Fake Accounts: A Novel

"Another book I am extremely excited about is the American critic Lauren Oyler’s novel, Fake Accounts . It’s about a woman who discovers that her boyfriend has a secret life online as an Instagram conspiracy theorist, it’s out on 2 February, and I simply can’t wait to get my hands on it. Who do I have to bribe to get an advance copy? Oyler is a fantastically acerbic critic, whose work I’ve admired for a while – regard the incisive skill on display in her review of Tolentino’s Trick Mirror in the London Review of Books , for example, or this uncomfortably clear-eyed dissection of the relationship between hype and critical response in an interview published by The End of the World Review . It goes almost without saying that a lot of eyes will be on her own fiction debut – but indications are good. (“I started [Oyler]’s book thinking ‘she is such an enormous bitch in her book reviews, her novel better be unimpeachably great,'” as the memoirist Emily Gould put it, “and whoops! Sorry, it is!”) Not a novel, but I want to briefly mention that the American writers R. O. Kwon ( The Incendiaries ) and Garth Greenwell ( Cleanness – one of my favourite novels of 2020 ) have teamed up to produce an anthology of short fiction called Kink, which explores questions of love and desire “across the sexual spectrum” with a starry list of contributors including Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado and Chris Krause. It’s going straight on my pre-order list. Out 9 February. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And I suspect you will also be pleased to hear that Five Books alumnus Francis Spufford , author of Red Plenty and Golden Hill , will release a new novel in February 2021 (although readers in the US will have to wait until May). The latest book, Light Perpetual imagines an alternate future for five children killed in a (real-life) WW2 bombing: what if, somehow, they had survived? What are the lives they would have gone on to live? A detailed portrait of London through the 20th century. I’ll also be looking out for Vendela Vida’s We Run The Tides (February 9), and Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall – author of the dizzying postmodern thriller The Raw Shark Texts (4 February in the UK, or 6 April in the US) ."