brighton, while Sebastian Barry’s A THOUSAND MOONS (Faber, £18.99, March) is an unconventional Western about a Native American girl adopted by US soldiers in the 1870s. And Maggie O’Farrell’s
HAMNET (Tinder, £20, March) examines the effect on Shakespeare and his wife of their young son’s death.
In his debut novel COME AGAIN (Canongate, £16.99, March), comedian Robert Webb tells the tale of a woman with a chance to save her husband’s life by travelling back in time.
Millions of readers will be slavering like HenryVIII on the way to a banquet at the thought of THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT (Fourth Estate, £25, March), the concluding instalment of Hilary
Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. Will it scoop the Booker Prize like its predecessors Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies? Ali Smith also brings a long-running project to an end with SUMMER (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99, July). Her “Seasonal Quartet” has told readers more about the state of the nation than a lorryload of newspapers.
Elena Ferrante’s first novel since her all-conquering Neapolitan quartet is sure to cause a stir. THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS (Europa, £20, June) is about a young girl in Naples learning unwelcome truths about the adult world as she reaches adolescence.
Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell tells the tale of “the strangest British band you’ve never heard of” in UTOPIA AVENUE (Sceptre, £20, June), set in the late 1960s.
And the ambitious, high-concept new novel from John Boyne, author of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, begins as a story about a family, and extends over 2,000 years. A TRAVELLER AT THE GATES OF WISDOM is out in July (Doubleday, £16.99).
The latest new novel by Michel Faber, author of The Crimson Petal And The White, lands in September. A TALE OF TWO
WORLDS (Doubleday, £18.99) is a “contemporary Dickensian fable” about a world where the letter D disappears from the language.
Sixteen long years have passed since the publication of the magnificent Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell. Susanna Clarke returns at last in September with PIRANESI (Bloomsbury, £14.99), the eerie tale of a man who lives in a flooded house. CHARLOTTE HEATHCOTE AND JAKE KERRIDGE
NON FICTION
In UNSPEAKABLE (W&N, £20, February) John Bercow, former speaker of the House Of Commons, offers a “forthright and incisive” account of tumultuous British politics from the vantage point of his front row seat. “I made friends and enemies alike but from start to finish I sought to do the right, rather than the convenient, thing,” he says.
Music journalist Pete Paphides recalls coming of age in Birmingham in BROKEN GREEK (Quercus, £12.99, March). He didn’t speak between the ages of four and seven, instead seeking refuge from a troubled home life in music. “Tender, clever and as funny as it gets,” says broadcaster Lauren
Laverne. LYRA McKEE: LOST, FOUND, REMEMBERED (Faber, £12.99,April) gathers unpublished material alongside her celebrated work. It commemorates “one of the most important and formidable journalists of her generation”, shot dead last year during rioting in Derry. Raynor Winn wrote the awardwinning The Salt Path, the story of how she and her terminally ill husband lost their home and walked the 630-mile SouthWest Coast Path. She returns with WILD SILENCE
(Michael Joseph, £14.99,April). This explores the challenge of returning to mainstream life after homelessness. Former supermodel Lily Cole taps into the growing call for sustainable living with REASONS FOR OPTIMISM (March, Penguin, £14.99), a call to action that explores solutions to the planet’s biggest problem: us. Philippe Sands, author of awardwinning bestseller East West Street, returns with THE RATLINE: LOVE, LIES AND JUSTICE ON THE TRAIL OF A NAZI FUGITIVE (April, Orion, £20). It’s a “historical detective story” about the “astonishing life, escape and mysterious death” of high-ranking Nazi Otto von Wachter. Comedy fans will pounce on
RAMBLE BOOK (HarperCollins, £16.99, May) by writer and broadcaster Adam Buxton, one half of Adam and Joe. It’s described as “a very funny and at times poignant memoir”, exploring his childhood, parenthood and grief at the death of his father, among much, much more.
“The elegant, gossipy and bitchy” diaries of 20th-century politician and socialite Chips Channon will be published in full for the first time. THE DIARIES OF CHIPS CHANNON VOL 1 covers seismic events from his friend Edward
VIII’s abdication to the outbreak of the Second World War (Hutchinson, £25, September).
For the first time, “self-proclaimed diva” Mariah Carey tells her life story, from childhood to motherhood, in I HAD A VISION OF LOVE (Pan Macmillan, £20, September). “Mariah delves into her darkest moments and astonishing victories… This is Mariah as you’ve never seen her before.”
Finally, in October comes VICTORIA WOOD: THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY
by Jasper Rees (Trapeze, £20). Wood always planned to write a memoir but died aged 62 in 2016, the book unwritten. However Rees had complete and exclusive access to the national treasure’s extensive archive and has interviewed everyone who knew her best. CHARLOTTE HEATHCOTE
CRIME
2020 will be the year when the legal thriller makes a comeback, judging by the praise already lavished on Graham Moore’s
THE HOLDOUT (February, Orion, £12.99). It’s the tale of a woman on a jury who persuades her fellow jurors to acquit the defendant, with dark consequences that will affect all of their lives.As a pressure-cooker environment, the jury room has nothing on the wedding in THE
GUEST LIST (February, HarperCollins, £12.99),
Lucy Foley’s follow-up to her bestselling debut The Hunting Party. Feuds explode and guests start dropping dead.
There are unmissable debuts to seek out: CC MacDonald’s HAPPY EVER
AFTER (Harvill Secker, £12.99, January) featuring a woman whose life implodes after a moment of madness involving a handsome father at her daughter’s nursery; THE MEMORY WOOD by Sam Lloyd (Bantam, £12.99, February) in which an abducted 13-yearold chess prodigy tries to use her skills to outwit her captor; and Elizabeth Kay’s SEVEN LIES
(Sphere, £12.99,April) which shows why a man should never try to come between his wife and her best friend.
Among the old favourites returning is Joël Dicker whose THE DISAPPEARANCE OF STEPHANIE MAILER (MacLehose, £20, May) looks set to be a convoluted hall of mirrors in the vein of his big hit The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair. Belinda Bauer
is also back with her first novel since her
Booker-longlisted Snap: EXIT (Bantam, £14.99, June) features a pensioner on the run after an attempt at a good deed goes horribly wrong.
Later in the year there will be a welcome reappearance from Hercule Poirot as reimagined by
Sophie Hannah in THE KILLINGS AT KINGFISHER HILL (HarperCollins, £18.99, August), while Anthony Horowitz resurrects Poirotesque detective Atticus Pund in MOONFLOWER MURDERS
(Century, £20, August), the long-awaited sequel to his ingenious classic Magpie Murders.
Also channelling Agatha Christie is Pointless host Richard Osman: his novel THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB
(Viking, £14.99, September) is gentle fare about a group of sleuthing octogenarians with a hobby of re-examining unsolved homicides.
But the thriller I’m most looking forward to is THE DEVIL AND THE DARK
WATER (Raven, £14.99, October), Stuart Turton’s first novel since his smash hit debut The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle. It promises to feature murder on the high seas and, if as good as its predecessor, it’ll be as immersive as a tidal wave. JAKE KERRIDGE
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