books

Green Dot follows the snarky but self-aware 24-year-old Hera as she attempts to find connection and meaning in her life, taking a job on a news website, and soon falling for an older married journalist, Arthur. Despite cynicism in all other areas of her life, she becomes besotted with him, and – despite herself – begins to long for a conventional, picket-fence happy ever after. A debut novel, Green Dot has been widely praised, and compared favourably with the likes of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones and Meg Mason's Sorrow and Bliss. The Irish Times observes that "despite the arch and exuberant writing style, there is a bleak undercurrent to the book". iNews describes it as "a brilliantly bawdy novel… a Fleabag-style debut [that is] actually worth the hype". (LB)

First published February 27, 2024

Blessings tells the story of shy protagonist Obiefuna's struggle to fit into a society where homosexuality is criminalised, homophobia is unquestioned and where any gender non-conformism is condemned. When he is caught in a clinch with another boy, his conservative, dogmatic father is outraged, sending him off to a strict Christian boarding school. First love and first enmity soon follow, as Obiefuna matures and learns how the world works.The Observer describes Blessings as a "an emotive, affecting debut", achieving "a blend of the particular and the universal, glossing traditional storytelling with a literary finesse that adds style without scaring the horses". It is a "sublime coming-of-age tale, " says the Guardian. "In a novel of secrecy, silences and silencing, Ibeh's sentences throughout are fastidiously pruned." (LB)

First published June 4, 2024

Billed as "Patricia Highsmith meets The White Lotus", the new novel from the author of the acclaimed The End of Mr Y is a wildly original summer thriller that begins as a just-married couple arrive at their luxury hotel on a Greek Island – reeling from the dramas of their wedding, and withholding secrets from one another. Told through letters, torn notebook pages and transcripts, The Sleepwalkers wrongfoots and surprises the reader at every turn, descending into a dark, Gothic mystery. "Through her bold storytelling," writes The New York Times, "The Sleepwalkers becomes a work of peculiar, gonzo genius." (RL)

First published April 9, 2024

For anyone previously unfamiliar with Everett's decades-long career, they will likely know him now, after his acclaimed 2001 novel, Erasure was turned into the Oscar-nominated 2023 film American Fiction. Everett's latest is a reimagining of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the enslaved Jim, which hits all the familiar narrative beats of its inspiration while creating a dazzling (and very humorous) new work. "Gripping, painful, funny, horrifying, this is multi-level entertainment," writes The Observer, "a consummate performance to the last." (RL)

First published March 19, 2024

"I wasn't trying to play the victim until the world taught me what a powerful grift it is." This is the opening sentence of Victim, a novel presented as the memoir of flawed protagonist and Bronx native Javi Perez, who plays the game of tragic storytelling to his own advantage. Javi learns that his background – murdered father, single, struggling mother, best friend an imprisoned gang member – is the perfect route to fame and fortune, and he is soon creating – and selling – stories around his identity in order to gain recognition as a writer. This shrewd "hustling Icarus", as the New York Times Book Review describes him, is at this centre of this "energetic and deeply satisfying debut novel". The Southern Review of Books praises the author's mastery of character: "Boryga's character development is exceptional. He draws the reader into Javi's psyche, experiencing his constant rationalisations, the fear of being caught, and the occasional pangs of guilt." (LB)

First published March 12, 2024

If you like your fiction noirish and nerve-shredding, look no further than the latest offering from US literary powerhouse Joyce Carol Oates, the author of more than 60 novels. In Flint Kill Creek, her characters face various macabre situations within a collection of a dozen short stories, with titles including Bone Marrow Doner, The Phlebotomist and Happy Christmas. It is a "grimly satisfying" collection of tales, says Publishers Week. "In each case, Oates's prose is surgically precise, and her appetite for the grotesque falls on the right side of lurid." The protagonists of each tale are bewildered by what is happening around them, thrown off balance, and face chilling, unhappy outcomes. "Yet, in thrall to a master manipulator of words," says the New York Journal of Books, "readers will grit their teeth and turn another page in this collection. The stories in Flint Kill Creek are unforgettable – although many may wish they could forget." (LB)

First published November 5, 2024

Shortlisted for The Booker Prize this year, Van der Wouden's sharp and sexy debut novel is set in The Netherlands 16 years after World War Two. Its protagonist is Isabel, an uptight, controlled and humourless figure who lives alone in her family's countryside home, shunning outsiders, intimacy and joy. All this begins to be broken apart when her brother's girlfriend, Eva, comes to stay. Amid the sweltering heat of the summer, tensions between the two women simmer, and truths are uncovered, leading to the plot's central, devastating revelation. "A quietly remarkable book" writes The New York Times of The Safekeep: "the story is resolved in such a bold and tender way that it becomes not merely clever, but indelible." The Washington Post praises The Safekeep as: "the rare novel about World War Two, the Holocaust and their aftermath that succeeds in feeling fully, intimately human". (RL)

First published May 28, 2024

Molly Aitken's 2020 debut The Island Child – about the power and danger of a mother's love – was a critical triumph. Her second has been equally well received, and is based on the true story of the first Irish woman convicted of witchcraft, Alice Kyteler (1280-1325). Bright I Burn portrays a formidable but humane heroine with a love of power, sex and wealth, who gets through four husbands, all of whom come to a suspicious end – whereupon an ambitious bishop condemns her as a witch. Alice's voice is interspersed throughout by the commentary of a chorus of judgmental villagers. "The novel moves through the decades in sharp, poetic vignettes," says Publishers Week. "It adds up to a fiercely intelligent and often surprising examination of a woman's choices and their consequences." The Irish Times, meanwhile, describes Bright I Burn as "mesmerising", and "an imaginative, very stylishly written and entertaining book". (LB)

First published June 6, 2024

David Sedaris returns with his most deeply personal and darkly hilarious book.

If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris's cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong.

When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself.

With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny--it's a book that can make you laugh 'til you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris's powers of observation have never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future.

This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumor joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris's darkest and warmest book yet--and it just might be his very best.

First published May 29, 2018

If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leap­ing to his death. There’s a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party—lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs.

These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harm­less laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background—new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can’t by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.

First published October 5, 2021