THE BEST NEW FICTION
Our Country Friends
Gary Shteyngart
Allen & Unwin £14.99 It’s March 2020 and novelist Sasha and his psychiatrist wife Masha have invited a combustible collection of house guests to ride out the Covid crisis at their family home in upstate New York. Among them are an app developer, a globetrotting dandy and a charismatic celeb known only as ‘the Actor’. Add love, rivalry and revenge, and in Shteyngart’s hands you get a playful, allusive comedy of pandemic manners that triumphantly blends hilarity with soulfulness.
Hephzibah Anderson
Violeta Isabel Allende
Bloomsbury £16.99
At 100 years old,
Violeta has led a storied existence. Born in 1920, she spryly chronicles the events and upheavals of her remarkable life in a letter to her grandson. There’s plot aplenty, with political twists like military coups complicating intensely personal developments including a relationship with an unfaithful mafia gun-runner, her father’s suicide and her wayward daughter’s drug addiction. A whistle-stop tale, it sometimes creates a frustratingly blurred portrait.
Eithne Farry
The Love Songs Of W.E.B. Du Bois Honorée
Fanonne Jeffers
Fourth Estate £20 Named after the black scholar and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, this all-consuming multi-generational epic arrives on a wave of hype from across the Atlantic. Blending a folkloric style with hard-hitting realism, it yo-yos around four centuries in the bloodline of an African-American family, focusing on (among others) Aggie, sold to a sadistic Southern slave-owner, and Ailey, a historian in Washington DC. An intelligent page-turner about navigating the legacies of trauma.
Anthony Cummins
Real Easy Marie Rutkoski Tinder Press £14.99
As mid-western strip clubs go, The Lovely Lady is a pretty decent place to work. That’s until two of the women who work there end up murdered. Rutkoski’s first adult thriller offers a tough, convincing portrait of the hard lives of both The
Lovely Lady’s employees and the overworked cops who are always one step behind in their attempts to find the killer. A literary crime novel in the Gillian Flynn mould, with real heart and soul.