THE BEST NEW FICTION
The Magician Colm Tóibín Viking £18.99
Is there a more consistently classy novelist than Tóibín? His latest book explores the rollercoaster life of the German writer Thomas Mann, charting his disillusionment with both his native country after the rise of Nazism and later with his adopted America, as McCarthyism takes hold. The bourgeois-born father of six who is tormented by homosexual yearnings is captured with skill and tenderness. In a novel of many moods, its every page rings true.
Max Davidson
A Calling For Charlie Barnes Joshua Ferris Viking £16.99
The eponymous hero of Ferris’s fourth novel is an American Everyman. With multiple wives and children, and a catalogue of get-richquick schemes, Charlie Barnes is unwavering in his pursuit of the American Dream – until the 2008 recession and pancreatic cancer intervene. The narrator is Barnes’s son, a novelist whose narrative is inventive and witty, tender and wise. It’s a portrait of life, love and death, and much else besides. Simon Humphreys
Matrix Lauren Groff William Heinemann £16.99
Best-selling US novelist Groff journeys deep into medieval Europe, where Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine banishes a 17-year-old girl to a rundown English convent. That ungainly teen will go down in history as the poet Marie de France, but she makes her mark here as a warhorse-riding rebel, fearless in her ambition. It’s a bold, luminous tale that captivates from first to last.
Hephzibah Anderson
The Unheard Nicci French Simon & Schuster £14.99
What do you do if your three-year-old daughter comes home from a visit to her father with an alarming black painting and babbling about killing? For Tess, struggling with her recent break-up, finding the truth becomes an obsessive quest, one that risks everything she has. If all the twists don’t work, this is still a haunting investigation of our darkest fears.
John Williams