OUR PICK OF THE MONTH’S BEST PAPERBACK FICTION
THE FLATSHARE
beth O’leary Quercus, £12.99 HOW can a man and woman share a flat but never actually meet?
It may sound unlikely but in the London property market anything can happen.
Shy nightshift worker Leon allows craft-obsessed Tiffy to move into his one-bedroom apartment and they both sleep in the same bed but at different times, communicating through Post-It notes.
This is set to be the romcom of the year with lovable characters, comic situations and a deeply satisfying love story. A Sleepless In Seattle for the 21st century.
Late IN THE DAY
Tessa Hadley
Vintage, £8.99
THIS compelling novel dissects the lives and loves of four largely unlikeable characters.
Sexy Lydia and shy Christine were best friends at college where Lydia fell for self-obsessed-Alex. Wealthy Zach, Alex’s best friend, took a shine to Christine. However many years later, Zachary is married to Lydia and Alex is married to Christine. But when Zachary dies, their lives are upended.
Hadley captures the way old feelings, longings and hidden secrets unravel tight-knit relationships.
HALF A WORLD AWAY
Mike Gayle Hodder, £7.99 FOR most of his life, Noah has dealt with inconvenient feelings such as grief or anger by ignoring them, instead focusing on family and his legal career.
When his long-lost, bear-hugging, Mariah Carey-loving sister shows up, dragging their childhood baggage with her, he’s in shock.
What follows is a kind of sibling love story as a bond grows, helping them to face some terrible realities.
Mike Gayle’s writing is wise, compassionate and prone to making you cry.
ANDREINA CORDANI AND EITHNE FARRY THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT ★★★★★ Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate, £25
HILARY Mantel has won the Booker Prize twice, first for Wolf Hall, and second time round for Bring Up The Bodies. Both books provided a subtle and seductive portrait of Thomas Cromwell, the canny outsider who survived a brutal childhood in Putney to pull himself up by his bootstraps, eventually inveigling his way into the court of Henry VIII and becoming the king’s right-hand man.
The Mirror And The Light continues Cromwell’s fascinating story and is packed to the gills with intrigue and incident as hostile aristocrats plot his downfall, despising Cromwell’s lowly origins, and courtiers and ladies-in-waiting whisper in corridors and courtyards about the next potential queen. But they are all at the mercy of a capricious king.
The novel opens in May 1536 with the death of Anne Boleyn. Bring Up The Bodies focused on the last three weeks of her life, an intense hour-by-hour account of Cromwell’s endeavour to rid the king of a queen he no longer wanted.
Here, Cromwell watches as her head is neatly chopped off with the French executioner’s sword and her tiny husk of a body is bundled into an arrow chest instead of a coffin, her head placed by her feet for want of room.
He then wanders off “for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner”, a little disturbed by the queen’s ending but also pragmatically moving on to the next item on his allencompassing, ever-expanding agenda.
The Mirror And The Light is a richly detailed, epic sweep of a book. It contains rebels and uprisings, religious tensions and reprisals, imprisonments and executions, the threat of the plague, and more royal wives to woo.
And, of course, inevitably,