Cal Flyn's Reading List
Cal Flyn is a writer, journalist, and the deputy editor of Five Books . Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape , her nonfiction book about how nature rebounds in abandoned places, was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the British Academy Book Prize. She writes regular round-ups of the most notable new fiction, which can be found here . Her Five Books interviews with other authors are here .
Open in WellRead Daily app →Abandoned Places (2021)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2021-01-26).
Source: fivebooks.com
Rose Macaulay · Buy on Amazon
"Yes, this is a wonderful book – a real tome. I think it’s out of print now, but I bought a second hand copy very cheap via Abe Books. Rose Macaulay was a prolific writer who wrote more than twenty novels in the twentieth century. Macaulay was fascinated by ruins and themes of civilisational collapse; I really like her novel My World My Wilderness , which is partially set in post-war London, where a fearless teenage girl called Barbary runs wild through the shell craters and the bombed-out remains of churches, all of which are garlanded with wildflowers and weeds: “greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Mayan temples, hiding them from prying eyes…” It’s very atmospheric. But I’ve chosen The Pleasure of Ruins , a nonfiction book, because it’s an impressive work of scholarship: a cultural history of ruins that examines how these places repulse and attract in equal measure, and in that sense haunt our collective imagination. She’s very good on the origins of sham ruins. She quotes Thomas Whateley, the 18th-century English politician and author of Observations on Modern Gardening : In wild and romantic scenes may be introduced a ruined stone bridge, or which some arches may be still standing… a picturesque object…the care taken to keep it still open, tho’ the original building is decayed… give it an imposing air of reality I think that’s so interesting – artifice creating a sense of reality. I think the emotional and spiritual significance of the symbol of the ruin, or the abandoned building more generally, is such that it throws our present worries and cares into sharp relief. It says: one day this too will be dust. Of course, she writes about real places too, ancient cities: Petra and Persepolis, Nineveh and Babylon. Places that prove to us the truth of that sentiment. The collapse of civilisations, ruined temples to ruined gods. She touches on modern ruins too, saying they have yet to acquire the “weathered patina” of age, and have not yet put on their ivy, but Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed, and the appropriate creatures will revel… I love that – the redemption of the ruin through natural forces. It is reborn as a living landscape. In the end, though, she says that ruins are best experienced as a fantasy, that in real life – as she experienced in London during the war – the picturesque destruction is too tinged with sadness and fear to be desirable. The idea of ruination, of abandonment and decay, is bigger and more meaningful than it is in reality."
Jeff Vandermeer · Buy on Amazon
"That interview is where I heard about him, actually. I bought a copy of Annihilation right away and lost myself in it. I can’t tell you how eerie and absorbing it is. I’d better explain the set up: Annihilation is the first novel in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. The Southern Reach is a research institution set up to investigate the mysterious ‘Area X’, an exclusion zone with strange and frightening effects on the human mind. We follow ‘the biologist’, one member of a four-woman team that has been dispatched into the zone. Long abandoned and fenced off, it has grown into a pristine wilderness – but it is haunted by traces of the expeditions that have gone before them. If you’ve seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic film Stalker , you’ll have some sense of the atmosphere and concept. Like Stalker , it’s incredibly unsettling, and yet terribly, verdantly beautiful. It’s very, very good. Yes. What’s interesting about the Southern Reach trilogy is that it doesn’t answer all the questions that it poses. You have to be quite willing to come away at the end still not quite certain what is going on. But I like that about it. I made the mistake of taking Annihilation with me on a trip to Swona, an abandoned island off the north coast of Scotland, where I spent 24 hours alone and slept in an abandoned house. I’d travelled there in June, when the wildflowers were in bloom and the birds were breeding; I thought it would be nice to see it so full of life, and it was. But the ‘life’ was not pleased to see me. I was threatened by what we call bonxies – great skuas, big busty seabirds – and then dive-bombed and scratched by Arctic terns when I accidentally got too close to their colony. “I had to put it down and read a 1974 Readers Digest instead, because it was making me far too jumpy to sleep” Being there amid the abandoned houses, all in various states of dereliction, some with belongings still in the cupboards and one with the dining table still set, was very unsettling. Even though I knew myself to be safe, I just couldn’t relax. There were birds stamping around in the roof space of the house I stayed in overnight, which kept me awake. And my only reading matter was this, which definitely didn’t help. In the end I had to put it back in my rucksack and read a 1974 Readers Digest that I found in a cupboard, because it was making me far too jumpy to sleep."
Mary Mycio · Buy on Amazon
"In a sense, yes. I suppose that sense of unseen, unknowable danger is very much present when visiting the Chernobyl exclusion zone. There are a number of very good books about the 1986 nuclear accident and its aftermath – not least Svetlana Alexievitch’s Chernobyl Prayer ( known as Voices from Chernobyl in the US) and Serhii Plokhy’s Baillie Gifford Prize-winning Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy . But what I’m really interested in, and what I travelled there myself to see in 2017, is how the natural world has rebounded or reacted in the wake of the accident and in the absence of people. The exclusion zone, or ‘zone of alienation’ in the more poetic translation, covers about a thousand square miles of Ukraine. There’s also a large ‘radioecological reserve’ over the border in Belarus, which arguably received the brunt of the contamination. So we’re talking about an enormous area that has been almost entirely deserted. It takes in two towns, Chernobyl and Pripyat, and nearly 200 smaller settlements, many of which were farming communities. In Pripyat, we explored abandoned schools and sports facilities, a small fairground, a supermarket and apartment blocks. The scale of the abandonment inside the zone is really quite incredible. And though the radiation has had myriad negative effects – especially in the immediate aftermath of the accident, when swathes of pine forest were killed, and unknown numbers of animals died of radiation poisoning – the zone has, over time, begun to be recolonised by flora and fauna. It’s a controversial subject, but Mary Mycio breaks down complex science and translates it for a general audience. Published in 2005, it’s now a little out of date, but I’d recommend anyone interested in the apparent natural recovery of the Chernobyl exclusion zone to start with this book, before moving on to more recent scientific studies, as it offers an excellent grounding in the science. And it’s all told through an engaging first-person narrative."
J. G. Ballard · Buy on Amazon
"Yes. This was recommended to me by Amy Liptrot . I’d never read any Ballard before that. The Drowned World is set in a post-apocalyptic future, in which the ice caps have melted and the planet is growing ever hotter. The world’s surviving population has fled north to what was the Arctic. London is flooded; its buildings rise from steamy lagoons where once were Piccadilly Circus and Pall Mall and Trafalgar Square. Dr Kerans is a research scientist working for the military, and is making ecological study of this strange new habitat. He lives in some style in the penthouse of the abandoned Ritz Hotel, helping himself to the cocktail cabinet and wearing the luxury suits left by its last occupant before the evacuation, a Milanese financier. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . All the time it’s getting hotter, and the wildlife is getting wilder and more primitive – de-evolving, in Ballard’s way of thinking. And so is Kerans. You can think of it as a sort of cli-fi Heart of Darkness, with that unhinged quality, and the intense heat, and this ominous ramping up of tension. It also has a number of things in common with Annihilation , in as much as the main character Kerans is a biologist studying this uncanny world, and growing increasingly psychologically affected by it. As a vision of the future, it’s rather terrifying. But it’s rather beautiful too: this steamy, swampy London where alligators lurk in cloudy waters, and giant lizards roar at the sun. There’s an incredible scene in which a sort of pirate, Strangman, drains Leicester Square using pumps and dams, and the few remaining residents walk into the silted-up, slimy city streets, and find it horrifying. While working on Islands of Abandonment , I found I kept circling back around to sci-fi . Although I’m writing nonfiction, there was something in the atmosphere of Annihilation and The Drowned City that I wanted to recreate; I wanted my book to feel the way I did reading those books. Because abandoned places often are uncanny in the manner of weird fiction, they can be ominous and eerie and unsettling. And yet they are thrilling too – and that what draws me back, the way I keep being drawn back to these books. Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape is out now. January 26, 2021. Updated: July 17, 2021 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]"
Favourite Novels of 2020 (2020)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2020-12-18).
Source: fivebooks.com
Sophie Mackintosh · Buy on Amazon
"Mackintosh’s debut The Water Cure was a dizzyingly ambiguous novel about three sisters kept by their parents from a world that may or may not have been contaminated by some unspecified disaster. It was dazzlingly good, almost suffocatingly claustrophobic, and so I awaited her second outing keenly. How gratifying, then, to find Blue Ticket a tonally similar, and yet somehow entirely fresh work of dystopian fiction. Set in an alternate reality, possibly a dystopian near-future (as in The Water Cure , this is never made explicit), we meet our protagonist Calla as she is allocated a ‘blue ticket’ in the government-sanctioned lottery, which decides which girls should go on to become mothers. A blue ticket marks Calla for a child-free future – one in which she might prioritise independence and career. When we find her a decade or so later she has done just that: she is a scientist by day, hedonist by night. But when she becomes obsessed with the idea of becoming pregnant, and does so by underhand means, she becomes an outlaw and we see how quickly society turns on her. I wrote a longer review of the book for New Humanist magazine, in which I remarked on how speculative fiction allows us to examine moral questions without the normal baggage that we all bring to our reading of a book. “ Blue Ticket reads like an allegory,” I noted, “but the moral we are to take from it is not clear.” This is the pleasure of Mackintosh’s fiction: her heroines are as morally complex as the world they live in. A book that stays with you long after you consign it to the bookshelf."
Garth Greenwell · Buy on Amazon
"Greenwell’s novel (although it could equally be described as a collection of short stories, or a series of vignettes, or – as he has described it in the past – ‘a lieder cycle’) portrays an unnamed American man living and teaching in Sofia, Bulgaria. Autobiographical, in the loosest sense, it is a portrait of a gay man navigating a life in an often homophobic country, forging intimate connections, and bearing witness to political and social upheaval. Cleanness is perhaps most notable for its portrayals of queer sex, which are delicately but unflinchingly written, and suffused with unspoken questions of trust, vulnerability and power. In parts, we are invited to share in our protagonist’s humiliation, as he is truly laid bare upon the page. Desire, in Greenwell’s book, is a strange and shapeshifting creature which spits at and scratches its owner. “Sex is … at once as near to and as far from authenticity as we come,” as he has written . “In no other activity, I think, do the physical and metaphysical draw so near one another.” Quite. It’s a clear, calm and rather beautiful book that I admire a great deal."
Susanna Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor (narrator) · Buy on Amazon
"Susanna Clarke had an enormous hit with her 2004 debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , a great tome with Tolkienian ambition – telling the story of the ‘rediscovery’ of magic during the Napoleonic Wars – and mainstream appeal. So this slim novel had a lot to live up to. Fans will be delighted to hear that it succeeds magnificently. Set in a fantastical other world, which (as it soon becomes clear) runs parallel to our own, we find its protagonist wandering an infinite series of ruined halls through which wind rushes, clouds condense and seawater washes. Clarke is said to have been inspired by the surreal short stories of Jorge Luis Borges; her lead character takes his nickname from the 18th-century Italian painter of vast, imaginary prisons. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Piranesi, we soon learn, is a scientist of some kind, who shares his detailed notes on ‘The House’ and what can be found there with ‘The Other’ – his only company, unless you include the skeletons he has found secreted between the statues of the halls and vestibules. I won’t say any more – it’s a book you should come to fresh –but think of it as the lovechild of Northern Lights and Christopher Nolan’s thrillingly disconcerting movie Memento . Truly rather wondrous, and the product of a brilliant mind. (I should note that I ‘read’ this in the form of an audiobook read by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who made an excellent narrator, perfectly embodying Piranesi’s pleasant, if confused, manner.)"
Hilary Mantel · Buy on Amazon
"Launched to huge fanfare in spring… only for it to be immediately drowned out by the thumping pulse of Covid lockdowns and border closures, Mantel’s stunning conclusion to her double- Booker Prize -winning Wolf Hall trilogy took us by the hand and led us, by circuitous means, to the inevitable demise of Thomas Cromwell on the executioner’s block. I knew how it had to end, anticipated it, and yet – after approximately 120 hours in the company of “He, Cromwell” – I wasn’t yet ready to give him up. Mantel is the most deft and masterful of writers. Ominous foreshadowing is conveyed subtly by way of allusion, sideways glances, and deadpan asides; warnings are missed, mistakes are made, resentments build. Through Mantel’s eyes, the great anti-hero of English history is reinvented as a man of thought and care and canny, who plays his mercurial master like a lute, until he doesn’t. The fall, when it comes, is swift and merciless. Right until the final pages I was still guessing as to how it would unfold. And the epilogue – detailing Henry VIII’s later regret – hangs with me still. I must say that I missed Anne Boleyn’s acid wit and neurotic energy, but she makes her occasional appearances in flashbacks thanks to Mantel’s habit of weaving and interweaving past and present. Plus, our promise of a troubled future: Bloody Mary rising up in the wings, bitterness twisting and hardening inside her. What will she write next? I can’t wait. Hilary Mantel could write a shopping list and I would savour it."
Sayaka Murata · Buy on Amazon
"I was late to appreciate Sayaka Murata, whose breakthrough novel Convenience Store Woman was recommended by Linda Flores in our interview on the best of modern Japanese literature (“darkly humorous”). But I’m here now, and just in time for the publication of this firecracker of a follow-up, Earthlings . Earthlings explores many similar themes to that earlier book (fake relationships, emotional weirdness, societal pressure to be ‘normal’), but takes it to the next level. In it, two young cousins on the brink of puberty create an imaginary world for the two of them to share. When Natsuki and Yuu’s blossoming romance causes consternation among relatives, they are torn apart; Natsuki never truly recovers. As I wrote in my fall round-up, “if you appreciate trigger warnings, this book requires them all – child abuse, violence, incest, and plenty more. But somehow the story skates along the top of all this darkness, and shimmers with a deadpan wit. I loved it.” Of course, I read far more than five brilliant books this year. So let me add a few honourable mentions: I zipped through Naoise Dolan’s sharp and funny novel about a bisexual love triangle, Exciting Times ; I admired the formal invention and emotional acuity of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House , a memoir of abuse at the hands of her partner (which I am counting as a 2020 book on a technicality – it was released in the UK, in January); and Paul Mendez’s raw and ennervating coming of age story Rainbow Milk . And one more, which I can’t bear to leave out: Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening was first published (in the original Dutch) in 2018, but made it into English translation in spring and won the 2020 International Booker Prize. When I discussed it with the chair of the judges, Ted Hodgkinson , he said: “I get tingles when I even think about this book.” I have to agree. It’s truly electrifying, and not for the faint hearted. What have I missed? I’d love to hear the books that made your 2020 top five. Let us know by messaging us on Facebook , Twitter or Instagram . Part of our best books of 2020 series."
Notable Novels of Fall 2025 (2025)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2025-09-30).
Source: fivebooks.com
Patricia Lockwood · Buy on Amazon
"There are a number of highly anticipated new novels just newly released, not least Patricia Lockwood’s latest, Will There Ever Be Another You . I love Patricia Lockwood. Her writing is irreverent and funny and full of non-sequiturs, yet also full of pathos and depth. You may remember her memoir, Priestdaddy , about growing up in the Midwest as the daughter of an charismatic, gun-toting Catholic priest, or her heartbreaking novel No One is Talking About This . Will There Ever Be Another You features a narrator unhinged by Long Covid, whose brain fog is modelled on symptoms experienced by Lockwood herself, as detailed in a London Review of Books diary published in 2020. (“I was under the impression that I had taken detailed notes throughout the experience,” as she recalled, “but when I opened the file called ‘quarantine’ I found it to be 158 words long and full of cryptic particles: ‘Masque of the Red Death. Statue of Pericles. Tigers.’ Fine, whatever.”) Also unmissable: this profile of Lockwood, which ran recently in the New Yorker."
Oyinkan Braithwaite · Buy on Amazon
"You may, like me, be excited to learn that the Nigerian-British novelist Oyinkan Braithwaite has a new novel. In Cursed Daughters , a young woman believed by her relatives to be the reincarnation of her drowned cousin desperately seeks to break the family curse that leaves all their women in their maternal line heartbroken. This bleakly humorous family saga will not disappoint those who loved Braithwaite’s hit debut, My Sister, the Serial Killer and offers a fascinating portrait of life in Lagos, which she depicts as utterly modern yet deeply superstitious. (Out now in the UK; 4 Nov in the US)"
Olivia Laing · Buy on Amazon
"In November, Olivia Laing (whose experimental novel Crudo was an international bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize ) will publish The Silver Book , a novel billed as both “a queer love story and a noirish thriller” set in 1970s Italy. In it, a young English artist meets the (real) production designer Danilo Donati, before joining him as his assistant at the film studio where reality is recast and reconstructed. These are troubled times—the ‘ Years of Lead ,’ during which hundreds died in terror attacks—and very soon the violence will be knocking at their door. Laing wrote the book in a three-month frenzy in 2024, describing the process as like “an extraordinary tidal wave I was riding…I’d be typing as fast as I could, with the sense that I could hear the words.” I can’t wait to read the result."
Ian McEwan · Buy on Amazon
"Ian McEwan returns with his nineteenth(!) novel, What We Can Know . He describes it as “a novel about a quest, a crime, revenge, fame, a tangled love affair, mental illness, love of nature and poetry, and how, through all natural and self-inflicted catastrophes, we have the knack of surviving somehow.” In the apocalyptic 22th century, a historian searches for a literary manuscript last seen at a scandalous 2014 dinner party; since then the world has been ravaged by fire, pandemic, nuclear explosions, rising sea levels. Imagine A.S. Byatt’s Possession set in the world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , and you’ll get an idea—and McEwan brings bravura and extravagance to this terrible vision. The New York Times’ Dwight Garner declared it “a piece of late-career showmanship” from the old master. “It gave me so much pleasure,” he added, “I sometimes felt like laughing.”"
Chris Kraus · Buy on Amazon
"Yes. While I have you, let me draw your attention to Chris Kraus’s The Four Spent the Day Together . Kraus, the avant-garde author of I Love Dick , offers a new freewheeling autofiction in which the main character, ‘Catt’ becomes obsessed with a grim real-life murder in northern Minnesota around the time that her own partner relapses into alcoholism. Krause has explained that, while attempting to report the case in a true crime style reminiscent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song , she “started to realize that it was not possible to write that kind of book anymore.” They “took place in backwater towns, pre-internet, where people really thought they were invisible. Everyone, the perpetrators, the defendants, the judge, the whole community, would just pour their hearts out. That’s not happening now.” However, while researching she was struck by the similarities between the depressed mining town in which the murder took place and the working class Connecticut community in which she herself grew up. Those parallels then formed the core of the book, which wrestles with class in contemporary America, addiction, and—as ever—art. (Out Oct 7.) It’s exciting to see so many new books from big-hitter authors after what felt like a quiet summer. Each of these books has been eagerly awaited, and we’d love to know what you think. Let us know on social media—or send us your own personal watch list of notable novels in Fall 2025."
Notable Novels of Spring 2021 (2021)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2021-01-01).
Source: fivebooks.com
Torrey Peters · Buy on Amazon
"Torrey Peter’s Detransition, Baby starts from a provocative premise – a co-parenting triangle formed by a trans woman, a former trans woman (now detransitioned and living again as a man), and his new girlfriend who has fallen unexpectedly pregnant. It tackles big issues (gender dysphoria, the challenges of living as a trans woman, non-traditional family units) with wit and flair; think Fleishmann is in Trouble , if Fleishmann is in Trouble were set in the New York LGBTQ community. Serpent’s Tail, the British publisher, has published a brief extract online which will give you a sense of the voice, in case you want to try before you buy. Sarah Moss’s Summerwater finally reaches the US on 12 January; released in the UK last year to thunderous acclaim, this small but perfectly formed novel comprises twelve monologues voiced by guests at a remote holiday park on a Scottish lochside, whose stories come together and apart – as, all the while, rain hammers at the window and the tension mounts. I was particularly excited to receive an early proof of Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road (21 January in the UK, no US release date yet), which I gobbled up in record time. In it, Anya, a woman who fled the war-torn Balkans as a child, returns to visit her Bosnian parents for the first time in years, with her very English fiancé in tow. It’s an impressive novel; Sudjic’s cool affect and sense of detachment provides cover for a growing sense of urgency and alienation. I’m not sure if I’d describe it as a fragmentary novel, exactly, but it’s certainly fractured – personally I love it, although I know this style can be polarising. (I also recommend Sudjic’s 2017 debut, Sympathy , an ultra-online story of digital stalking and sexual obsession.) And if that sounds interesting to you, I suspect you will also be excited to hear that Max Porter, author of the thrilling, shape-shifting novellas Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny , will release a new book – The Death of Francis Bacon – on January 7. Again, I don’t see a US release date listed yet, but Americans should keep their eyes peeled. It’s described variously as a novel and a sequence of seven “written pictures,” its an ambitious attempt to get into the mind of the late, great artist. Fans of experimental fiction should also look out for Rebecca Watson’s little scratch , a formally inventive work of stream-of-consciousness that has had met with a rapturous critical reception, and is out on 14 January. Its words often scattered across the page, or unfolding in parallel columns, it has an enthralling, slightly breathless quality and perfectly recreates the flickering of thoughts through the anxious mind. Get a sense of Watson’s style by reading the award-winning short story that spawned the novel in The White Review ."
Abigail Dean · Buy on Amazon
"Finally, Abigail Dean’s Girl A is the psychological thriller everyone seems to be talking about this season. The focus of enormous pre-publication hype, the novel has been backed by Paula Hawkins ( The Girl on the Train ), Jessie Burton ( The Miniaturist ) and what seems like dozens of other big-name authors, and is set to be a television show directed by Johan Renck (HBO’s Chernobyl). In it, a woman is forced to reckon with the extreme abuse she and her siblings underwent as children at the hands of their parents and the impact it had on their later lives. An assured debut that you will find hard to put down – but be prepared for a harrowing read. It’s out on the 21 January in the UK, and 2 February stateside. The American writer Patricia Lockwood is best known as a poet and memoirist (you really must read her hilarious account of growing up the daughter of a charismatic but erratic Lutheran minister, Priestdaddy ), but she will release a debut novel No One is Talking About This on February 16. It’s garnered praise from Sally Rooney ( Normal People ) and Jia Tolentino ( Trick Mirror ) and follows a woman who has found enormous fame off the back of her humorous social media posts. (One might suspect there to be an autofictional strand at play here, given that Lockwood is almost as well known for her irreverent Twitter presence as she is for her perceptive literary criticism .)"
Lauren Oyler · Buy on Amazon
"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) ."
Kazuo Ishiguro · Buy on Amazon
"Kazuo Ishiguro will be publishing his first new novel since winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017. Klara and the Sun (2 March) is told through the eyes of a slightly out-of-date android (“Artificial Friend”) as she secures her first owner. It’s a slim book, with big ambitions – asking questions about the ethics of artificial intelligence – reminiscent of Never Let Me Go . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’ll also be looking out for Mary H. K. Choi’s latest YA novel Yolk , about two estranged sisters facing serious illness, Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom – finally out in the UK on 4 March, after receiving rave reviews in the US in September – and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed , a sequel to his bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning debut The Sympathiser . Science fiction fans will also be pleased to hear that Arkady Martine will release A Desolation Called Peace , a follow-up to A Memory Called Empire, recommended on this site when it was shortlisted for the 2020 Arthur C Clarke Award ,"
Megan Nolan · Buy on Amazon
"I am personally looking forward to Irish writer Megan Nolan’s debut, Acts of Desperation, about a brief, toxic relationship, its aftermath, and examining the self-negating impulse of a woman who needs to see herself reflected in the eyes of another person to feel herself to be real. With endorsements from Karl Ove Knausgaard and Catherine Pew, I think it’s going to make a real splash. I admire Nolan’s sensitive and emotionally honest personal essays; if you haven’t come across her before, I recommend this piece – which offers unflinching self-analysis disguised as an ode to the affordable pub chain Wetherspoons (“I still go there alone some hungover maudlin Sundays, needing there to be somewhere which always stays the same, and costs the same, and sounds the same.”), and this essay she wrote about being a university dropout for The Guardian (“When I arrived at Trinity, for all my problems, I still believed myself to be essentially clever and interesting, and within four weeks, that idea of myself, which had kept me safe, had been shattered.”). I’m placing preorders now for Jon McGregor’s fifth novel Lean Fall Stand and Katherine Heiny’s Early Morning Riser , both out in April. Look out for Rosa Rankin Gee’s Dreamland , set in Margate, on England’s south coast, in the near future: sex, drugs, rising sea levels and a love story between two young women. Plus Redder Days by Sue Rainsford, a slim masterpiece of literary horror. Part of our best books of 2021 series."
Notable Novels of Spring 2022 (2022)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2022-01-11).
Source: fivebooks.com
Hanya Yanagihara · 2022 · Buy on Amazon
"Hanya Yanagihara, author of the heartbreaking and critically acclaimed bestseller A Little Life , is imminently to publish To Paradise, her third novel. Yanagihara’s new book is set in an alternate world, one in which the American Civil War has produced a continent of rival territories—a Disunited States. It’s divided into three parts, each a hundred years apart. The final instalment takes place in a dystopic 2093 as pandemics sweep the world. Characters appear and reappear in different guises, changing ethnicity and gender. It’s a novel of huge ambition, and one likely to arouse a great deal of critical attention; already the Guardian has called it “impressive” and “significant”, the New York Times warned it “simultaneously bedazzle[s] and befuddle[s]”. To Paradise is the novel everyone will be talking about in spring 2022. Monica Ali (author of the Booker-shortlisted Brick Lane ) will publish her long-awaited fifth novel Love Marriage here in the UK in February and in the US in May. Karen Joy Fowler ( The Jane Austen Book Club , We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves ) will return with Booth, a fictional account of the life of John Wilkes Booth, the stage actor and Confederate sympathiser who assassinated Abraham Lincoln—and those of his his many theatrical siblings."
Sheila Heti · Buy on Amazon
"I’m particularly excited about the February arrival of Pure Colour by Sheila Heti, surely the smartest, most erudite and exacting writer working today. I was riveted by her postmodern philosophical novel How Should a Person Be? , in which a character called Sheila (who is very like, but not an exact facsimile of, the author) holds long discussions with her friends, including a painter called Margaux (who is very like, but not an exact facsimile of, the Canadian artist Margaux Williamson ). And her daring meditation on whether to become a parent, Motherhood —much of which unfolds as a dialogue governed by the rolling of dice, using a technique borrowed from the I-Ching —must have prompted thousands, if not tens of thousands, of earnest debates. Both of those books are perhaps only nominally considered to be fiction, but Pure Colour has been billed by the publisher as “a galaxy of a novel” which combines realism with surrealistic elements (at one point, the protagonist’s father moves through her as a spirit, at another she becomes a leaf), and asks the reader to consider life and death, the nature of art, and the nature of… well, nature. Unmissable. Also of note: Booker Prize-winner Marlon James returns with the second novel in his bestselling fantasy Dark Star Trilogy, Moon Witch, Spider King (March 3); Lucy Foley ( The Hunting Party, The Guest List) returns with a new twisty, multi-perspective thriller The Paris Apartment (Feb 22 in the US, 3 March in the UK) ; while Sarah Moss’s slim Covid novel The Fell —out in the UK since November—will reach the US (1 March)."
Douglas Stuart · Buy on Amazon
"Looking ahead, April offers an embarrassment of riches. Douglas Stuart is due to release his second novel, the breathlessly anticipated follow up to his Booker Prize-winning, million-copy-selling debut Shuggie Bain ; Young Mungo has been described as a working class Romeo and Juliet , in which two men from either side of Glasgow’s sectarian divide fall in love for the first time. The first review just dropped (Kirkus says it’s “romantic, terrifying, brutal, tender, and, in the end, sneakily hopeful”) so get your pre-orders in pronto. I’m also very excited about Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House , which is a ‘sibling novel’ for her remarkable novel-in-stories A Visit From the Goon Squad , which must be one of my favourite-ever books. Emily St John Mandel (author of that most beautiful of post-apocalyptic novels Station Eleven , another from my all-time top ten) will publish Sea of Tranquility , a time travel book that leaps from the Canadian wilderness to a colony on the moon—a perfect book for people like me, who love those books that fall into the science fiction–literary fiction intersection on the publishing Venn diagram. There’s also Companion Piece by the great Ali Smith to look forward to, her follow-up to her beloved Seasonal Quartet, and Julian Barnes ‘ Elizabeth Finch , a portrait of an intellectual crush."
Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft · Buy on Amazon
"Olga Tokarczuk’s masterpiece The Books of Jacob , which was specifically cited when she won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature , will finally reach the United States. It’s translated by the American author and critic Jennifer Croft, who also translated Tokarczuk’s International Booker Prize-winning Flights . The Books of Jacob —published in the original Polish in 2014—is a thousand-page tome on the life of Jacob Frank, a self-proclaimed messiah in 18th century Poland who declared his followers exempt from moral laws, and encouraged them to break all forms of religious and sexual taboos. It is, inarguably, a daunting prospect, but it’s a worthy reading project for dark winter evenings. The Guardian called it “dense, captivating and weird…a visionary novel that conforms to a particular notion of masterpiece—long, arcane and sometimes inhospitable.” Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Also of note: one of Denmark’s most celebrated writers, Tove Ditlevsen ( The Copenhagen Trilogy ) will publish The Faces , a portrait of one woman’s slide into mental illness (26 Jan); Fernanda Melchor, author of the multi-award-winning Hurricane Season , will publish another work of brutal, torrential prose, Paradais (March 22); and one of my favourite discoveries of last year, Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century , which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, will arrive in the US—an eerie translation by Martin Aitken will be available from 1 Feb."
Julia Armfield · Buy on Amazon
"I’ve had my eye on quite a few literary debuts this season, not least Julia Armfield’s beautifully unnerving Our Wives Under the Sea . Armfield previously published a remarkable short story collection, salt slow , which saw her shortlisted for the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year here in the UK, and this book underlines her reputation for finely crafted tales of the horrifying, the strange and the contemporary gothic. Also of interest: Oklahoma poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s first novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois will be published in the UK on 20 Jan after garnering rave reviews in the States; Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers , a feminist dystopia in which ‘failing’ mothers are sent to a government-run re-education unit, is very freshly released and will appeal to those who enjoy Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks or Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket ; and Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark , which follows a large cast of characters through generations in the centuries that follow a calamitous plague. As ever, we love to hear about the books that you are personally looking forward to—or have just discovered. Don’t hesitate to get in touch via Twitter , Facebook or Instagram . We always love to hear from you. Part of our best books of 2022 series."
Notable Novels of Summer 2023 (2023)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2023-05-20).
Source: fivebooks.com
Emma Cline · Buy on Amazon
"One of the most hotly anticipated books of summer 2023 must be Emma Cline’s new novel The Guest. Set at the end of a long hot summer on Long Island, we follow a manipulative 20-something as she infiltrates the social circles of the American elite. Cline is an able storyteller and a master narrator of the inner lives of amoral young women. It’s another hazy, intriguing tale from the author of The Girls , her bestselling 2016 story of cult-motivated murders in 1960s California. Like Sally Rooney , Cline is that rare literary beast—a critic’s darling who also sells by the shedload. Naoise Dolan, the young author whose caustic debut Exciting Times made a splash back in 2020, will publish her second novel. The Happy Couple charts the upcoming nuptials of Luke and Celine, an Irish couple who found themselves getting engaged as an alternative to breaking up, including the perspective of several members of the wedding party. It is, The Guardian reports , “less love triangle, more sex pentangle”, so be prepared for bed-hopping and a more general debate about what it means to live happily ever after."
Catherine Lacey · Buy on Amazon
"The book I’ve been jabbering about to anyone who will listen is Catherine Lacey’s new novel Biography of X , which is a tricksy, intriguing book comprising a faux biography set in a contemporary, but counterfactual United States. In it, the grieving widow of a renowned, controversial performance artist named ‘ X’— whose iconoclastic, identity-switching work echoes that of Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle, among others—attempts to piece together her wife’s mysterious origins, and in doing so offers a glimpse into a reality in which the American South seceded under a theocratic regime in the wake of the Second World War . It’s at once moving and bewildering, and terribly clever—quite extraordinary. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, now’s the moment. It’s the novel other novelists have been pressing into each others’ hands. Lorrie Moore ( Birds of America , Self-Help ) is best known for her masterful and often very funny short stories , but is also a talented novelist. Her new book I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home , billed as “a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries,” will be out in June. And Dennis Lehane ( Mystic River , Shutter Island ) returns with Small Mercies , a superior thriller set in 1970s Boston in the tense months that follow a ruling aimed at desegregating local schools . A missing white girl; a black man found dead—are these the sparks that will finally set the tinderbox alight?"
Alice Winn · Buy on Amazon
"Alice Winn’s In Memoriam— a love story set during the tumult of the First World War—came roaring out of the starting gates and straight into the bestseller lists. In it, two heartsick schoolboys are forced to confront their feelings for one another amid the horror of war. It’s been endorsed by such literary grandees as Maggie O’Farrell and Garth Greenwell; The New York Times has also described it as both “devastating” and “tender”. (See also: Winn’s recent Five Books interview in which she recommended five of the best WW1 novels .) The actor Tom Hanks has published a second book, his first novel, which offers a behind-the-scenes account of the creation of a blockbuster movie: The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece . It’s received somewhat mixed reviews ( The Washington Post described it as “thoroughly engaging”; The Guardian said it was “a bland busman’s holiday”) but has already garnered plenty of column inches and will certainly find a large audience. (Hanks’ first book, a collection of short stories in which typewriters featured prominently, is reported to have sold 234,000 copies in the UK alone.)"
Steven Wright · Buy on Amazon
"And the American stand-up Steven Wright, known for his deadpan one-liners, has also ventured into fiction for the first time with Harold , an absurdist , stream-of-consciousness novel set over a single day in a third-grade classroom, as thoughts flit through the mind of an eight-year-old boy. As The New York Times explains , “The book’s central metaphor is a description of Harold’s thought process as a room with one window and a riot of birds flying around. Occasionally one flies out. That represents an idea. It’s a view of creativity that is random and unpredictable. Isn’t it a bit scary? What happens if the birds stop flying out?” It won’t be for everyone but it’s an interestingly experimental approach from one of the most influential comedians of our age. I’m excited about Megan Nolan’s second novel, Ordinary Human Failings , which will be out in July. This is her follow-up to the incisive Acts of Desperation , which took the form of a post-mortem of an obsessive, power-imbalanced relationship. This new book follows an ambitious news reporter whose investigation into a child’s sudden death on a 1990s London housing estate leads him to an Irish immigrant family with a notorious reputation. But are they at fault? Nolan specialises in the creation of emotional landscapes so bright one can barely look at them."
Caleb Azumah Nelson · Buy on Amazon
"Finally, look out for Caleb Azumah Nelson’s second novel Small Worlds, which was published this month in the UK and shot straight into the bestseller charts. Set in South London among its Ghanaian diaspora, this—like his first novel Open Water — is a lushly-written love story set to a powerful musical soundtrack; Small Worlds also digs deep into the immigrant experience and intergenerational trauma. As ever, such a round-up can only ever offer a tiny glimpse of the wealth of newly published novels. We’d love to hear what you’ve enjoyed recently and what books you have on pre-order. Get in touch with us by email or on social media to let us know."
Notable Novels of Spring 2024 (2024)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2024-01-20).
Source: fivebooks.com
Sigrid Nunez · Buy on Amazon
"Fans of Sigrid Nunez ( The Friend ) will be pleased to learn that her new novel The Vulnerables is already available in the US and will be in British bookshops from Jan 25. It’s set in Covid-era New York, in which an unnamed female writer moves into a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment to look after their pet macaw, Eureka. This is, technically, her second ‘pandemic novel,’ after Salvation City (2010), which is set during a fictional flu outbreak; previously Nunez has commented how, when the 2020 lockdowns came into effect, she had a sense of eerie premonition: “When all of this started, I thought, ‘Wait, didn’t I write a book about it?'” Towards the end of this month, Kiley Reid will publish Come and Get It , a follow-up to her Booker-longlisted debut Such a Fun Age . Set at the University of Arkansas, it follows mixed-race student Millie as she helps an older female professor to spy on her dorm neighbours. Come and Get It has had more mixed reviews than the earlier book, but nevertheless it’s reported to be a twisty page turner packed with whip-cracking repartee."
Megan Nolan · Buy on Amazon
"Readers in the US will finally be able to get their hands on Ordinary Human Failings , the sophomore novel by the Irish writer Megan Nolan. It’s a change of direction after her transfixing debut Acts of Desperation — in which a troubled young woman sinks herself into a one-sided relationship—but not an unwelcome one. Ordinary Human Failings is a family drama set on a London housing estate in the 1990s, as the child of a Irish immigrant family falls under suspicion following the disappearance of a local toddler. An ambitious but jaded reporter offers to put the family up in a cheap hotel—for ‘protection’—but this apparent munificence comes with strings attached. Nolan has been one of my favourite writers for years; she dissects the inner experience with a scalpel blade and precisely labels what she finds. Ordinary Human Failings feels like a significant development in her personal style, shifting from the hushed confessional to something grander, something more universal. “Nolan dissects the inner experience with a scalpel blade and precisely labels what she finds” Past Five Books interviewee Francis Spufford ( Red Plenty , Golden Hill ) will also arrive Stateside with a new, propulsive novel that spans genre and literary fiction. Cahokia Jazz is billed as a “noirish detective novel” set in an alternate 1920s America, where the Jazz Age is swinging in the grand old Mississippian city of Cahokia . In our own reality, Cahokia was an ancient indigenous settlement abandoned in the 14th century; in Cahokia Jazz, thanks to a quirk of epidemiological history, the city not only survived but thrived and now acts as the setting of a complex murder mystery set in train by the discovery of a “spectacularly butchered” body on the roof of a skyscraper. It’s been out since October this side of the Atlantic, garnering rave reviews; it will be interesting to see what Americans think of their reminagined nation."
Alexis Wright · Buy on Amazon
"And I was also excited to see that Aboriginal Australian writer Alexis Wright—author of the Outback epic Carpentaria and the bleakly fantastical The Swan Book —has a new book, Praiseworthy , out now in Australia and the UK, and shortly to be released in the US. Every book by Wright is a literary event, in my opinion. Praiseworthy is an environmental allegory set in a small Aboriginal town in the north of Australia, and—in true Wright style—bends time and space as it interweaves oral history, ancestral myth, and dystopian vision. The Sydney Morning Herald declared it “an abundant odyssey that contains a formidable vision of Australia’s future.”"
Jennifer Croft · Buy on Amazon
"In March Jennifer Croft, the International Booker Prize-winning translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights , will publish a novel—possibly her first, depending on how you define her earlier book Homesick . In The Extinction of Irena Rey , eight translators arrive at a house deep in the primeval forest ready to translate a book by a revered Polish author. Shortly after they arrive, the writer the have come to pay tribute to disappears. It’s a strange and very funny book that offers fascinating insight into the world of the literary translator."
Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison · Buy on Amazon
"Speaking of International Booker Prize-winners, I was delighted to learn that there will be a new Lucas Rijneveld book: My Heavenly Favourite . Rijneveld won it in 2020 with the same translator, Michele Hutchison, for The Discomfort of Evening , a staggering and sometimes shocking story set in a small, religious Dutch farming community. My Heavenly Favourite has a similar setting, drawing from Rijneveld’s own rural upbringing, and is narrated by a large animal vet in the wake of his criminal obsession with a farmer’s young daughter: a cowshit-splashed Lolita . The Financial Times called it a “tender but terrifying, tumbling monologue…an uneasy voyage inside the mind and—however distasteful it is for us to go there—the heart of a paedophile.” Rijneveld’s writing is not for the faint-hearted, but I wouldn’t miss it for the world. A ‘lost’ novel by the Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez will be published in English in March, ten years after his death, and reportedly against the wishes of the author himself . Márquez suffered with dementia in his final years, and may have feared the critical response to Until August , but his sons have explained that they feel this final book to be “the result of our father’s last effort to continue creating against all odds” and deemed it too precious to remain hidden in an archive."
Adelle Waldman · Buy on Amazon
"I have probably read Adelle Waldman’s sharp and perceptive Brooklyn comedy of manners The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. half a dozen times already, so I can’t wait for her long-awaited follow-up, Help Wanted , which will be out mid-March in the US and at the end of the month in the UK. It’s been billed as “a humane and darkly comic workplace caper” following the lives of those working an early morning shift at a big-box store in upstate New York. That description made me think of Joshua Ferris’s ad agency novel Then We Came to The End — written in the first person plural! very clever and funny—so I was delighted to see him among those endorsing the book, calling Help Wanted : “both a brilliant diagnosis and a moving account of retail workers hidden in plain sight all around us, whose full humanity has never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered.” Miranda July will publish her second novel, All Fours , in which a forty-something artist upends her life, departs on a cross-country road-trip, and ultimately holes up in a roadside motel twenty miles from home. It’s about female desire and midlife malaise, and is the product of a highly original mind. “That phrase midlife crisis is such a punch line,” July explained to Vogue . “ You never really say it with any empathy or faith in that person’s process, you know? But when I look around at people my age, whoever isn’t having some kind of crisis at this point in their life, I wonder if they’re asleep at the wheel.”"
Percival Everett · Buy on Amazon
"Plus Percival Everett (author of The Trees , a hilarious and horrifying buddy-cop novel shortlisted for the Booker in 2022 ) will return with James , a reworking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrated by Jim, the escaped slave with whom Finn travels on a raft. In a starred review , Publishers Weekly noted that in this version, Jim is “a Black man who’s mastered the art of minstrelsy to get what he needs from gullible white people.” Jim’s “wrenching odyssey concludes with remarkable revelations, violent showdowns, and insightful meditations on literature and philosophy,” it adds: “Everett has outdone himself.” I’ve got my pre-order in already. What are you looking forward to this season? Let us know your selection of the most notable fiction of spring 2024 via social media."
Notable Novels of Summer 2020 (2020)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2020-06-07).
Source: fivebooks.com
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan · Buy on Amazon
"Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s moving portrait of a marriage troubled by mental ill-health, Starling Days, was published last year in the United Kingdom to critical acclaim (and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award), but is only recently out in the United States and Canada. Full of a quiet grace and tenderness, the book opens in the aftermath of what appears to have been a suicide attempt by Mina, a Classics scholar, on George Washington Bridge. From here, Mina and her partner Oscar face an uncertain future. Softly spoken and perceptive, it is a book that asks us what it means to live when you’re not sure you want to – and how it feels to act as spectator to someone else’s pain. Other titles already out include Evie Wyld’s The B ass Rock , a haunting, three-stranded novel about women separated by time but linked by male brutality. As in Wyld’s previous novels (the superlative All the Birds, Singing and After the Fire, A Still, Small Voice ), she deploys here an ingeniously complex structure that jumps back and forth through centuries, bringing into alignment events generations apart so that we might view their commonalities. Lucid, menacing and masterfully constructed."
Paul Mendez · Buy on Amazon
"There have been some very strong literary debuts over the last couple of months – and none more notable than the British writer Paul Mendez’s bold and assured Rainbow Milk. Glowingly endorsed by such literary heavyweights as Bernardine Evaristo and Marlon James, the semi-autobiographical Rainbow Milk unfolds in two parts, the first episode – a sort of a prologue – focuses upon Norman, a Jamaican ex-boxer loosely based on Mendez’s grandfather, who emigrates to an often hostile 1950s Britain; the second follows Jesse, a young, gay, black man as he is disfellowshipped by his community of Jehovah’s Witnesses, moves to London and begins to take clients as a sex worker. Later he finds new fellowship in the literary world. As with the Wyld book, these paired experiences illustrate the way violence and prejudice reverberate and mutate over decades, but it too is taken up with the yearning for tenderness and connection. Jesse’s story in particular is raw and powerful, offering unflinching descriptions of sex and desire, and it will make you feel alive. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Also making a splash has been Kate Elizabeth Russell’s bestselling My Dark Vanessa , an account of a relationship between a male teacher and a precocious teenage pupil, through the eyes of the woman that girl grew into. When her ex-lover is publicly accused by another former student, Vanessa is forced to reframe what has until now appeared to her the defining romantic relationship of her life as one of rape and abuse. Bleakly discomfiting, My Dark Vanessa offers a a vivid depiction of vulnerability and the lifelong impact of grooming."
Naoise Dolan · Buy on Amazon
"Naoise Dolan’s entertaining first novel Exciting Times has just been released in the US, having shot straight into the bestseller charts in the UK and Ireland. Set in Hong Kong, a cynical Irish TEFL teacher falls in with a fast crowd of Oxbridge and Trinity College, Dublin graduates when she starts sleeping with the cold fish Old Etonian Julian, and turns a gimlet eye upon the brash, neo-colonial attitudes of his privileged friends. But when she falls for Mei Ling (“Edith”), a beautiful and hardworking lawyer, she is forced to reckon with what it means to be earnest. Crammed with rapier-sharp one-liners and an almost academic analysis of social interaction, Exciting Times’ caustic wit made me laugh out loud, then nod in agreement. Maggie O’Farrell’s lyrical eighth novel, Hamnet – a fictionalised account of the short life of Shakespeare’s son – appeared during the height of Covid-19 panic, so don’t miss out; the Booker Prize-winning Irish author Roddy Doyle ( Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha ) saw the UK release of his new Love pushed to October, but it should still appear in late June on the other side of the Atlantic. Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games fantasy trilogy for young adults , has published her highly anticipated prequel , The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes , which offers a backstory for the detestable bad-guy President Snow. Panem is bereft of our heroine Katniss Everdeen, but it will be a valued addition to any fan’s bookshelf, young or old."
Catherine Lacey · Buy on Amazon
"One of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists , Catherine Lacey ( Nobody Is Ever Missing ), is releasing her fourth book, Pew – a creepy tale set in a small Southern town, in which a stranger of indistinguishable gender and ethnicity pitches up in the local church, and is soon hearing the confessions of the town’s residents as they prepare for their ominously-named Forgiveness Festival: Rachel Cusk meets Shirley Jackson. A modern day fable about what we project onto others. It’s out now in the UK, and will appear in July in the US. I’m also very keen on the American writer Kate Zambreno’s Drifts : a wise and fragmentary autofictional work. In it, a novelist working on a never-ending book sweats over her journals but after seven years – like Kafka and Rilke in their time, as she notes – finds herself disheartened by how little she has to show for it. It reminded me of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation , specifically her protagonist’s obsession with ‘art monsters’ – those one-track-minded geniuses who forsake all else on their path to glory. Drifts also has perhaps my favourite ever epigraph (César Aira: “It should be remembered that the bulk of the work they were doing was preliminary: sketches, notes, jottings.”) which I have pinned up above my desk, for solace on my less productive days."
Sophie Mackintosh · Buy on Amazon
"Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket is probably the summer 2020 novel I most feverishly awaited. It’s due to be published later this month in the US, and has been pushed to August in the UK in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. I can promise you that it is worth the wait: if you enjoyed her hallucinatory first book The Water Cure , then you will be delighted with Blue Ticket , which offers another eerily-dreamlike dystopia – this time, set in a world in which young women are randomly allotted their role in life at the onset of puberty (motherhood or childlessness) – that is, they are relieved of the burden of ‘having-it-all’. We meet Calla, a female chemist whose hedonistic lifestyle grinds to a halt when she feels herself driven to impregnate herself against all rules. As with so much speculative fiction , this fantasy world – so alike ours in many ways, and yet so alien in others – offers the opportunity to make close study of aspects of our own society in a vacuum, that is: without the usual baggage that comes with political debate. There’s a beautifully poignant moment when a group of on-the-run pregnant ‘blue ticket’ women take in a ‘white ticket’ woman outlaw who refuses children, an inversion of their own situation, in an awkward yet sympathetic stand-off that spoke much to my and my peers’ present circumstances. Coming up this summer, and available on pre-order now, are new novels from Five Books alumnus Daisy Johnson ( Sisters ) , and the beloved Australian author Kate Grenville ( A Room Made of Leaves ), while Eley Williams – author of the fantastically experimental 2017 short story collection Attrib. and other stories – will publish her first full length novel The Liar’s Dictionary . Ali Smith is to publish the final book of her seasonal quartet, Summer , in early August, while the cult Italian novelist Elena Ferrante will release The Lying Life of Adults , both of which represent major literary events. Look out too for DBC Pierre’s Meanwhile in Dopamine City and Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom come August. Plus be sure to pre-order your copy of Marilynne Robinson’s Jack , due in late September. It’s been a stressful and disconcerting time, these last few months – and there’s no clear end point in sight. Many have been struggling to concentrate on fiction, but for me fiction has always offered an escape, a distraction, food for the soul. So: keep up with new publications if you can, and support the writers who produce them by buying their work, spreading the word and attending online events where you can. Let us know what novels you are enjoying in summer 2020, by getting in touch on Twitter , Facebook or Instagram ."
Notable Psychology and Self-Help Books of 2023 (2024)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2024-01-06).
Source: fivebooks.com
Paul Bloom · Buy on Amazon
"So let me start with a round-up of books by past Five Books interviewees—that is, individuals we have previously highlighted as experts in their fields. Paul Bloom published a new book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind , which serves as an accessible and highly readable overview of the field of psychology. It draws from his immensely popular introductory psychology class at Yale, reportedly one of the university’s most popular courses of all time. In it, he leads the reader through the work of early researchers (including Pavlov’s dogs and Skinner’s pigeons), into a discussion of the malleability of memory and emotion, and the complex questions surrounding consciousness . The New Scientist said it was “an ambitious, up-to-the-minute, comprehensive” introduction; it would be perfect for the curious layman or a switched-on school leaver considering a degree in psychology. The Duke University psychologist Dan Ariely—who we once interviewed about the best books on behavioural economics —published Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things . It digs into our bizarre attraction towards misinformation and ‘alternative facts.’ In the context of the fake news crisis, social media bubbles, and the rise of unnervingly convincing narratives produced by artificial intelligences, this book couldn’t be more timely. And the New York Times columnist David Brooks ( The Social Animal , The Second Mountain ) offered up a new book about social psychology through the lens of self-improvement, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen."
Emma Gannon · Buy on Amazon
"In 2023, self-help books were explicitly moving away from themes of self-optimisation, productivity, and ‘grind culture’, and towards building a more boundaried, balanced relationship with work. Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals , which Emma Gannon highlighted as one of the best self-help books of 2021 , was an early leader in this field, and remains extremely readable and convincing. It’s available now in paperback in both the UK and the US. Gannon, another bestselling British author, has herself recently published a helpful, perspective-offering book along parallel lines: The Success Myth: Letting Go of Having it All reflects on why our traditional vision of what ‘success’ looks like so often leaves us with a sense of anti-climax, and how to step off that neverending treadmill of ambition and aspiration in favour of a more fulfilling life. It was endorsed by the likes of Seth Godin and Alain de Botton , and serves as a valuable and earnestly-argued polemic that will force you to question what you are really trying to achieve. Simone Stolzoff’s The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work tackles some similar ideas, and is aimed at a similar audience—those who feel they have submerged themselves in pursuit of an ideal career and lost something of their own character, objectives, and identity along the way. (The title is a riff on Derek Winnicott’s idea of ‘ good enough parenting ,’ which allowed for the child’s natural and growing disillusionment with the parental figure as part of normal development. If this sounds comforting, you may also be interested in Avram Alpert’s The Good Enough Life . ) Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant—Wharton psychologist and author of the mega-bestseller author of Think Again — comes at the question of success and aspiration from a more traditional angle, arguing that talent is overrated; it’s all about character and application. A classic self-help book for those seeking focused and inspirational life advice, with a particular concentration on organisational change and creating supportive systems. While I’m here, I should also mention that Oprah Winfrey teamed up with Harvard Business School professor Arthur C. Brooks to write Build the Life You Want : The Art and Science of Getting Happier , an uplifting book with a focus on emotional self-regulation that was an instant New York Times bestseller. Work is one of their ‘four pillars’; the other key elements as they see it are family, friendship, and faith."
Nedra Glover Tawwab · Buy on Amazon
"You might be interested in two new books from relationship therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab, author of the bestselling Set Boundaries, Find Peace . In February, she published Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships , pitched as “a road map for understanding and moving past family struggles—and living your life, your way.” If you grew up with a fractured, violent, or otherwise traumatic family life, and feel that those experiences have followed you into later life—or if you find yourself trapped in a toxic cycle in your dealings with your close relations—this is a book that will push you to find a calmer, more humane dynamic. If you find it illuminating, a spin-off ‘workbook’ , offering related practical exercises, is also now available for pre-order."
Dacher Keltner · 2023 · Buy on Amazon
"There has been a rash of books about awe and wonder—essentially celebrating the profound impact of these emotions upon the human brain. UC Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner’s Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life offers a very readable, scientifically sound exploration of a near-ineffable experience, which he defines as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” (As an aside, I spoke to the philosopher Robert Clewis about ‘the sublime’ early last year, and he noted that he had been collaborating with experimental psychologists researching awe; the sublime, he said, could be interpreted as a form of ‘aesthetic awe.’) And, on a similar topic but taking a very different—more personal—approach, Katherine May’s Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age shares stories from her own life, in which she has sought to escape feelings of stress, disconnection, and overwhelm by re-awakening her awareness of the subtle beauty that can be found everyday life. She swims in the sea, keeps bees, and watches a meteor shower… Altogether these gentle personal essays make for a feelgood book that might be dipped in and out of, and it should appeal to those who enjoyed her debut Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in a Difficult World , which amassed a huge fanbase during the Covid lockdowns. A couple. Kevin Kelly, ‘senior maverick’ at Wired magazine and veteran tech writer, has a new book out: Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier is a compendium of short, aphorism-like words of advice aimed primarily at a younger audience. Much of it feels familiar territory but nevertheless bears repeating. (“Habit is far more dependable than inspiration,” he observes, channeling Atomic Habits . “Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.”)"
Susannah Breslin · Buy on Amazon
"And Susannah Breslin’s intriguing Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment jumped out at me. It’s a memoir based on her experiences as a subject of the renowned Block Study , a longitudinal research project that followed her (and 127 others) from childhood into adulthood, searching for factors that might predict a child’s future success. Breslin, the daughter of Berkeley academics, was constantly observed and interviewed throughout her early years and came to view these researchers as stand-in parental figures. She became a successful journalist but also battled cancer and found herself trapped in an abusive marriage. In Data Baby, Breslin reflects on her experiences: How much of her present was predicted by her past? How much of her future has been pre-ordained? How much has all of ours? Unfortunately much of the early data collected during the study has been destroyed, but her story serves as a curious thought experiment that poses interesting questions. What psychology and self-help books did you enjoy in 2023? Let us know."
Notable Self-Help & Psychology Books of 2024 (2024)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2024-11-20).
Source: fivebooks.com
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Jonathan Haidt · Buy on Amazon
"That’s right. Happiness expert and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt ( The Coddling of the American Mind , The Happiness Hypothesis ) has a new book out, The Anxious Generation, which has been a huge hit in the United States, sitting on the bestseller lists for weeks. In it, he argues that the age of the smartphone has royally messed up our adolescents. “Continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities” disturbs their sleep, fragments their attention, and acts, effectively, as an addictive substance. He links the rise of social media to a spike in mental illness and anxiety. Almost everyone I speak to seems to have an opinion on this book; it has clearly hit a nerve. The most creative response, in my opinion, was by Decca Aitkenhead in The Sunday Times Magazine , who recruited her teenage sons and a group of local youths, locked away their phones and sent them on a camping trip completely alone. A perfectly normal activity when I was their age—okay, more than twenty years ago now—but mind-blowing to these teenagers, who are conditioned to being contactable 24/7. The girls had the greatest response, being the ones who feel most under pressure by their peers to be ‘extremely online’ and to abide by a series of complex, unspoken social rules while being so. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."
Oliver Burkeman · Buy on Amazon
"Next, I want to direct your attention to the new books from four-time(!) Five Books interviewee Oliver Burkeman , whose book Four Thousand Weeks brought me so much reassurance and clarity back in 2021. In that book, he argued that most discussions of time management are based on the flawed premise that, if we just try hard enough and are more organised, we could get everything done. Burkeman told us to face up to our own finitude and accept that you can only do a tiny proportion of all possible tasks. Plan accordingly. This new book, Meditation for Mortals , again asks us to—respectfully—get a grip, to accept where we are in our lives rather than living in a fantasy land, and to understand that there will never be a golden day when we finally ‘get on top of things’ and live correctly. He calls on us to reflect on ‘the liberation of defeat’ and ‘the futility of becoming a better person.’ If that sounds gloomy, maybe it’s not the right book for you, but if you are anything like me—that is, an all-or-nothing kind of person who strives for perfection and then jacks it all in when they inevitably fall short—then it might just be the book that will change your life. Or (as Burkeman would likely correct me) it could change your day, hopefully the day after that, and maybe every day after that, sequentially, one after another. It’s better, he tells us, not to make grand plans but to make small, ‘daily-ish’ steps towards the person we want to be."
Keith Payne · Buy on Amazon
"Keith Payne’s Good Reasonable People feels very timely: it’s a study of partisanship in contemporary America, from the perspective of a social psychologist from rural, Christian Kentucky whose own family splits along political lines. We have, he argues, “psychological immune systems” that swing into action to neutralise information that threatens our self-identity and beliefs. In this way, we may all believe our tribe to be the good, reasonable people of the title—and those who disagree with us to be reckless fools. In truth, he contends, most people don’t really abide by a particular ideology. They might hold conservative views on tax but liberal views on public spending; many hold actively contradictory views, or at least logically inconsistent ones. Most questions of belief—political, religious, moral—also come down to circumstance. He cites the example of two German twins, separated at birth: one grew up Christian in the Hitler Youth, the other was raised in a Jewish-American family. In adulthood they attempted to reunite, but could not overcome their differences in worldview, all of which was entirely down to chance. Next time you jump to debate, says Payne, ask yourself instead: Why do I believe what I think I believe? Why do they? In this way you might be able to walk yourselves backwards to a place of accord. Still, he warns, there’s no easy way out of the political division we find ourselves in."
Nicky Hayes · Buy on Amazon
"A Little History of Psychology by Nicky Hayes, president of the British Psychological Society, is the opposite of timely, in as much as it starts in the Classical period—far before the field of psychology was ever thought of as ‘psychology’—and runs right into the present. But we love the ‘Little History ‘ series from Yale University Press, and can be sure this will be an evergreen book that will expand your mind and your general knowledge. Hayes steps through various developments in the science, from behaviourism to psychoanalysis, making sure to cover all the key psychological concepts you might meet on a college course as well as bonus extra areas of interest."
Charles Duhigg · Buy on Amazon
"Then you might be interested in the new book from Charles Duhigg ( The Power of Habit ) , which dissects the skills of what he calls ‘super-communicators’—that is, those socially-gifted conversationalists who can guide an interaction successfully and seamlessly, avoid offence while approaching prickly subject matter, and generally convince others to share your point of view. To this end, there’s some shared territory with Payne’s Good Reasonable People —he delves, for example, into why, for example, unconscious bias training can be counter-productive (those being lectured to, feeling defensive, dig in their heels)—but Duhigg approaches this from the perspective of someone who wishes to influence opinion or turn other unpromising situations to one’s own advantage through the power of sweet talk. His case studies, warns the Wall Street Journal , can read “more like manipulation than communication.” But, argues Duhigg, you don’t need to be cynical: “Conversations can change our brains, bodies, and how we experience the world.” By opening ourselves to dialogue, we open ourselves to more authentic exchange."
Award-Winning Biographies of 2024 (2024)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2024-11-06).
Source: fivebooks.com
Jonathan Eig · 2023 · Buy on Amazon
"King: A Life is a new biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.—billed as the “definitive” biography—by the author of a bestselling 2018 biography of Muhammed Ali. King grew of that previous work, as many of his sources knew both men, says Eig; this new book was written with an intention of creating a true intimacy with his subject. “A biography can make you feel like you’re getting to know the person,” he explained in an interview . “I wanted to write a book that would make you cry at the end when you lose this person that you loved.” Despite extensive previous coverage and several previous biographies, Eig uncovered unseen archive material and revelations that Alex Haley (the journalist who co-wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X ) fabricated quotes in a high profile interview."
Ilyon Woo · Buy on Amazon
"Ilyon Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife tells the incredible life stories of Ellen and William Craft, a married Black couple who escaped slavery in 1848 and disguised themselves as a disabled white man (Ellen) and his manservant (William). Together they fled Georgia for the North, became celebrities within the abolitionist movement but were later forced to flee the country after the imposition of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 left them vulnerable to kidnap by slave hunters. Master Slave Husband Wife is, the author reflected , full of “nailbiting” moments. “That’s the thing about the story of the Crafts. Even if you know the outcome, it’s incredibly suspenseful because of how the Crafts take ownership of seemingly impossible situations.”"
Jonny Steinberg · Buy on Amazon
"A different married couple forms the focus of the book that won at March’s National Book Critics Circle awards : Jonny Steinberg’s account of the lives of Winnie and Nelson Mandela. It is, as Richard Stengel wrote in The Guardian , “a beautiful and sad portrait” of a “marriage of opposites” at the heart of the Black South African struggle. Winnie and Nelson “is more than a joint biography”: it’s a “deft and operatic interweaving of two outsized characters.” In Steinberg’s telling, “the pair are like twin planets that exert immense gravitational forces on each other.” They can pull each other off course: “Winnie was Nelson’s kryptonite; for her, he scrambled his moral compass and did things that were deeply out of character.” The author achieves incredible access to the inner workings of their relationship, thanks in part to the detailed transcripts prison guards took during Winnie’s visits to Nelson while he was imprisoned. That they exist at all offers some insight into the inhumanity of apartheid; the incredible cruelty suffered by Winnie and Nelson Mandela during their lives, drawn together in this impressive biography, offers yet more evidence."
Jackie Wullschläger · Buy on Amazon
"In June, the FT ‘s chief art critic Jackie Wullshläger won the 2024 Elizabeth Longford Prize, a £5,000 British literary award now in its 21st year, for Monet: The Restless Vision. Wullshläger’s biography is the first full account of the great Impressionist’s tempestuous private life—and how these dynamics played out in his art: he was “wild,” he once wrote, “with the need to put down what I experience.” For all his contemporary ubiquity—find his famous water lilies on fridge magnets, tea towels, posters—”Monet was essentially ignored after his death,” noted reviewer Hugh Eakin in the New York Times. “For decades, his wildly abstract late work went unsold.” Only towards the end of the 20th century “did Monet begin to be rediscovered as the ur-modernist we know today.” Wullshläger’s “lively” biography, based on “meticulous” research does much to illuminate a much-shrouded life of turbulence and workhorse ambition."
Iman Mersal, translated by Robin Moger · Buy on Amazon
"The winners of Britain’s oldest literary awards (alongside the Hawthorndon Prize ) were announced in May. This year, for the first time, there were two winners of the biography prize. The first, Traces of Enayat , by Iman Mersal (translated into English by Robin Moger) is an intriguingly uncategorisable book—equal parts biography, memoir, and speculation—that artfully and movingly portrays the life of Enayat al-Zayyat, a largely forgotten Egyptian writer who died by suicide in 1963. “To trace someone,” Mersal writes, “is a dialogue that is perforce one-sided.” Despite great efforts, ultimate Mersal experiences “despair” over the impossibility of understanding the truth of al-Zayyat’s life. These “remnants,” explains the New Yorker , are “embroidered” with photographs and personal reflections, “leaving behind a seductive mystery.”"
Ian Penman · Buy on Amazon
"The joint winner was veteran critic Ian Penman’s Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors, a study of the life of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The book also won the Royal Society of Literature’s prestigious Ondaatje Prize, for its evocation of post-war Germany. The author Francis Spufford, one of the Ondaatje Prize judges, said that Penman “captures not only scenes both gross and beautiful from the 1970s life of the workaholic Fassbinder, but a glittering array of thoughts and moments from his own long fascination with Fassbinder’s place and time and historical moment.” Jan Carson, another judge, said: “It’s biography. It’s philosophy. It’s critique. It’s flighty enough to read like fiction and yet it’s one of the most grounded books I’ve read in years. Yes, it’s about German cinema, but German cinema’s simply the mirror Penman’s holding up to force his readers to look long and hard at themselves.” Hopefully there’s a book that jumps out at you from among these prize-winning biographies. Have we missed anything? Let us know by getting in touch on social media. November 6, 2024. Updated: September 28, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."
Award-Winning Biographies of 2025 (2025)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2025-12-20).
Source: fivebooks.com
Jason Roberts · Buy on Amazon
"Jason Roberts’ Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life is a dual biography of the 18th-century naturalists Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon. The Pulitzer jury described it as a “beautifully written” account of these great scientists who “devoted their lives to identifying and describing nature’s secrets, and who continue to influence how we understand the world.” In an interview with El Pais , the author said that he initially planned a book about the heroes of the Enlightenment, but the more he dug into it, the more he realised those heroes were “not very Enlightened.” The Linnean taxonomical system “became this form of cultural colonialism,” he explained, “because you were able to wipe the slate clean and award a name to a species.” Buffon’s approach was ridiculed in his time, but he “was the first person to actually say that we are living in the era of humans, that humans are permanently changing the global climate… he knew quite well that the period of the time wasn’t ready for some of his ideas.”"
Cynthia Carr · Buy on Amazon
"When I spoke to the critic Mary Ann Gwinn about the biography shortlist for this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, she described Cynthia Carr’s Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar as “a compassionate portrait” of the Warhol ‘superstar’ who was cast by Tennessee Williams and inspired several Lou Reed lyrics. Despite her fame in the New York underground scene, the trans icon never found the mainstream acclaim she dreamed of, and she died tragically young. “I simultaneously felt so much sympathy for her and aggravation at the people who had a lot more resources than her and didn’t really help her,” explained Gwinn. Carr’s biography benefits from a series of interviews recorded by a friend of Candy Darling shortly after her death, lending “a real immediacy” to the writing. This book was also the joint winner of the Plutarch Award, see below."
Tim Blanning · Buy on Amazon
"Consulting the shortlists for the annual Elizabeth Longford Prize are a great way to discover new historical biographies. This year, the winner was Tim Blanning, with Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco . Augustus was a somewhat hapless king of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in the 18th century; his patronage of the arts, however, made Poland a major centre of Baroque culture. When I spoke to Roy Foster , the Oxford academic and prize judge, about the shortlist earlier this year, he described the Blanning as “an astonishing researcher” who asks “whether a figure can be both a reviled failure in politics and yet historically significant because of his authority in other arenas of life, which may, in the long term, be more influential.” It is also, he added, “extremely funny… It’s a witty book, as well as a profound one.”"
Lucy Hughes-Hallett · Buy on Amazon
"This year, two books were selected to share the Plutarch Award, an international literary prize whose winners are selected by a committee of notable professional biographers. Those books were Candy Darling (see above), which they praised for its “emotional pull and sensitive handling of its subject,” and Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham . The judges admired The Scapegoat ‘s “innovative structure and engaging, intelligent style.” Hughes-Hallett—who previously won the Baillie Gifford Prize for The Pike — has “a novelist’s eye for the extraordinary,” they added. The Scapegoat conjures “an entire bygone world: the masques, dances, art, food, and attitudes” of Jacobean-era England; altogether it’s “stylish, vivid, and frequently surprising.”"
Sue Prideaux · Buy on Amazon
"The Duff Cooper Award, a literary nonfiction prize, was awarded this year to Sue Prideaux’s highly acclaimed biography Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin . When Five Books editor Sophie Roell spoke to judge Minoo Dishaw earlier this year, he said that Prideaux “shows the comedy of his nature and character, coupled with, often, the extraordinary sadness of the reversals and sufferings that he endured.” Recently, Gauguin has been “monsterized,” he added, but Prideaux’s sympathetic account portrays his life in Tahiti as the artist having adopted “a local way of living which is very strange to modern Western secular eyes.” It’s “an extraordinarily bold and provocative case.” You may also be interested in reading our interview with Prideaux herself, in which she recommends the best biographies of artists . December 20, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."
Award-Winning Novels of 2022 (2022)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2022-12-13).
Source: fivebooks.com
Shehan Karunatilaka · 2022 · Buy on Amazon
"The Booker Prize is the UK’s most prestigious literary award, bringing with it a prize pot of £50,000 and (almost invariably) a huge boost in sales. The winner of the 2022 Booker Prize was Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida . I spoke to the chair of the judging panel, Neil Macgregor, back in September when he described it thus: “The hero of this book is already dead. In the afterlife, he’s given a chance to revisit moments and places from his life, which took place during the Sri Lankan Civil War, in which the hero—who was a photographer—was ultimately killed. It’s a fantasy of a dead figure coming back, revisiting and understanding what happened, and also watching what the significance of their own life was.” Its sister prize, the International Booker Prize, seeks to award the best fiction translated into English over the previous year. It’s always, always worth paying attention to, because the shortlists highlight so many wonderful books from around the world that we might otherwise not come into contact with. I almost always discover my favourite books of the year via these shortlists. The winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize was Tomb of Sand, a novel by Geetanjali Shree, as translated by Daisy Rockwell. The chair of the judges Frank Wynne, a noted translator in his own right (see below), told me in June that this book was “an extraordinary piece of fiction, [and] also an extraordinary piece of metafiction” of Indian partition."
Ruth Ozeki · Buy on Amazon
"Other prizes of note include the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which was won in 2022 by Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness , a novel that gives voices to inanimate objects; the Goldsmiths Prize (for “fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”), which went to the collaborative novel Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams—a clever portrait of literary friendship and an experiment in political fiction; and the James Tait Black Prize, the UK’s oldest literary prize, which went to Keith Ridgway’s A Shock , in which each chapter forms a series of interlocking stories about characters living in South London. The International Dublin Literary Award, worth €100,000 is one of the world’s richest literary prizes, and is awarded to a novel published in the English language, or translated into English, that year. It was won this year by the French author Alice Zeniter for The Art of Losing , as translated by Frank Wynne. The novel follows three generations of an Algerian family from the 1950s to the present day."
Joshua Cohen · 2021 · Buy on Amazon
"Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It’s a genre-bending campus comedy about the Jewish-American experience which has attracted rave reviews. Writing in The Guardian , Leo Robson described it as “a comic historical fantasia” that reads “like an attempt, as delightful as it sounds, to cross-breed Roth’s The Ghost Writer and Nabokov’s Pale Fire .” At the National Book Awards, Tess Gunty won the prize for fiction for her debut novel The Rabbit Hutch . The ‘rabbit hutch’ of the title is an affordable housing block in post-industrial Indiana, where residents live on top of each other. It’s set over a single, sweltering week that will ultimately end in violence. The translated literature prize was won by Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses , a short story collection translated by Megan McDowell."
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers · Buy on Amazon
"The National Book Critics Circle Awards are organised by some of America’s most respected arbiters of taste. In 2022, the NBCC fiction prize was won by the noted poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers for her first novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , a book that has won near-universal acclaim since its release in May. As Joshunda Sanders explained in The Boston Globe, it’s “a sweeping matriarchal epic that leads readers through a majestic tour of race, family, and love in America… the Great American Novel at its finest.” In Canada, Sheila Heti won the Governor General’s Literary Award for her wildly imaginative Pure Colour , in which she contrasts the wonder and joy of creation with our daily experience of frustration and disappointment. She’s one of my favourite writers—erudite, funny, intelligent, unpretentious. This latest work is unmissable. Jennifer Down won Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award for Bodies of Light, which was praised for its “ethical precision” in its portrait of a young girl in care who is forced to reinvent herself again and again. Nicolas Rothwell has also just been announced the winner of the Australian Prime Minister’s award for his novel Red Heaven , set in 1960s eastern Europe. At the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Whiti Hereaka won the 2022 fiction prize for Kurangaituku , a subversion of the traditional Māori story of Hatupatu—as seen through the eyes of the monster."
Harry Josephine Giles · Buy on Amazon
"The 2022 Arthur C Clarke Award was won by Harry Josephine Giles for their remarkable, boundary-pushing novel-in-verse Deep Wheel Orcadia , set on a space station and told in the Orcadian dialect (alongside a creative English translation). I spoke to the chair of the judges, Andrew M. Butler earlier this year, who noted that “it’s the sort of book the prize exists to draw attention to for die-hard sci fi readers, and to make non-sci fi readers question their assumptions about the genre.” Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace (which was also shortlisted for the Clarke Award) won the Hugo Award for best novel this year; its the second novel in her Teixcalaan sequence—you might want to start with A Memory Called Empire , which started the series and was also highly acclaimed. P Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn won the 2022 Nebula Award for best novel, along with a bunch of other awards including the Locus Award for best first novel—it’s a fun, magical whodunnit set in an alternate, steampunk Cairo, and it has found a passionate fanbase. At the World Fantasy Awards, the best novel winner was The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri, an epic high fantasy described by Shelley Parker-Chan as a “feminist masterpiece.” Stephen Graham Jones won the Bram Stoker Award for My Heart is a Chainsaw (described by the publishers as “ Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th “, which sounds fun); the Mystery Writers of America awarded the 2022 Edgar Allan Poe Award to Five Decembers by James Kestrel, a 1940s noir with a brilliantly pulpy cover; and the International Thriller Writers garlanded S.A. Cosby for the second year running for Razorblade Tears , described to me by Tosca Lee earlier this year as “a moody Southern thriller with fast-paced action, the story of two men—one black, one white, both ex-cons—who team together to solve the murder of their sons, who were married to one another. It’s a gritty tale that looks into questions of race, poverty, and other bias through the lens of both violence and compassion.” In the UK, Ray Celestin won the 2022 Golden Dagger for his novel Sunset Swing . Scottish author James Robertson won the 2022 Walter Scott Prize for his latest novel, News of the Dead . I spoke to judge Elizabeth Laird earlier this year, who said: “Behind the beguiling, interlinked narrative of three characters from different periods of history—an Iron Age hermit, a nineteenth-century literary conman, and a child thrown out into the world from war-torn Europe—is a profound appreciation of a landscape, the rocks, the rain, the streams, trees and mosses of the remote Scottish glen where these three lives are lived.” And in Australia and New Zealand, the $50,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize went to Thomas Keneally’s Corporal Hitler’s Pistol , described by The Guardian as “a compelling blend of historical crime thriller and intricate portrait of an Australian rural community.” The UK’s Romantic Novelists Association highlights the best books in nearly a dozen romance sub-categories; we’ve heard great things about A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske, which topped the fantasy romance category. The Romance Writers of America did not run their Vivian Awards this year. Part of our best books of 2022 series. December 13, 2022. Updated: February 7, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."
Award-Winning Memoirs of 2025 (2025)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2025-12-22).
Source: fivebooks.com
Tessa Hulls · Buy on Amazon
"Tessa Hulls’ extraordinary graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts offers personal insight into the long shadow cast by political persecution: upon her grandmother Sun Yi, a dissident journalist in Shanghai during the Communist regime; her high-achieving mother Rose, who struggles to care for Sun Yi following a mental breakdown; and onto Tessa herself, who fled to the ends of the earth to escape her family’s problems—but is now ready to face her inheritance. The Pulitzer Prize committee praised Feeding Ghosts as “an affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women …. and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories.”"
Helen Garner · Buy on Amazon
"This year, the surprise winner of Britain’s biggest nonfiction prize was Helen Garner’s How to End a Story — a collection of her diaries kept between 1978 and 1998. “I have to confess that, at first, I was a bit sceptical about this book,” admitted Robbie Millen, the critic and chair of this year’s judging panel, during an interview with Five Books editor Sophie Roell earlier this year. “It’s 800 pages… That’s a lot of words about someone who I didn’t know huge amounts about. But I found it absolutely gripping.” She is an excellent and observer of everyday life, he commented, but the real “pull-through” is her unsparing account of her two marriages, one of which begins as an affair and ends in violence. He added: “I love how novelists in particular—the really good ones—just go to places where mere mortals like me would never go, whether it’s baring their emotions or revealing their inner lives.”"
Omar El Akkad · Buy on Amazon
"The nonfiction National Book Award also went to a work of memoir this year: Omar El Akkad’s powerful, personal, and highly political essay collection, which reflects on his experiences as an Arab immigrant, and criticises the West’s indifference to Palestinian suffering. Collecting the award, El Akkad said in his speech : “It’s difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child’s body. It is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I know that my tax money is doing this. And it is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have been watching people snatched off the streets by masked agents of the state for daring to suggest that Palestinians might be human beings.” The book expands on a viral social media post, in which he observed: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”"
Alexei Navalny, translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel · Buy on Amazon
"Patriot , the posthumously-published memoir by Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny—banned in his home country and denounced as “extremist materials”—has been extremely well received in the west. Here in the UK, it was announced the ‘book of the year’ at the British Book Awards, and in the US the National Book Critics Circle awarded it their top prize for autobiography. When I spoke to May-lee Chai , one of the NBCC judges, about the shortlist, she described it as “the whole package: it tells a compelling story of a man whose life was important and impactful and it’s a very literary book.” Not only that, she added, but “the writing is beautiful! It’s not just a journalistic account of Navalny’s struggles under Putin’s authoritarianism, but it also showcases Navalny’s talent as a writer.” Despite the seriousness of his subject matter, “Navalny writes with surprising humour… He has a sharp eye for irony and characterization, and even when he is imprisoned, he can write about his captors and his experiences with great wit.”"
Jeff Young · Buy on Amazon
"This autobiography-focused prize can be relied upon to highlight some of the most interesting new memoirs being published in the UK. This year, the winner was Jeff Young’s Wild Twin — also shortlisted for the 2025 Stanfords Travel Book of the Year prize —which offers an account of the author’s years as a drifter, intertwined with reflections from the present day. It is at once, noted judge Peter Parker, “a ruefully funny account of a young Liverpudlian’s dreams of pursuing the life of a poète maudit in Europe and a moving meditation on how lives are built upon our memories and unravel without them. Jeff Young’s description of his time in Amsterdam in the early 1980s brilliantly evokes the hand-to-mouth existence of life on the margins, living in squats, pilfering goods, cleaning hotels and working in seedy bars. Almost half a century later he is back in Liverpool, where both his mother and one of his sisters have died and his father is drifting into the fog of Alzheimer’s.” Wild Twin, they concluded, “is a wonderfully original and beautifully written autobiography.” December 22, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."
Award-Winning Novels of 2023 (2023)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2023-12-15).
Source: fivebooks.com
Paul Lynch · 2023 · Buy on Amazon
"The Booker Prize is the biggest fiction award in the UK and Ireland. Paul Lynch won the £50,000 prize in 2023 for Prophet Song , a darkly prophetic novel set in a near-future Ireland that the New York Times described as “an unsettling dystopian parable.” In it, a biologist and mother of four must cope alone after the secret police take her husband into custody and the country descends into civil war. It’s earned comparisons with The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984 , but Lynch has downplayed the ideological elements of the book: “My themes tend to be more metaphysical than political,” he commented. “A lot of political fiction begins with its own answer—it knows the problem and it knows the solution—and so therefore, it’s about grievance. And I think the work of serious fiction must instead be grief: grief for the things we cannot control, grief for what cannot be understood, grief for what lies beyond us.” Lynch, the author of four previous novels, has previously won several major literary awards, but was yet to have a major commercial breakthrough; the Booker win is likely to ensure his writing now finds a broad audience, both in Ireland and abroad. The 2023 International Booker Prize judges compiled a “bold and subversive” shortlist of novels newly translated into English. I was particularly intrigued by The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé—translated by Richard Philcox—billed as “a retelling of the New Testament set in modern-day Martinique.” But the ultimate winner was Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov (translated from the original Bulgarian by Angela Rodel) in which a dementia clinic offering period-piece accommodation is embraced by unsettling political elements harking towards a nostalgic national past. The Times said it was “a genre-busting novel of ideas.”"
Barbara Kingsolver · 2022 · Buy on Amazon
"The Women’s Prize for Fiction is, in my opinion, brilliant at highlighting those books that sit nicely in that intersection in the literary fiction/popular fiction Venn diagram—that is, the sort of book I’m looking for when I’m looking for an enjoyable and well-written book to lose myself in during a long journey, or while on holiday. This year’s winner was Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead , a modern retelling of David Copperfield set in an opioid-ravaged Appalachia, which has been a huge hit this year. Kingsolver previously won the same prize in 2010 with The Lacuna . Other shortlistees included Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel The Marriage Portrait and Louise Kennedy’s tale of infidelity during the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ , Trespasses . The shortlists for the inaugural Nero Book Awards were announced in November 2023. These prizes might loosely be considered a replacement for the Costa Awards (formerly known as the Whitbread Awards), which were scrapped rather unexpectedly last year after five decades. The top book in each category will take home £5,000, and the overall winner a further £30,000. They won’t be announced until January, but notable finalists include Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting , a comedic family drama that was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Eleanor Catton’s environmental thriller Birnam Wood . And finally: the 2023 winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, a €100,000 annual prize, was German author Katja Oskamp and her translator Jo Heinrich for Marzahn, Mon Amour , a novel described by the Lord Mayor of Dublin as a “warm, witty, and moving portrait of older residents in Berlin.” Kingsolver’s beloved Demon Copperhead also triumphed in May when it shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with Hernan Diaz’s bestselling novel Trust , a cunning book built of four unreliable narratives set in early 20th-century Wall Street. He has explained: The novel is about who has a voice: who, throughout history, has been given a megaphone. Who has been gagged? Rather than thematise that in an expository way, I thought it would be more vivid – and fun – for readers to be presented with this polyphonic arrangement of four voices in succession and gently ask them to question why we trust one over the other. An adaptation for HBO, produced by Kate Winslet , is forthcoming."
Justin Torres · Buy on Amazon
"At the 2023 National Book Awards, Justin Torres ( We the Animals ) won the fiction prize for Blackouts , an experimental novel in which an older gay man slowly dying in the desert converses with a younger, unnamed narrator who has come to care for him. It is “festooned in dizzying layers of tales-within-tales, photographs, film scripts, scholarly-sounding endnotes and fictionalized accounts of real-life figures,” as NPR has explained , and concerns the distortions, confessions, and erasures of queer history . (I suspect that, if you enjoy Blackouts , you will also enjoy Catherine Lacey’s recent Biography of X —another slippery creature that takes the form of a fictional biography, with semi-fictional source notes.) Earlier in the year, Ling Ma (author of the brilliant post-pandemic novel Severance ) triumphed at the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Awards with Bliss Montage , a highly acclaimed collection of eight short stories. “The collection guts and renovates the genre by refusing to draw a distinction between realism and fable,” noted the judges. “Freed from the constraints of allegory or standard-issue plot mechanics, readers are instead left to reflect on more essential things, most prominently, humanity’s ability to absorb and inflict harm.”"
Sarah Bernstein · 2023 · Buy on Amazon
"And in Canada the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize was won by Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience , an eerie and unsettling tale of xenophobia set in an unnamed northern country, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize earlier in the year. The Daily Telegraph declared it “a beautiful, riddling tale of a woman on the fringe of a rural community” that, though “philosophically opaque,” is both “elegant and electric.” Human rights lawyer Shankari Chandran won the $60,000 Miles Franklin Award for her third novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens , a book about a fictional nursing home in Sydney populated with elderly Sri Lankan residents. “Don’t be fooled by the cute premise or the twee title,” warns ABC News. “This story has Australian identity and colonial mythology in its crosshairs, and the author is a crack shot.” Across the Tasman Sea, the 2023 winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction was The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey, a novel set in the rural high country and narrated by an opinionated magpie. It is, said the judges, “poetic, profound and a powerfully compelling read from start to finish.” Readers in the US and the UK will be able to get their hands on a copy from April, published by Europa Editions . The 2023 Arthur C Clarke Award was won by Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker . When I spoke to the prize director Tom Hunter earlier this year, he described it as a “dark, satirical, deeply angry book about our species,” which is “also eminently readable, oddly hopeful at times, and very, very funny.” I also particularly enjoyed another Clarke-shortlisted title, The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, which is a rather excellent amalgam of airport thriller and Oulipian experiment. It won France’s Prix de Goncourt back in 2020 , but was only recently translated into English by Adriana Hunter. In it, a plane, including its passengers, is duplicated when it passes through a storm cloud. In a series of narratives, we explore how the various characters cope—or don’t—with their new, strange identity as a matching pair."
R. F. Kuang · Buy on Amazon
"At the Nebula Awards in May, R.F. Kuang won the prize for the best novel for Babel , a dark academia fantasy set in an alternate Oxford University where the study of translation and magic are closely intertwined. It’s an ambitious act of world-building and functions as a powerful postcolonial parable. Perfect for fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , or for those who have aged out of Harry Potter and are looking for something similar but a bit meatier. Lucy Caldwell won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for These Days , a novel set during the Belfast Blitz, a series of four devastating major air raids on the Northern Irish city in 1941. The judges noted that “the juxtaposition of the horrific and mundane and the authenticity of detail makes this novel an exceptional study of the terrors and consequences of war.” Other shortlisted titles included Robert Harris’s Act of Oblivion , a story set in 17th-century New England, and Elizabeth Lowry’s The Chosen , a fictionalised account of Thomas Hardy’s marriage . George Dawes Green received the Crime Writers Association’s Gold Dagger award for his long-awaited fourth novel The Kingdoms of Savannah , a Southern Gothic mystery. “His prose is languid, even luxurious, but at critical moments of suspense, he pares it back to ramp up the terror,” said the New York Times. John Brownlow won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, a prize for the best thriller, for Agent Seventeen , a riveting suspense novel that will shortly be followed up in April with the publication of Agent Eighteen . The International Thriller Writers announced their annual awards in May. The title of ‘best hardback novel’ went to Sundial , a work of psychological horror from the author of The Last House on Needless Street , Catriona Ward. Sundial was also a finalist at the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards. Of course, there are only so many spots on shortlists and that means that many brilliant books are unfairly passed over. If you have a firm favourite from the 2023 class of fiction, why not drop us a line on social media to let us know? December 15, 2023. Updated: June 11, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."
Award-Winning Novels of 2024 (2024)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2024-12-16).
Source: fivebooks.com
Samantha Harvey · 2023 · Buy on Amazon
V. V. Ganeshananthan · Buy on Amazon
"A few months ago I also spoke to the novelist Monica Ali about the books shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction , which this year was won by V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night . It’s set during Sri Lanka’s devastating civil war, and focuses on the female experience of conflict. “I mean, where to start?” asked Ali. “Once you’ve read this book, you’re never going to forget it. It’s absolutely searing, deeply moving. And it’s an utterly compelling piece of storytelling.”"
Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann · Buy on Amazon
Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter · Buy on Amazon
"In Ireland, the Dublin Literary Award—worth €100,000—was won by the Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu for his surrealist novel Solenoid , in which the fiction is interwoven with memoir and philsophical thought experiments . The judges’ statement described it as “wildly inventive, philosophical, and lyrical, with passages of great beauty,” noting that the translation by Sean Cotter captures “the lyrical precision of the original, thereby opening up Cărtărescu’s work to an entirely new readership.”"
Jayne Anne Phillips · 2023 · Buy on Amazon
Lorrie Moore · Buy on Amazon
"Earlier in the year, Lorrie Moore triumphed in the fiction category at the National Book Critics Circle Awards for her latest novel I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home , a novel in which a grieving man embarks on a cross-country road trip with the decaying body of his dead lover. It has all the snappy humour and melancholy that we’ve come to expect from Moore. (Perhaps this gives gives me an excuse to direct you to her devastating and darkly witty 1997 story, set in a children’s hospital, ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ ?) Generally, the National Book Critics Circle Awards shortlists serve as a kind of bellwether of American critical opinion, and are therefore an excellent source of reading tips."
Percival Everett · Buy on Amazon
Anne Michaels · 2023 · Buy on Amazon
"This year’s winner of Canada’s Giller Prize for Fiction was Anne Michael’s Held , which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Booker judge Sawhney (see above) described it as a very complex, layered book which is “about questioning the nature of existence, and different concepts around consciousness, perception, the nature of reality.” It was, he added, “very interesting because it comes in at so many different ideas from so many different angles.” It’s not a light read, but it is one that will reward your efforts—from the author of the highly acclaimed Fugitive Pieces ."
Alexis Wright · Buy on Amazon
Emily Perkins · Buy on Amazon
"At the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Emily Perkins won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction for her novel Lioness , in which a wealthy woman finds her family embroiled in a corruption scandal, and is forced to evolve from “catalogue model blandness” to the predator of the title. It’s a story of female rage and a sudden unravelling."
Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith · Buy on Amazon
"South Korean novelist and poet Han Kang was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The ceremony took place earlier this month, shortly after a brief declaration of martial law in her country; she appeared to address the political tumult at home in her speech , declaring that “the work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life.” Kang’s 2014 novel Human Acts focuses on violent clashes between protestors and the military during an earlier period of martial law four decades previously. In a press conference after the ceremony, she said it had been “startling” to see similar events unfolding in real time."
Kevin Jared Hosein · Buy on Amazon
"The winner of the 2024 Walter Scott Prize was Kevin Jared Hosein’s Hungry Ghosts, set towards the end of colonial rule in Trinidad. When I spoke to Katharine Grant, one of the judges, earlier this year, she said it could be “a tough read, not for toughness’s sake, but because life was tough, sometimes more than tough as we learn from the backstories of the characters.” But, she added, “Kevin Jared Hosein writes with such energy, such command of his plot, such confidence, that you don’t want to look away in case you miss something. You feel the desires of the people he’s created; you can see where they might lead. You feel for them all.” Read our full coverage of the 2024 shortlist here . Of course, there are far more prizes than I have space to summarize here. Some very prestigious! Have we unfairly missed one of your reading highlights of the year? Let us know on social media. Find more of the best novels of 2024 here . Browse our coverage of the best books of 2024, in all genres, here. December 16, 2024. Updated: February 23, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."
Award-Winning Novels of 2025 (2025)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2025-12-16).
Source: fivebooks.com
David Szalay · Buy on Amazon
Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi · Buy on Amazon
"The 2025 International Booker Prize —a sister prize, reserved for translated fiction—was one this year by Heart Lamp , selected stories by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhashti. Judge Anton Hur, when I spoke to him about the shortlist, reserved particular praise for the translation: “so daring and textured and vitalic.”"
Yael van der Wouden · Buy on Amazon
Michael Crummey · Buy on Amazon
"Ireland’s €100,000 Dublin Literary Award was won this year by Michael Crummey’s The Adversary , a novel about a dysfunctional family in 19th-century Newfoundland, which the Washington Post described as a “beautifully written, immensely powerful and subtly ingenious novel.”"
Andrew Miller · Buy on Amazon
"Andrew Miller won the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for The Land in Winter , in which two couples in 1960s England find their normal lives suspended by heavy snow. When I spoke to her in May, judge Katharine Grant described it as “Intense, immersive and beautifully paced.” It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year."
Percival Everett · Buy on Amazon
Rabih Alameddine · Buy on Amazon
"Rabih Alameddine made a splash with his novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) , which won the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction, as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In it, a high school philosophy teacher and his mother share a tiny Beirut apartment. Desperate for privacy and self-fulfilment, he is offered a fellowship in the United States—and must grapple with his resentment and love for his prying mother."
Hisham Matar · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
Souvankham Thammavongsa · Buy on Amazon
"In Canada, Souvankham Thammavongsa won the 2025 Giller Prize for Pick a Color , a wickedly funny novel about the immigrant experience that follows a nail salon worker over the course of a day. “I live in a world of Susans,” she writes. “I got name tags for everyone who works at this nail salon, and on every one is printed the name ‘Susan.'”"
Siang Lu · Buy on Amazon
Damien Wilkins · Buy on Amazon
"And at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Damien Wilkin won with Delirious , in which a policewoman and her librarian husband move to a retirement village only to find themselves haunted by unanswered questions from the past."
László Krasznahorkai & translated by George Szirtes · Buy on Amazon
László Krasznahorkai & translated by George Szirtes · Buy on Amazon
László Krasznahorkai & translated by Ottilie Mulzet · Buy on Amazon
"December 16, 2025. Updated: December 17, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."
Notable New Novels of Summer 2021 (2021)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2021-06-25).
Source: fivebooks.com
Rachel Cusk · Buy on Amazon
"Rachel Cusk’s new book, Second Place, has also been hotly anticipated. Cusk is best known for her Outline trilogy, those cool and exacting works of autofiction . Second Place, too, draws from life, in as much as the main character ‘M’ is a writer who lives in an isolated marsh—not unlike Cusk herself—and the narrator gestures towards some “global pandemonium” making travel difficult. But the main thrust of the plot is derived from, or adapted from, a 1933 memoir by the American salonnière Mabel Dodge Luhan, who invited the writer D.H. Lawrence to live at her arts colony in New Mexico. Like Luhan, Cusk’s M writes to a painter she admires, inviting him to live in a guest house on her property. Like Luhan, M hopes that this this celebrated artist will reflect her life and landscape in some way through his art, something she does not feel qualified to do. And—like Luhan’s relationship with Lawrence—this relationship cannot be anything other than fraught and parasitic. But who, exactly, is the parasite? I loved Rosa Rankin Gee’s Dreamland , a bleakly beautiful queer love story set in a dystopian England of the near future. In it, Chance, a scrappy young woman, fights to keep her family’s heads above the water (sometimes literally) in Margate, a seaside resort that is slowly being reclaimed by rising seas. It’s intense and Atwood-esque, cranking up the tension as it goes, until its spectacular final sequence. I also enjoyed Sue Rainsford’s Redder Days , and indeed am quoted on the cover describing it as “a masterpiece of literary horror”—so it is. Set in a paranoid, possibly post-apocalyptic world, Redder Days features a failed commune in a Centralia -like landscape, where smoke billows from the ground and members patrol the perimeters alert for incomers carrying a virus known as ‘the redness’. Information is drip fed in this occasionally cryptic, always atmospheric novel."
Jon McGregor · Buy on Amazon
"I was eagerly anticipating Jon McGregor’s new novel Lean Fall Stand— his fifth—and it didn’t disappoint. Like his Costa Prize-winning anti-mystery Reservoir 13 , it begins with a scene of high drama before allowing the consequences to spool out over the subsequent years. In Reservoir 13 , it was the search for a missing girl; in Lean Fall Stand it is a freak accident during an Antarctic expedition. The pitch and intensity of that opening scene is never revisited, but serves instead as fuel to fire the reader’s interest in the slower unravelling. What marks the novel apart is the strange, moving and often funny evocation of the speech and thought patterns of a stroke patient—which takes an almost experimental form on the page—and the ambivalence of the patient’s wife, who finds herself unexpectedly swapping a career in academia for a new life as a live-in carer. Striking and unusual. Lisa Taddeo—author of Three Women , the blockbuster 2019 study of desire and abjection — has made her first foray into fiction with the confrontational novel Animal . In some ways it’s a continuation of her work in Three Women, touching on similar themes—notably, the domination of women by men—but also a corrective. Joan, the protagonist, does not simply lie down and take it. She hurts, but also hurts in return. It’s a book of female rage and sometimes graphic violence. Buckle up: this book goes dark and deep."
Zakiya Dalila Harris · Buy on Amazon
"Zakiya Dalila Harris’s debut novel The Other Black Girl, newly released, earned her a million-dollar book deal and has shot into the New York Times bestseller list. Described as Get Out meets Stepford Wives , the book begins as a slow burn office drama—in which a black publishing assistant greets the arrival of a new black colleague with excitement and then suspicion—before taking a turn for the speculative. The final twist in the tail will give you whiplash. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Also of note in speculative fiction is Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander . Fans of Annihilation will be pleased to hear that it’s a eco-thriller set in the world of wildlife trafficking and bioterrorism, with a distinctive noir style. Security consultant ‘Jane Smith’—not her real name—finds herself drawn into an international criminal conspiracy after being passed a key to a mysterious storage unit. In the background, a near-future Earth is degenerating as temperatures rise, ocean currents stall and drones monitor the cities. Disquieting and cerebral."
Courttia Newland · Buy on Amazon
"Plus there’s Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time , a story of parallel worlds and astral projection—which offers a vision of a world in which there were no European empires, and in which a form of African cosmology has become the dominant world religion. A novel of epic proportions and massive ambition, A River Called Time is not a quick read but it is, as Wired magazine has noted, “speculative fiction that genuinely made me speculate.” One for fans of Octavia Butler and Ursula le Guin . A few. I recommended Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk last year when it was first released in the UK; it’s now available in the United States, published by Doubleday."
A. K. Blakemore · Buy on Amazon
"And the poet A. K. Blakemore’s prose debut The Manningtree Witches has also been extremely warmly received. It’s a historical novel based on the real-life 17th century witch trials in Essex, England, set during the civil war and at a time when Puritan attitudes prevailed. The self-appointed ‘Witchfinder General’ Mathew Hopkins sets about rooting out practitioners of Maleficia, devilry, at a time when many women have been left to get on with life while their men were fighting wars. I’ve seen it described, rather deliciously, as ‘ Fleabag meets Hilary Mantel’, and if you can resist that then you are made of sterner stuff than I. Shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize; out in the US on August 10. Yes. Look out for Leone Ross’s magical realist This One Sky Day ; Gwendoline Riley’s tense tale of mother-daughter strife My Phantoms ; and Lucy Jago’s Jacobean scandal A Net for Small Fishes . And if you missed it last year, Louise Erdrich was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her 2020 novel The Night Watchman , which is set on an Indian reservation in 1950s America and inspired by the life of her own grandfather. The New York Times called it “a magisterial epic”. Part of our best books of 2021 series."
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022 (2022)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2022-09-17).
Source: fivebooks.com
Cormac McCarthy · Buy on Amazon
"The literary event of the season must surely be the publication of Cormac McCarthy ‘s first new books since the devastating, Pulitzer Prize-winning, post-apocalyptic The Road in 2006. McCarthy returns now with not one, but two linked novels, which together tell the story of Bobby and Alicia Western, a brother and sister pair tormented by family history—their physicist father helped invent the atom bomb. In The Passenger , salvage diver Bobby stumbles upon a murder mystery while exploring a submerged plane wreck. In Stella Maris —a novel that unfolds entirely through a transcript of dialogue—maths prodigy Alicia is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Jenny Jackson, McCarthy’s editor, described it to The New York Times as “a book of ideas”. (“What do you do after you’ve written ‘The Road’?” Jackson added. “The answer is, two books that take on God and existence.”) The novels will be released in close succession in the United States: The Passenger on Oct 25, 2022 and Stella Maris on Nov 20, 2022 . A box set will follow the following month. (The books will be released simultaneously in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.) You may also be pleased to hear that Maggie O’Farrell—whose Women’s Prize-winning novel about the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet — found enormous critical and commercial success, has just released a new, much-buzzed-about novel. The Marriage Portrait considers the marriage of Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and the ill-fated Lucrezia, 15-year-old daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, ruler of Florence."
Maggie O'Farrell & narrated by Genevieve Gaunt · Buy on Amazon
"The Marriage Portrait offers a glimpse of the luxury and lechery of Renaissance Italy, where Lucrezia moves between gilded cages, adorned in glittering jewels—and all the while sensing her wifely value being weighed and measured. In terms of style, this new novel has been somewhat divisive; its lush, symphonic prose has been dubbed by some as “overwrought” , while others prefer “evocative” . I liked what Claire Allfree had to say about it in The Times : “So headily perfumed is her prose it works on the reader almost like a drug.” Sound good? Then I suspect this historical romance (of a kind) will work for you. Earlier this month, Ian McEwan released his eighteenth novel, Lessons , a sweeping (even sprawling) account of a single man’s life as it intertwines with the major political events of the 20th and early 21st centuries. It opens in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, as Roland Baines’ wife leaves him and his infant son to fend for themselves. Flashing back and forth through time, we take in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as Baines’ personal history—notably a damaging sexual relationship with a piano teacher in early adolescence and its emotional repercussions throughout the rest of his life. Over a period of decades, Baines grows, matures, and ultimately takes stock of the world and his role in it. An ambitious social novel. Barbara Kingsolver ( The Poisonwood Bible , Flight Behaviour ) also returns with Demon Copperhead , which reimagines Charles Dickens ‘s David Copperfield as set in the Appalachian Mountains, transposing that Victorian melodrama into a world of trailer parks, opioid crisis and a creaking foster care system. A true saga with a cast of thousands. Compulsively readable."
George Saunders · Buy on Amazon
"And—okay, fine, technically not a novel, but—I should also note that George Saunders (who won the Booker Prize in 2017 for his brilliantly funny and surreal first novel Lincoln in the Bardo ) has a new book out in mid-October. In Liberation Day, Saunders returns to his first love—the short story—and transports us into a hell-themed amusement park and a near-future police state. (If you can’t wait, make sure you’ve read his storytelling masterclass A Swim in a Pond in the Rain , adapted from a course on Russian short stories that he has taught at Syracuse University for twenty years.) Personally, I’m particularly excited about Our Share of Night by the Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez, who was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021 for her utterly unsettling collection of literary ghost stories The Dangers of Smoking in Bed . This new novel, also translated into English by Megan McDowell, is a gothic horror set partly during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, but which also embraces elements of occultism and the supernatural. Clocking in at more than 700 pages, this is an intimidating tome that simply pulsates with negative energy. That’s a recommendation, in case I’m not being clear."
Mariana Enriquez · Buy on Amazon
"Celeste Ng (the author of Little Fires Everywhere ) will publish a new novel, Our Missing Hearts (Oct 4). As will Kamila Shamsie ( Home Fires ), whose latest book Best of Friends will be out at the end of this month. Fresh from her Booker Prize shortlisting (for Oh William! ) , Elizabeth Strout is shortly to publish one more novel starring her beloved Lucy Barton. In Lucy By the Sea , our heroine reluctantly agrees to wait out the pandemic with her ex-husband in coastal Maine. And Andrew Sean Greer offers a follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic novel Less : in Less is Lost , our hapless hero Arthur Less sets out on a road trip across the United States. It’s been endorsed by the great and the good, including David Sedaris—who called it “wildly, painfully funny.” A balm."
Namwali Serpell · Buy on Amazon
"Namwali Serpell won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction in 2020 for her rowdy, polyphonous speculative novel The Old Drift . She returns now with The Furrows, an elegiac and uncanny story of grief, unreliable memories and mistaken identity. When Cee Williams watches her brother Wayne die in her arms, aged 12, something so powerful passes between them that she passes out; when she awakes, his body is gone. This lost brother haunts her for the rest of her life, appearing in the faces of strangers, and dying over and over again in her mind. The Financial Times said that it “confirms Serpell’s place as one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today.” I’m also intrigued by a novella by another Clarke Award-winner , Tade Thompson, who is stepping away from science fiction with Jackdaw , a darkly comic story about a psychiatrist who becomes obsessed with the British painter Francis Bacon. Written in feverish, free associative prose, it’s attracted praise from writers including Will Maclean and Paul Tremblay. Master of horror Stephen King returns with Fairy Tale , in which a high school student inherits great riches—and the key to a parallel universe—overnight. Richard Osman continues his ultra-popular Thursday Murder Club mystery series with The Bullet That Missed , wherein the retiree sleuths tackle a decade-old cold case that, inevitably, soon glows red hot. In November, the four-time Hugo Award-winning fantasy author N.K. Jemisin will publish The World We Make , concluding her Great Cities duology; Esquire called it “hopeful and enthralling.” And I mentioned this last time , but R.F. Kuang’s dark historical fantasy Babel is finally out, and has already raced to the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Fans of Candice Carty-Williams (author of the internationally bestselling Queenie ) will no doubt be racing to the bookshop to pick up a copy of her latest book, People Person , in which a lifestyle influencer, whose glossy exterior hides a deep loneliness, reconnects with estranged family members. And previous Five Books interviewee Bryony Gordon will publish Let Down Your Hair , a YA adaptation of Rapunzel for the social media age. It’s a busy season, as I say, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of it with these highlights. I hope you’ve spotted something to suit your tastes. As ever, we are keen to hear what novels you most looking forward to in Fall 2022—so let us know. Send us a tweet , or post on our Facebook page . Part of our best books of 2022 series."
The Best Novels of 2023: The Booker Prize Shortlist (2023)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2023-11-25).
Source: fivebooks.com
Paul Lynch · 2023 · Buy on Amazon
"The winner of the Booker Prize is notoriously difficult to predict, but this year’s favourite was always Paul Lynch’s darkly foreboding novel set in a dystopian, semi-familiar Ireland. It opens with a knock on the door from the newly formed secret police—and soon our protagonist’s husband, a trade unionist, has disappeared and she is left to face her family’s uncertain future alone. Lynch has explained that the novel grew out of his anxieties in the post-Trump, ‘post-truth’ era: “I wondered about how the real is no longer real, how misinformation and disinformation have led to a decline in trust in traditional sources of authority. I wanted to understand where all this might lead,” he said. “ Prophet Song took shape as a dystopian ruse that seeks to explode the form. How can such a novel be speculative when what is happening on these pages belongs to the here and now?” The Booker judges said it was “a shocking, at times tender novel that is not soon forgotten”; it has “one of the most haunting endings you will ever read.” Lynch, an Irish novelist based in Dublin, has published four previous novels and has won several major awards, including the Kerry Irish Novel of the Year for Grace (2017) and France’s Prix Gens de Mers for a translation of Beyond the Sea (2019). Prophet Song reportedly took him four years to write: it is presented as a block of text, without paragraph breaks, and the prose has a propulsive, lyrical quality that is challenging but readable. One for fans of Cormac McCarthy ‘s bleaker work—an excerpt from The Crossing appears as an epigraph."
Paul Murray · 2023 · Buy on Amazon
"Informed observers also had their eyes on Paul Murray’s tragicomic family saga The Bee Sting , in which we view the world through the eyes of four members of the Barnes family in a revolving carousel of perspective that has seen the novel compared to the work of Jonathan Franzen. Imelda’s first love died tragically in a car accident; heartbroken, she found herself marrying his brother in his place. Dickie assumed the role of his dead sibling in other ways too, taking on the family business and living in denial his homosexual identity. Cass and PJ, their teenage children, are busy with their own identity crises as their bewildered parents break down. “The characters are unforgettable,” declared the Booker judges. “They persist with hope and are capable of startling moments of love and generosity, despite their myriad flaws and problems.” The Guardian declared that “you won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.” The Bee Sting is Murray’s fourth novel, and channels the same riotous teenage angst of his 2010 bestseller Skippy Dies , an unruly mystery set in an elite boy’s boarding school. That too was longlisted for the Booker. 2023 wasn’t Paul Murray’s year, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see him in the running again in future."
Jonathan Escoffery · 2022 · Buy on Amazon
"This much-buzzed book of interlinked short stories that has already been nominated for a host of other prizes including America’s National Book Award, the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. If I Survive You portrays members of a Jamaican family making their lives in Miami from the 1970s onwards; its eight-part structure makes it more of a fictional mosaic than a straightforward story. This prompted a little grousing over the book’s eligibility, although the Booker rules simply state that books under consideration should be “unified and substantial”—the family is the thread that binds Escoffery’s episodes together. Despite its sometimes heavy subject matter—characters face poverty, racism, and tricky family dynamics—it has a “peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism”, said The New Yorker: Escoffery’s inventive and experimental approach to fiction “is marked by ingenuity.” If you’d like to get more of a sense of the style, his story Pestilence is available online at Electric Literature ."
Chetna Maroo · 2023 · Buy on Amazon
"The book that jumped out at me, personally, from the shortlist this year was Chetna Maroo’s strange, sparse little novel about a Jain family living in Luton, England. In the aftermath of their mother’s death, the youngest of three daughters become fixated on the sport squash, spending hours training at a local sports centre with her father every day. Together they drive troubling thoughts of death from their minds with a regimen of drills, ‘ghosting’, sprints, and increasingly desperate matches. Although I’m not particularly athletic, I do have a soft spot for sporting novels —which tend to feature singular characters with obsessive mindsets and near-mystical descriptions of physical exertion. Though very different in terms of content, in style it reminded me of Sally Rooney thanks to its restrained evocation of complex emotions and fraught interactions. In Western Lane , Maroo’s debut, we see squash as an act of sublimation. “In many ways, this intimate sport is loneliness itself,” noted Ivy Pochoda, former US squash champion and New York Times reviewer: “The game of squash becomes a way into Gopi’s grief and her attempts to process it. Only on the court does she have space to grieve alone, independent of her sisters, to submit to the void and find her footing within it.”"
Paul Harding · Buy on Amazon
"There were three Pauls on the shortlist this year—what are the chances? Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2009 debut Tinkers . This new book, his third, is a work of historical fiction inspired by the true story of Malaga, an island off the coast of Maine where former slaves made their homes alongside Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans. The self-sufficient, racially-integrated community was disbanded by the US government in 1911 when the residents were evicted in the name of public health. “Terrible how terribly good intentions turn out almost every time,” as one character observes, prophetically—and sure enough this unique, rag-tag community is soon no more. The Washington Post praised it as a “beautiful, brooding” book of “determined hope”: its “rich, unvarnished” portrait of island life is shaped by “long, cascading sentences [that] rush forward to encapsulate as much complexity as they can.” The judges said it was a “heartbreakingly beautiful” novel, noting that they were moved by Harding’s “the delicate symphony of language, land, and narrative.”"
Sarah Bernstein · 2023 · Buy on Amazon
"Rounding off the 2023 Booker Prize shortlist is Scottish Canadian writer and literary scholar Sarah Bernstein’s unsettling, enigmatic second novel about a woman who moves to an isolated, northern town in another country to look after her brother after his wife leaves him. Soon the brother departs too, leaving her in a town where nobody likes her and where she does not speak the language. “I was not from the place,” the unnamed, unreliable narrator notes, “and so I was not anything.” It’s an allusive book that will reward the reader who does not seek hard answers to the uncomfortable questions that haunt this atmospheric text. In mid-November, Study for Obedience won the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious prize for fiction. Bernstein was also recently flagged by Granta as one of Britain’s best young novelists; you can also find a short extract from this book on the Granta website, if you’d like to get a flavour of the book before committing."
Booker Prize-Nominated Mystery Novels (2026)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2026-01-20).
Source: fivebooks.com
Shehan Karunatilaka · 2022 · Buy on Amazon
"Set in during the Sri Lankan Civil War, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida —which won the Booker Prize in 2022—follows a war photographer as he pieces back together the story of his life and death. As Neil MacGregor, the art historian and chair of the 2022 judging panel, told me : “It’s a fantasy of a dead figure coming back, revisiting and understanding what happened, and also watching what the significance of their own life was. So at one level, it’s an enormous subject, almost a theological issue—what did this person do with their life? what does it add up to?—but it’s done with enormous humour.” There are moments, MacGregor explained, “of real horror”, when the brutality of the conflict are laid bare. But also “wild humour”. “It’s an attempt to draw up a balance sheet to write an account of a life, but in this wonderfully fantastical, hilarious, spine-chilling way.”"
Percival Everett · 2021 · Buy on Amazon
"That same year, Percival Everett was shortlisted for The Trees, a buddy-cop pageturner that opens in the aftermath of a series of awful murders in Money, Mississippi. “Part police procedural, part black comedy, the novel is both irreverently silly and deadly serious,” declared Houman Barekat in Literary Review . “The killings appear to be delayed revenge for historical wrongs.” Money, MS, “is MAGA country, a town of gun-loving hillbillies” where the two black FBI detectives brought in to investigate the killings face prejudice at every turn. And, overall, the novel’s “brisk narration and unusual register – an arrestingly perverse blend of playfulness and earnest moral purpose – make for a refreshing antidote to the po-faced didacticism that lets down so many contemporary novels of the politically conscientious sort.” After a brief diversion into a possible supernatural explanation, the solution transpires to be highly off-this-world. But don’t let me spoil it for you. It was one of my best books of 2022 ."
Eleanor Catton · Buy on Amazon
"Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize back in 2013 with this vast historical novel set in 1860s New Zealand, in which a gold prospector seeking his fortune stumbles into a web of murder and deceit in a frontier town. The novel itself is structured around the astrological calendar—each plot point reflecting some movement in the real-life sky during the period in which the story unfolds. The Luminaries features fortune tellers, prostitutes, merchants, magnates and a Maori gemstone hunter, and it is, as New York Times reviewer Bill Roorbach declared , “a lot of fun, like doing a Charlotte Brontë-themed crossword puzzle while playing chess and Dance Dance Revolution on a Bongo Board.” If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. “Some readers will delight in the challenge, others may despair.” This is not a book that’s easily picked up and put down again, in other words—but a project, perhaps to be read over a long journey or a period of gardening leave."
Mark Haddon · 2003 · Buy on Amazon
"In The Curious Incident , a fifteen-year-old boy who struggles with social cues but excels at mathematics decides to turn his attention to solving the murder of a local dog—and in doing so also stumbles upon the truth about the disappearance of his own mother, two years previously. Protagonist Christopher is usually interpreted to be autistic, and this fictional representation has drawn praise from many directions, including Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge researcher, who recommended it to us as one of the best books on autism , describing it as “very original”: “as a work of fiction, it does a good job of engaging the reader through a character who is clearly different.” Haddon’s high concept mystery, which is enjoyed by adults and young adults alike, is one of our most regularly-recommended books on Five Books; it was also recommended to us by bestselling children’s author Robert Muchamore as a good book for a reluctant 12-year-old reader . It was longlisted for what was then the Man Booker Prize in 2013."
Michael Collins · Buy on Amazon
"In this noirish mystery, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000, a frustrated news reporter—trapped in a dead-end job writing about local fundraisers—finds his postindustrial town oddly reinvigorated by a high-profile murder investigation, and can’t help but insert himself into proceedings. The Independent called it a “a complex and literary book”, that is also “fast-paced and cinematic”: a “fabulous fusion of hard-boiled mystery and American social history.” The Keepers of Truth was also shortlisted for the €100,000 Dublin Literary Award in 2002."
Booker Prize-Winning Historical Novels (2025)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2025-12-28).
Source: fivebooks.com
Hilary Mantel · 2009 · Buy on Amazon
Hilary Mantel · 2012 · Buy on Amazon
Hilary Mantel · Buy on Amazon
"And you can’t stop there. Though the final instalment, The Mirror & the Light , did not earn Mantel her forecast hat-trick of Booker Prizes, it is at least as brilliantly written as the first two, as we witness Cromwell’s final defeat. Expect intrigue, humour and a non-linear narrative. If you have already read and loved Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, you may be interested in our list of recommended books like Wolf Hall ."
Barry Unsworth · Buy on Amazon
"In this unsettling historical novel, a family of seafarers from 18th-century England embrace the greed and the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. A father, son and nephew embark on a voyage from Liverpool to West Africa, where they buy slaves to transport to the American Colonies. When disease breaks out in the hold, the captain’s reckless and inhumane response sparks a mutiny."
Michael Ondaatje · Buy on Amazon
"Sacred Hunger was the joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1992, alongside another work of historical fiction, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient , in which an aristocratic aviator, grievously burned in a plane crash, is tended by a nurse in a Tuscan monastery during the Second World War. The English Patient was adapted into a film directed by Anthony Minghella in 1996."
Peter Carey · Buy on Amazon
"Peter Carey took inspiration from the life of Australian folk hero Ned Kelly in this fictionalised autobiography, which won the Booker Prize in 2001. Kelly, the son of a transported convict, turns to banditry in colonial Australia, before he and his clan are ultimately cornered by armed police in a hut in the remote bush."
Peter Carey · Buy on Amazon
"You may also be interested in Carey’s earlier Booker Prize-winning novel, Oscar & Lucinda, a love story between a gambling seminarian and a genteel heiress, who meet on a ship bound for the Antipodes and end up attempting to transport a glass chapel through the Australian outback. It too was adapted for the screen , with Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in the starring roles."
Salman Rushdie · Buy on Amazon
"Authors take very different approaches to historical fiction. Some, like Mantel, above, seek historical accuracy where possible—embroidering only in the gaps left in the historical record. Others take a very different and more fantastical approach."
George Saunders · Buy on Amazon
"And if you’re open to supernatural elements, you should also read Lincoln in the Bardo , a wild ride of a novel set in the cemetery where Abraham Lincoln’s young son has been recently buried. It features rude ghosts, spectral humour and a polyphonic chorus of voices. Lincoln in the Bardo , which won in 2017, is both hilarious and heartbreaking, but you need to be ready for the text to take excitingly experimental form. It’s one of my favourite books of all time. I laugh just thinking of it."
Thomas Keneally · Buy on Amazon
"Keneally’s Booker Prize-winning novel, based on the true story of Oskar Schindler—an entrepreneur and Nazi party member who saved the lives of more than 1200 Jews during the Second World War, in assisting their escape from Hitler’s Germany. Keneally was convinced to take on the project after meeting a Holocaust survivor in Los Angeles. As he later recalled : I met a Schindler survivor named Leopold Pfefferberg in his Beverly Hills luggage store in October 1980. Buying a briefcase to replace one which came unstuck, I was in there a long time while Mastercard investigated my bona fides… But Leopold had time to get talking, and ultimately led me out through the repair room, where Mischa, his wife, was working on orders, to a filing cabinet. It was full of Schindler material including testimonies of survivors, photographs of the period, documents, some of them produced by Oskar himself, copies of SS telegrams, and the famous list of Swangsarbeitslager Brinnlitz, Oskar’s second camp. The book was famously adapted into the Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg. For those who’d like to read more about the backstory to the book, and how it came to be, Keneally also wrote a memoir on the subject, Searching for Schindler . The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, a doctor from Tasmania who, as an old man, flashes back to his time in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, building the infamous Burma Railway. Read expert recommendations The best books on The Burma Railway Jacqueline Passman , Teacher 🏆 Winner of the 2013 Booker Prize This epic historical novel, set in a 19th-century New Zealand goldrush town, is ghost story, mystery, and extraordinarily ambitious work of literature in one. Successfully adapted into an acclaimed TV mini-series starring Eve Hewson and Eva Green in 2020. Read expert recommendations 🏆 Winner of the 2015 Booker Prize Marlon James's third novel tells the story of an attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1970s Jamaica and its chaotic aftermath, as CIA agents flooded in from overseas and violence flowed well beyond the island's shores. Michiko Kakutani, then of the New York Times, said it was "like a Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner, with maybe a little creative boost from some primo ganja. It’s epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex." Read expert recommendations The Funniest Historical Novels Toby Clements , Journalist 🏆 Winner of the 2000 Booker Prize A brilliantly clever historical novel featuring two wealthy sisters from a fictional Ontario town, featuring a novel-within-a-novel-within-a-novel—or something like it. To enjoy it, one must allow the action to unfurl in all directions—back and forth in time, and refracted through the characters' metafictional counterparts—and simply trust that it will all come together in the end. Read expert recommendations 🏆 Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize Read expert recommendations The best books on India William Dalrymple , Travel Writer 🏆 Winner of the 1989 Booker Prize Read expert recommendations The best books on Enduring Love Riz Khan , Journalist 🏆 Winner of the 1980 Booker Prize Read expert recommendations The Best William Golding Books Judy Golding , Memoirist"
Editor's Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year (2022)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2022-12-27).
Source: fivebooks.com
Emmanuel Carrère · Buy on Amazon
"Early in the year, I fell hard for Emmanuel Carrère’s whirling, discombobulating work of autofiction, freshly translated into English by John Lambert. As I wrote back in spring , when my head was still spinning: We, in the Anglophone world, have not paid Carrère his dues. This latest work is a difficult book to sum up, but suffice to say, it begins in an easy, breezy style that feels almost free-associative, before it swirls ever faster down the plug hole. Disparate, discordant elements come into alignment, and soon Yoga reveals itself to have been entirely orchestrated from beginning to end. By the closing pages I wanted to give it a standing ovation. You’ll either love it or hate it; clearly, I’m in the former camp. This is a book that made me think: wow, I didn’t know we were allowed to do that. For all sorts of reasons— some moral —but many of them literary. Carrère takes pains to underline his personal weaknesses (“I am an eminently moral individual who distinguishes very clearly between good and evil, and places nothing higher than goodness,” he explains, “but alas, no, I am not good.”) but does not hesitate to put them on display—nay, to parade them, in this book. Yoga charts his mental breakdown, after several self-congratulatory years of career success and marital bliss. His dramatic self-destruction spools out in slow motion—but there is something liberating in that for the reader, to see a writer dissect their own inner workings so painstakingly and under such a clear, bright light."
Percival Everett · 2021 · Buy on Amazon
"How to explain The Trees ? It has so many disparate ingredients, which should not work together, but absolutely do. It is a gritty examination of the legacy of extreme racism and lynching in the Deep South. It’s a revenge thriller. It’s a buddy cop farce. It’s a detective novel with shades of the supernatural. And, well, it’s one of the best, most readable, funniest, and most hard-hitting novels I have ever read—never mind in 2022. In a Guardian interview , Everett talked us through his rationale for this unusual approach: It would be very easy to write a dark, dense novel about lynching that no one will read; there has to be an element of seduction. Humour is a fantastic tool because you can use it to get people to relax and then do anything you want to them. The absurdity of the inattention to the subject was the driving force of the comedy, but the novel lives as much in turning around stereotypes as it does in revealing the truth of lynching. Everett’s previous novels (he has published 21) can be tricky to get a hold of here in the UK, so he was a new writer to me. But I’ve since learned that some of his back catalogue is available via Influx Press, and it was recently announced that Jeffrey Wright will star in a new film adaptation of his 2001 novel Erasure. The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize earlier this year and I had my money on it to win. Honestly, it’s so good. Do yourself a favour and read it."
Jennifer Egan · Buy on Amazon
"Egan’s joyously experimental A Visit From the Goon Squad (which found a rapturous reception on release in 2010, winning a Pulitzer Prize, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a National Book Critics Circle Award) is one of my favourite books of all time. This new sequel offers an expansion of that roving, playful world, as bit-players from the earlier book take centre stage. As with Goon Squad, each chapter serves as its own standalone short story, with its own trademark style or literary device. The Candy House includes a version of her short story ‘Black Box’ (originally published via the New Yorker’s Twitter feed as a series of 140-character updates ), and a funny epistolary chapter created from a very complicated email chain. These episodes jet back and forth through time—some set in the recognisable past, some in a dystopian near-future—and together loosely form a grander narrative about an algorithm developed by an anthropologist, Miranda Kline ( Goon Squad ‘s Mindy, in her later years), which predicts social behaviour, and the invention of the ‘Collective Consciousness’, in which the memories of individuals have been uploaded into the cloud, building a hive-mind that might now be searched, analysed, and relived. If, like me, you enjoy both speculative fiction and literary fiction, this will be right up your alley. It’s sharp, funny, and very, very clever—a social critique that never lapses into the portentous. You may also enjoy Emily St. John Mandel’s (author of Station Eleven ) very good new time travel novel, Sea of Tranquility , which was also recently released."
Maddie Mortimer · Buy on Amazon
"In Maddie Mortimer’s intimidatingly mature and inventive debut novel, a British artist faces down terminal cancer as her daughter comes of age. It’s a moving, strange, and unexpectedly playful book, inspired by the death of Mortimer’s own mother when she was only fourteen , and is in part narrated by the anthropomorphised voice of cancer itself. That’s a bold artistic decision—one that sounds somewhat self-consciously clever-clever—but this sharp, darkly comic voice adds a great deal of humour and verve to an otherwise heartbreaking story. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies won the 2022 Desmond Elliot Prize (awarded annually to the best British or Irish debut novel), was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and was longlisted for the Booker. Quite an achievement for a writer who is, if my sums are correct, only 26. So: expect great things from Maddie Mortimer. High-concept books like this aren’t for everyone, but if you like Ali Smith, Eimear McBride, and Max Porter, I think you’ll love Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies. The text itself, which has elements of concrete poetry, demands to be admired in hard copy. But it also translates unexpectedly well into a radio play; the audiobook is primarily voiced by Lydia Wilson, while Tamsin Grieg plays the role of Cancer, rudely interrupting with crows of victory and freewheeling observations. A whole-hearted recommendation."
Jon Fosse · Buy on Amazon
"Okay, I might be stretching it a little to describe Jon Fosse’ s monumental stream-of-consciousness sequence Septology as a ‘2022 novel’ (the first two installments were released in 2019), but 2022 has certainly been the Year of Septology. A dual edition of Damion Searles’s masterful translations of books VI and VII (beautifully produced by Fitzcarraldo Editions) was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize , and this year it was collected in English for the first time by US publisher Transit Books, which released a handsome, seven-part hardback edition. How to explain Septology ? It is a contemplative narrative from the point of view of an ageing painter, living in rural Norway, who is greatly taken up with his relationship with another artist, an alcoholic with the same name and appearance—perhaps another version of himself, having made different life choices. When I spoke to the chair of the International Booker Prize judges, Frank Wynne, he described the reading experience as “luminous… like swimming in an open sea. You can’t see land in any direction.” I quite agree. It’s a challenging read, in much the same way that Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport was challenging: it’s long, disorienting, and each section is comprised, essentially, of a single, infinitely unfurling sentence. But it’s a unique experience that rewards your time and attention. I loved what the critic Merve Emre had to say about it, which is what finally convinced me to give Septology a go myself: “the closest I have come to feeling the presence of God here on earth.” Surrender yourself into the void that is Septology. Of course—any ostensibly definitive list of ‘novels of the year’ is uncomfortably subjective. Not only are these choices a matter of taste, but it is also difficult to compare books read across such a long time period and in so many different contexts. The appreciation of any novel, I feel, is coloured by one’s state of mind while reading it. Some books I read with a pencil in hand, in order to review them; other books I flipped through while waiting for buses; others on a glowing screen in a darkened room beside my sleeping partner. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I’ve been recommending Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William! to all those looking for a gentle domestic novel of unexpected profundity. Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service and Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir to fans of Mary Gaitskill and Raven Leilani—that is, those who enjoy racy romantic encounters with a moral grey area. And Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow will suit those looking for an easy read that nonetheless tackles interesting questions of creativity and the meaning of art. These are all novels that intrigued, surprised, and amused me this year—but I’m only one person and I can’t read everything. I’m always interested to hear from you, our readers: What, in your opinion, were the best novels of 2022? Let us know. Part of our best books of 2022 series."
Editors' Picks: Highlights From a Year in Reading (2018)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2018-12-18).
Source: fivebooks.com
Nan Shepherd · Buy on Amazon
"I spent a week in January in a bothy in the woods in the Highlands, looking up at the Cairngorm range, where I read Nan Shepard’s great classic for the first time, having previously seen Robert Macfarlane sing its praises . It was the perfect time and place to do so: this slim work of nature writing, first published in 1977, is an account of gentle and repeated interaction with those same mountains in all seasons, and requires total immersion. I read from dawn to dusk then finished it by the light from a wood-burning stove – something I felt she might appreciate."
Sophie Mackintosh · Buy on Amazon
"This disconcerting debut novel has been showered with praise and accolades this year, and rightly so. Three sisters come of age on a remote island, in thrall to parental teaching that the outside world will cause them irreparable harm. Reminiscent of that strange film Dogtooth , which I also loved, it’s a bewildering and disturbing fable that will appeal to those who enjoy ‘feminist dystopia’ fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale and The Power . This smart, self-deprecating novel is a thinly veiled portrait of the author as he struggles with imposter syndrome (verging on a total breakdown) during a prestigious fellowship overseas. Merciless in his forensic analysis of social interaction and his skewering of his own pretension, it’s also a clever exploration what can be lost and found in translation between two languages and cultures."
Donald S Murray · Buy on Amazon
"Donald S Murray is a fantastic author who specialises in stories from the north of Scotland. This – published earlier this year – is a beguiling mix of nature writing, history and memoir taking in his childhood in bleak and beautiful Lewis, but moving further afield too, to peatland cultures in Ireland, Holland and Germany where he unearths dark stories from the past. It’s an unusual book, but a beautiful one. This was such a wonderful discovery: a page-turning post-apocalyptic novel that is beautifully written and constructed. It reminded me a little of Jennifer Egan’s wonderful A Visit From the Goon Squad in how it tells the stories of a number of interlinked characters, flashing back and forward in time. I’ve been pressing it into other people’s hands since the moment I finished it."
Chris D Thomas · Buy on Amazon
"I’m writing and reading a lot about the impact of humans upon the natural world, and this has been the most thought-provoking book I’ve read on the topic this year. It outlines the capacity of plant and animal life to adapt to the Anthropocene world, and is—as Elizabeth Kolbert says on the back cover—“improbably hopeful” on the planet’s prospects in the face of a rapidly changing climate. This was a recommendation from my interview with Laura Dassow Walls , the Thoreau biographer. Another apocalyptic book, of a sort – I’ve been reading on a theme – but a weird one this, full of strangeness and unexplained wonders. It kept me up two nights running. It’s the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, although this is (to my eyes) by far the strongest of the three books."
Olivia Laing · Buy on Amazon
"I love Laing’s nonfiction, so was very excited to read this new experimental novel which took the book world by storm. Written in a flurry over the summer of 2017, it’s told in real time, and conflates Laing’s real life persona with that of the cult literary figure Kathy Acker. I spoke to Laing about the book – and the genre of ‘autofiction’ more generally – for Five Books in October, and found her a thoughtful, erudite and inspiring interview subject. I also particularly enjoyed one of her recommendations, Michelle Tea’s Black Wave . I read this 1980 play as research for an essay I wrote on the Gaelic language earlier this year , and it has stuck in my head ever since. British soldiers arrive in 19th-century Ireland charged with ‘standardising’ (anglicising) Gaelic place names – and, in fact, bastardise them. Illustrates well the complexities of human relationships under colonialism and the insidious impact of cultural imperialism."
Editors' Picks: Notable Books of 2019 (2019)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2019-12-14).
Source: fivebooks.com
Mary Gaitskill · Buy on Amazon
"Also grappling with power dynamics between the sexes, Mary Gaitskill’s novella This is Pleasure was an extraordinary exploration of issues thrown up by the Harvey Weinstein case and wider #MeToo movement. Written through the eyes of a woman whose male friend’s career implodes following accusations of sexual harassment, Gaitskill wallows in the muddy waters of sexual morality. It also led me back to Bad Behavior , the thrilling short story collection that made her name and spawned the BDSM rom-com Secretary , starring Maggie Gyllenhall . Another super-hit was the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino’s debut collection of essays, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion , which happily lived up to the hype. Light on her feet but intellectually heavyweight, she turns an exacting, almost academic eye upon popular culture – analysing ego and identity in the age of social media; what she calls the self-optimisation industry (using her devotion to barre as a case study); her experience on an early reality TV show; and how growing up in a Texan superchurch tapped into the same longing for euphoria and losing oneself as later expressed through taking MDMA. Highly recommended."
Jon Day · Buy on Amazon
"Less well publicised, but perhaps my favourite nonfiction book published this year was Jon Day’s Homing , a memoir of parenthood and pigeon fancying, and though that sounds like an odd combination, it works brilliantly. I wrote a review of it for Prospect magazine, which you can find here : I called it “dazzlingly erudite.” (His debut book Cyclogeography , a memoir of life as a bicycle courier, is also extremely good.) Other works of memoir I enjoyed this year included Melanie Reid’s The World I Fell Out Of , a searing memoir of life after a riding accident rendered her tetraplegic which is gracious, brave and unexpectedly life-affirming. I was delighted to see it win the Saltire Prize for Nonfiction recently at the Scottish national book awards – well deserved. And I must mention Rhik Samadder’s heartbreaking yet hilarious I Never Said I Love You , which excavates the author’s history of depression, self-harm, childhood abuse – and aerates this dark and difficult subject matter with spectacular wit and self-awareness. Other new nonfiction books I enjoyed this year: Caroline Crampton’s The Way to the Sea , a beautiful book about tracing the Thames River from source to estuary; this is a topic close to Crampton’s heart as she spent her childhood sailing in its waters after her parents emigrated – by yacht – from South Africa to London. It’s cultural history, memoir and straight history all swirled together, with lovely passages that highlight the bleak beauty of an unglamorous stretch of English coastline. New Yorker staffer Casey Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee is an unusual blend of true crime and literary biography. Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize , it tells a remarkable true story of a murderous pastor in the American South, and the To Kill a Mockingbird author’s attempt to write about him, having contributed so much to Truman Capote’s true crime classic In Cold Blood . Also, Dan Richards’ Outpost is a charming travel book about remote hideaways such as those favoured by hermits, writers and ‘Mars colonists’ training in a mock-up space station in Utah. ( I interviewed Richards on the best of landscape writing .) Plus Mark Boyle’s The Way Home was a Thoreauvian take on the simple life: he records a year living off grid and without modern technology in rural Ireland. Thought provoking and bullish. (See my interview with Boyle on wilderness, here .)"
Robert Macfarlane · Buy on Amazon
"On the subject of the natural world, the patron saint of nature writing Robert Macfarlane had a new, hotly-anticipated book out: Underland: A Deep Time Journey . Having climbed the highest heights in his debut Mountains of the Mind , Macfarlane now dives down to the lowest of the lows. He goes caving in limestone caverns deep underground, rattles through salt mines under the sea in carts and stumbles across (literal) underground subcultures in the Paris catacombs, all interwoven with learned digressions into geological epochs and classical conceptions of the underworld. What can I say? Macfarlane is a most remarkable writer. And if you like the sound of Underland, I imagine you will also enjoy Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing , which I have only just begun but am already crowing about to anyone who will listen. Jamie is a fantastic Scottish poet and essayist, and Surfacing is her third essay collection after the wonderful Findings and Sightlines , both of which are very highly regarded. Charles Foster also enthused about it in his selection of the best nature writing of 2019 . David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future is essentially a work of climate change eschatology, and doesn’t make for a relaxing read before bed (in fact, it made me so anxious I had to put it away for a few weeks and come back to it.) But it’s an essential text for anyone with an interest in the environment, or, well, anyone alive on the Earth today."
Oyinkan Braithwaite · Buy on Amazon
"Sometimes, though, escapism is what’s called for. One of the most enjoyable books I read this year was Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer , which Val McDermid also selected among her picks of the best crime fiction of 2019 . Set in Lagos, it follows hardworking nurse Korede as she attempts to cover up the crimes committed by her insatiable sister Ayoola, a beautiful sociopath with black widow tendencies. As well as a crime thriller, it’s a razor-sharp dissection of male-female dynamics that never feels preachy or pretentious. Semiosis , a first-contact novel, was an immersive and mind-expanding work of science fiction by Sue Burke. It follows several generations of humans as they start a colony on a new planet, where plants are the highest form of intelligent life. Strictly speaking, this is a 2018 book, but it came out in paperback this year and I heard about it when I interviewed the director of the the Arthur C Clarke Award about their 2019 shortlist. It’s been a regular bestseller at Five Books, and rightly so."
Lara Williams · Buy on Amazon
"I also very much enjoyed Supper Club , the debut novel from British writer Lara Williams, which follows a group of millennial women as they embark upon a transgressive art project: a secret society whose members eat and drink and dance until they collapse, with the intention of putting on weight and learning to live unapologetically. The book takes an interesting form, folding food writing and recipes into the mix, reminiscent of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn . Sensuous, gluttonous, joyful and a little unsettling; it’s a celebration of hedonism, but a warning too. Another notable British debut was Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie . I’d had the impression it would be a Bridget Jones’s Diary -style feelgood farce – but though it shares some superficial similarities (charting the romantic travails of a young woman in London), it’s a far darker book. Queenie deals with domestic abuse, violent sex, panic attacks and racism; but with the help of her friends and (after a fashion) her British-Jamaican family, she rebuilds her life. More gruelling than expected, but very heartwarming and funny – particularly the sections starring her lovable, fast-talking, motley gang of friends she dubs ‘the Corgis.’ As I said at the start, I can’t possibly keep up with all the new books that I’d like to read, and one must also keep a varied diet of old and new reading material. But there are three novels I regret not getting to before year-end, and are sitting on my bedside table ready for when I get a spare moment. These are Max Porter’s Lanny , Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Starling Days , and Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport . Looking ahead, 2020 already looks chockablock with wonders. I can personally recommend Sophy Roberts’ The Lost Pianos of Siberia , which I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of. I wrote a blurb for it: “…Pack your suitcase for Siberia – Sophy Roberts’ gorgeous prose will summon you there like a spell.” Jenny Offill, whose Dept. of Speculation must be one of the best ever novels of marital crisis, will have a new novel out, called Weather . And, of course, who could forget the imminent arrival (March 2020) of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light , the final book in her Wolf Hall trilogy. It’s available on pre-order now, and I for one will not be sleeping until it gets here."
Editors' Picks: Notable New Novels of Early 2020 (2020)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2020-02-11).
Source: fivebooks.com
Garth Greenwell · Buy on Amazon
"One unmissable work of literary fiction not long out is Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, the follow up to his lyrical, rapturously received 2016 debut, What Belongs to You . As with the earlier book, Cleanness is a portrayal of an American expat living as a gay man in conservative Sofia – his alienation and struggle to form long-term relationships – and it unfolds by way of episodic vignettes. Greenwell writes with absolute candour, and in prose so elevated as to have spawned its own sub-genre of literary analysis. (If you like that sort of thing, I recommend Christian Kiefer on Greenwell’s “remaking of grammar in his own image” on Lithub .) Greenwell says he thinks of himself as more of a poet than a novelist, and certainly Cleanness is infused with a poet’s sensibility. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Standout debuts from January include Kiley Reid’s bestselling Such a Fun Age – a funny and accomplished social satire examining race and privilege through the eyes of a young black babysitter and her employer, which will make good discussion fodder for book clubs – and Irish writer Sue Rainsford’s Follow Me to Ground , an unsettling tale of father-daughter witchdoctors that twines magical realism together with horror."
Jenny Offill · Buy on Amazon
"Just out, and another one not to miss, is Jenny Offill’s Weather , her third novel and the follow-up to her wry, intelligent and heart-rending examination of marital infidelity, art and motherhood Dept. of Speculation , which cannot be recommended highly enough. As with Dept. of Speculation , Weather is built from fragments, some koan-esque and oblique, some directly reported, which Offill reportedly composes, pins to notice boards around her house, and sifts through for many months before settling upon the final formation. The new novel examines how to live and love in the shadow of climate collapse ."
Hilary Mantel · Buy on Amazon
"You may also be pleased to hear that there are new books out shortly from the Booker Prize winners Julian Barnes ( The Man in the Red Coat ), Aravind Adiga ( Amnesty ) and Anne Enright ( Actress ). Hilary Mantel, of course, has twice triumphed at the Booker with the first two instalments of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies . The third, The Mirror and the Light , will chart Cromwell’s inevitable demise and its publication in March is inarguably the literary event of the year. I’ve had it on pre-order for months, and a currently re-reading the earlier books in breathless anticipation. Join me, why don’t you. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Fans of Anne Tyler can look forward to her latest novel Redhead at the Side of the Road , out in April, while fantasy fanatics will be pleased to hear that Hugo Award-winner N K Jemison will be launching a new trilogy with The City We Became at the end of March 2020."
Ottessa Moshfegh · Buy on Amazon
"After that, Ottessa Moshfegh – one of the most outstanding young literary talents working today – will publish her latest novel Death in her Hands, which follows the darkly provocative tale of opting-out, My Year of Rest and Relaxation , and her Booker-shortlisted Eileen . This new novel is a detective story of a sort, centring upon an elderly widow living alone in the woods who finds a note on the forest floor apparently reporting a murder – but no body. As with Eileen, it is a book that plays with elements of crime fiction, but don’t expect a paint-by-numbers thriller that ties off neatly by the end. Dark and character-driven. Shortly to be released in the US, but already out (and well-received) in the UK are Ben Okri’s The Freedom Artist and Five Books alumnus Emma Jane Unsworth ‘s Grown Ups which is currently a Sunday Times bestseller in Britain. Also out now in the UK – and available on pre-order in the US – is the latest offering, from the author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (which won – amongst other things – the Bailey’s Prize, Goldsmiths Prize and the Desmond Elliot Prize). Strange Hotel is a slim, stream-of-consciousness novella that portrays the internal monologue of an unnamed woman in a series of anonymous hotel rooms, as she considers identity, trauma and romantic disappointment – and the intellectual defence mechanisms she has developed to survive."
Emily St John Mandel · Buy on Amazon
"And finally, if alarming news about the Coronavirus has sent you, like me, rushing back into the arms of Emily St John Mandel’s brilliant, beautiful post-pandemic novel Station Eleven , then you will be delighted to hear that she has a new book out in March 2020: The Glass Hotel. Also, coincidentally, set partly in a hotel – this one a luxury glass and cedar monstrosity on Vancouver Island – The Glass Hotel is, in Mandel’s words : “a ghost story with a Ponzi scheme in it”, reportedly inspired by the case of Bernie Madoff. Though not a dystopian novel like Station Eleven , the shipping executive Miranda and her boss Leon make an appearance in The Glass Hotel , marking it as taking place within the same fictional universe."
Very Short Books You Can Read In A Day (2020)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2020-09-23).
Source: fivebooks.com
Albert Camus · Buy on Amazon
"Or, sticking with my French theme, you might think about tackling one of Albert Camus’s existentialist novels. I can recommend The Stranger (sometimes The Outsider), although our expert interviewee Jamie Lombardi’s declared her particular favourite to be The Fall , in which the narrator witnesses a woman jumping to her death from a bridge and decides to keep walking. It’s believed to be inspired by his relationship with his wife. “I read it on a plane from New York to Amsterdam and I finished it with time to spare,” Lombardi told us in a discussion of the best Camus books . “It really speaks to the power of narrative and the way our understanding of our interpersonal conflicts helps to mediate our relationships, for better or worse.” Another favourite of my own is Muriel Spark’s iconic story of a dazzlingly charismatic schoolteacher The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . Set in a 1930s Edinburgh girls’ school and based on Spark’s own experiences, it was adapted into a 1969 film starring Maggie Smith in the titular role – for which she won an Oscar – but the original text is well worth reading. Very concise, it was initially published in the New Yorker and later repackaged as a novel. Indeed, most of Spark’s works are short, snappy, and very entertaining. I spoke to the Scottish intellectual Alan Taylor about the best books by Muriel Spark to mark her centenary in 2018, so you can find some further reading recommendations in that interview."
Sayaka Murata · Buy on Amazon
"Plenty of contemporary writers tend towards concision, too. I’m a big fan of the Japanese writer Sayaka Murata’s fiction, and you can find me fangirling over her latest, rather shocking, novel, Earthlings , in my selection of the most notable novels of fall 2020 . But if you’ve never read any of her work, I’d probably suggest you start with her breakout hit Convenience Store Woman, which explores many of the same themes (asexuality, nonconformity, relationships of convenience) in a less confronting context. It’s about a female shop worker who takes refuge in the scripted and impersonal nature of her job, and faces increasing pressure from her friends and family to marry and pursue a more challenging career. (Murata herself famously worked for years in a Tokyo convenience store .) I also enjoyed – if that’s the right word – Han Kang’s The Vegetarian , which won the International Booker Prize in 2016. It’s a chilling allegorical story about a placid Korean wife who, following a series of disturbing dreams, decides to give up meat, only to be punished by her husband and family for her act of passive rebellion with increasing brutality. My copy is slim enough to slip into a handbag, and although it’s not an easy read, exactly, its quiet aura of menace has a transfixing quality."
Julian Barnes · Buy on Amazon
"At least two winners of The Booker Prize proper (by which I mean, the prize for books published in English, rather than fiction in translation) have been very short books – novels bordering on novellas. Julian Barnes ‘ The Sense of an Ending is a haunting story that centres on the death of an old schoolfriend of the narrator, and a suicide note pronouncing that a free person “has a philosophical duty to examine the nature of their life, and may then choose to renounce it.” From there, a complex backstory unfolds, exploring the fallibility of memory, and how we all construct narratives of ourselves. It’s been many years since I read it, but certain aspects haunt me still, particularly one moonlit scene in which the characters watch the Severn Bore, a tidal phenomenon in which the flow of water in an estuary is briefly reversed. Ian McEwan is well known for his short novels (he once told the New Yorker that he felt the novella was “the perfect form of prose fiction”) and his Booker-winning tale of sexual frustration On Chesil Beach sails in barely over the line, at around 55,000 words. A novella is usually considered to run between 20,000 and 40,000 words, although the boundary is somewhat blurred. I also have a particular soft spot for The Cement Garden , his perverse and incestuous first novel, in which four orphaned children decide to hide their mother’s death from the authorities by entombing her in concrete in their cellar. Horrifyingly good. If you’re looking for a short book because of a poor attention span (thanks pandemic anxiety, doomscrolling, depression, stress, overwork and the endless interruptions of small children!) you might find yourself drawn to a book served in easily digestible chunks. We have plenty of short story recommendations elsewhere on the site, a short story being perfect if you have a spare half hour or so. (I myself have been carrying a copy of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table in my jacket pocket for a couple of weeks, and taking it out in moments of stillness.) Get the weekly Five Books newsletter However, if you’re looking for a longer, book-length narrative to linger over, a fragmentary novel might be a perfect solution. Often unfolding as a collage of vignettes, lyrical snatches or brief monologues, this form of literature is perfect for the present moment, echoing the disjointed nature Covid-era living, and served in thin, savourable slivers. Some favourite recent examples of mine are Maggie Nelson’s Bluets , a strange and beautiful meditation on her love for the colour blue, tinged with sex and heartbreak, and broken down into hundreds of numbered parts; and Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers , whose structure perfectly mirrors the fragmented experience of living through grief."
Jenny Offill · Buy on Amazon
"But my absolute favourite book of this kind, and perhaps my favourite book of all, is Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation – a fraught, wise and very, very funny account of marital discord and creative crisis. It’s served in short, sometimes sentence-length segments, some directly reported and sometimes elliptical or koan-esque. Those who enjoyed her recent bestselling novel, Weather , will know what to expect, but in my opinion this earlier book is the original and best, and I must have read it dozens of times. I own it in hard copy, well-thumbed, and also as an ebook on my phone so I can carry it with me anywhere. I often return to it during periods of insomnia. If you haven’t already read it, I can’t recommend it enough. McEwan, expanding on his enthusiasm for the shorter form, noted that “to sit with a novella is analogous to watching a play or a longish movie…both operating within the same useful constraints of economy.” Similarly, reading a script can also be a highly enjoyable manner in which to pass an hour or two; the perfectly-formed play is an immersive joy – plus stage directions exercise the imagination in unusual ways. Recently, after meeting her at a writer’s retreat, I began working my way through the back catalogue of the wonderful US playwright Annie Baker, beginning with her Pulitzer-winning drama set in a cinema auditorium The Flick . Baker is the master of the awkward silence, during which unspoken feelings can be tasted on the air – her characters being all the more appealing and realistic for their inability to express themselves. Though I am yet to see a live performance, reading the script offered a different medium in which to appreciate her skill."
Annie Baker · Buy on Amazon
"I tend to read plays when I find I have a hour or two to spare and I want something to read that can fully immerse me and then be over within that timeframe. Graphic narratives fill a similar role in my reading life. There is a great selection of recommendations in our comics and graphic novels section, and I can personally recommend Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina , the first comic to be longlisted for the Booker, which is a tense graphic masterpiece about the aftermath of a gruesome murder. I also very much enjoyed the gentle comedy of Matthew Dooley’s Flake (winner of the 2020 Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing ) and Simon Stålenhag’s post-apocalyptic beauty The Electric State , which was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction . Whatever you find appealing in these chaotic times you should embrace. We’d love to hear what you’ve been reading lately, especially if it’s a book that’s broken a reading drought. Send us a tweet , comment on Facebook , or write us an email – we’re always delighted to speak to Five Books fans."
Funny Short Stories (2025)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2025-04-08).
Source: fivebooks.com
George Saunders · Buy on Amazon
"George Saunders is a modern master of the short story. You might be familiar with Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo , or even his dissection of the Russian short story, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain , but for a very long time he was best known for his bizarre, tragicomic short stories that are very funny, as well as weird and often violent. I’ve listened to nearly all of them now, and ‘Ghoul’ is one of my favourites; it’s also a great introduction to Saunders as it features many of his trademark motifs and preoccupations. ‘Ghoul’ is set in a dystopian theme park, based underground and styled to represent a kind of earthly Hell, and is told through the eyes of an actor playing a ‘Squatting Ghoul.’ (Read, perfectly, by Jack McBrayer in the audiobook.) The inhabitants of this subterranean hellscape are plagued with power cuts and floods, and visitors never seem to arrive. What does it mean? Is it an atheist parable? Even the author isn’t sure . What I can tell you is that Saunders’ stories make me laugh, they make me think, and occasionally they make me gasp out loud in horror. He is one of America’s greatest living writers. Also recommended: The Tenth of December by George Saunders"
Lorrie Moore · Buy on Amazon
"I just love the irreverent stories of Lorrie Moore, who brings an acerbic wit and lightness of touch to even the darkest subject matter. In my opinion, her greatest gift lies in her sharp characterisation, in which she captures in a few deft sentences an entire personhood of a type you might meet in the street—flawed and wrongheaded and yet lovable for all their quirks. Those skills are displayed beautifully in her very funny short story ‘You’re Ugly, Too,’ whose protagonist Zoë Hendricks, a history professor at a liberal arts college in Illinois, who—single and directionless, and full of disdain for her Midwestern students and colleagues—struggles to find purpose and meaning. “You know,” one date tells her, “I just shouldn’t try to go out with career women. You’re all stricken.” Is she a pleasant character? Not really. Is she ridiculous? Yes, a little. But the wry humour with which she wreathes her desperation is completely compelling—just as Moore so brilliantly leavens her otherwise shattering account of the parents of a baby being treated for cancer in her famous story ‘ People Like That Are the Only People Here .’ Also recommended: Birds of America by Lorrie Moore"
Katherine Heiny · Buy on Amazon
"Katherine Heiny’s wonderful, heartwarming-without-being-soppy novels combine domestic drama, gentle humour and skewering social comedy, so I was pleased to discover that she published a short story collection early in her career (well, mid-way through an interrupted career ) gathering together some of the stories that first made her name. Single, Mellow, Carefree features rather a lot of adultery—a preoccupation Heiny has linked to her husband’s career as a spy, and the lies such a job necessitates. (“He used to be under death threat from the K.G.B.,” as she once recalled. “Then they called one day and said they were over it.”) But the story I’ve picked out is a droll story about a mother frantically organising a children’s party, featuring an underwhelming clown, a misshapen cake, and the advances of an unsettlingly mature second grader. Also recommended: Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny"
David Sedaris · Buy on Amazon
"Sedaris writes a combination of fantastical fables and highly autobiographical stories. All are told with the same brio and irreverent energy, but the realist tales are deeply poignant in their conclusions and subject matter. If you’ve never come across his work before, I’d recommend starting with this 2000 collection, which features some of his very best work. The title story discusses Sedaris’s experiences at a French language school as he grapples with the complexities of grammar and largely fails to express himself in a new tongue. But the real humour comes from the quirks of his fellow students (including an Argentinian who, when asked to explain his hobbies to the class in French, hazards at “making sex with the women of the world”) and the “sadistic” tutor who seems to enjoy cutting her clumsy wordsmiths down to size. (“Oh yeah?” she says to a Yugoslavian who claims to love everything life has to offer, “And do you love your little war?”) This collection also features two more of my firm favourites, ‘The Youth in Asia’ (a review of his family’s pet-owning history, which is both hilarious and deeply melancholy) and ‘Go Carolina’ (a recounting of childhood speech therapy for a lisp). Sedaris first made his name writing for the radio show This American Life and his stories are still, I think, appreciated to their best advantage in audio. I can’t now read his work without hearing his wry intonation and perfect comic timing. So do I suggest you try the audiobook, which is read by the author. Also recommended: When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris"
Roald Dahl · Buy on Amazon
"Roald Dahl is best known for his children’s fiction, but he also wrote many (extremely dark) short stories for an adult audience. They have the same simplicity of voice and form as his other writing, but are more macabre in tone. One of his best known is the story ‘Pig,’ in which a young orphan is brainwashed by his vegetarian aunt into believing that meat is disgusting and harmful to eat; ultimately—spoiler alert—he tastes pork by accident, and, fascinated, goes to an abattoir where he gets lethally caught up in the slaughtering machinery. This is the same mind that produced Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , but with the handbrake off. You’ll either love them or hate them—so why not give Dahl’s short stories a go. Also recommended: Skin and Other Stories by Roald Dahl I also think that Samantha Irby’s humorous collections Wow, No Thank You and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life deserve honourable mentions; technically these are personal essays, but I suspect they will scratch the same itch and they genuinely made me laugh out loud in public places."
Popular Fiction Highlights of Spring 2024 (2024)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2024-03-22).
Source: fivebooks.com
Aliya Whiteley · Buy on Amazon
"We’re big fans of Aliya Whiteley’s writing here at Five Books . She’s been twice shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award , which we cover every year, and recently spoke to us about the best sci-fi horror books . Her new book Three Eight One is a fun literary experiment in which every short segment is exactly 381 words long. It’s a fantasy adventure set three centuries in the future, as a young woman—the curator of an internet archive—is drawn into a mysterious quest. Constraints breed creativity. There’s a new book from the very prolific (and Clarke Award-winning) author Adrian Tchaikovsky. In Alien Clay , a researcher is exiled to an alien planet where he is brought into close contact (too close, he would say) with an extraterrestrial ecosystem. Tchaikovsky presents an Orwellian nightmare and a speculative biologist’s dream. Plus don’t miss Natasha Pulley’s new novel The Mars House , a genre-bending queer romance set in a dystopian Mars colony. Pulley’s books are always imaginative and highly evocative. Sci fi fans will also be pleased to hear that Hao Jingfang, the Hugo Award-winning writer, has a new book out too. Jumpnauts, translated from the original Chinese by previous Five Books interviewee Ken Liu , is a first contact-type novel in which signals from a mysterious alien race forces rival factions to form an uneasy alliance. It’s the action-packed opening title in a six-book sequence. More science fiction recommendations on Five Books"
Flora Carr · Buy on Amazon
"Flora Carr’s debut novel The Tower is a retelling of the 1567 imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots, in Lochleven Castle following the murder of her first husband and an uprising among her courtiers. The Tower focuses on Mary’s relationship with her ladies in waiting as they weather this bleak incarceration and the queen’s forced, humiliating abdication—all the while looking for an escape. If you love stories of courtly intrigue—and especially if you read and loved Denise Mina’s Rizzio , a fictionalised account of the events that immediately precede those of The Tower —then this will be the perfect next book for you. If you have enjoyed the recent flush of retellings of Greek myths, look out for Rosie Hewlett’s Medea— a “feminist” reworking of the story of Classical mythology’s most notorious heroine. It’s a follow-up to Hewlett’s bestselling debut Medusa . Needless to say, it won’t end well. And how historic does historical fiction have to be? I feel I should highlight Kristin Hannah’s epic coming-of-age tale The Women on the basis that it very nearly qualifies under the definition used by the Walter Scott Prize : that the book should be set at least sixty years before publication. The Women follows a young American debutante after she enlists as a nurse during the Vietnam War, and in so doing presents a fresh view of the conflict as seen through female eyes. In it, Frances ‘Frankie’ McGrath is catapulted from her comfortable upbringing in Southern California into traumatic wartime scenes that will leave her psychologically scarred. The Women tacks a tempestuous path through tragedy and romance; it’s a blockbuster read that will wring you dry, emotionally. More new historical fiction on Five Books"
Emily Henry · Buy on Amazon
"The queen of the contemporary rom-com Emily Henry is back with Funny Story , surely one of the most anticipated books of the season. Henry specialises in sharp, funny storytelling that ticks all the boxes of a beloved genre novel while simultaneously teasing at or subverting the form’s most recognisable tropes. Funny Story is a take on the familiar ‘fake dating’ scenario, but the well-worn plot device is elevated by Henry’s trademark wit and warmth. An unmissable new release for all romance fans. I’ve also seen a lot of buzz around Paige Toon’s latest novel, Seven Summers —a love triangle set on the stunning Cornish coast—and Kennedy Ryan’s This Could Be Us , a follow-up to BookTok favourite Before I Let Go . It’s not summer yet, at least where I am, but these love stories are guaranteed to bring a bit of heat. Romance on Five Books"
Stuart Turton · Buy on Amazon
"Stuart Turton’s creative takes on the murder mystery form are always delightful. The Last Murder At The End Of The World is set in a kind of post-apocalyptic utopia, in which a small community ekes out a harmonious existence on an island surrounded by poisonous fog. But when a scientist is found brutally murdered, they have only 92 hours to solve the crime before the security system suffocates them all. Oh, and they’re all amnesiac! Good luck! Turton’s books remind me of role-playing games, in the best way: daft, immersive, and very very fun. The ultra-bestselling (and rather intriguing ) suspense novelist A.J. Finn is to publish End of Story , in which a reclusive author invites a longtime correspondent to his mansion to write his life story—but there are unsolved mysteries lurking in his past that she can’t help but investigate. The grand setting and wide cast of eccentric characters should appeal to those who loved Knives Out. And don’t miss crime mastermind Tana French’s latest offering, The Hunter , a quality thriller set in rural Ireland. Retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper returns in this sequel to her 2020 hit The Searcher . Slower paced than your average suspense novel, but beautifully constructed. The best mysteries of 2023"
Robert Jackson Bennett · Buy on Amazon
"Detective fiction is given a magical twist in Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup. The Edgar-winning author combines intricate world-building with a Sherlockian murder investigation to create a fantastical, richly imagined story, the first in a planned trilogy. The Washington Post called it “utterly addictive.” Ali Hazelwood—author of popular STEM romances including Love Theoretically and The Love Hypothesis —has made her first foray into fantasy with Bride , a paranormal romance featuring a “dangerous alliance” between a vampire and a werewolf. Plus Danielle L. Jensen offers up A Fate Inked in Blood , the first in a new Norse-inspired fantasy series, which should delight her hordes of fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The best fantasy on Five Books I hope one or more of these reading suggestions has caught your eye. We always love to hear what you’re looking forward to—let us know on social media if we’ve missed off your most anticipated new releases of the season."
Must-Read Novels of Early 2026 (2026)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2026-01-13).
Source: fivebooks.com
George Saunders · Buy on Amazon
"As with Lincoln in the Bardo , Vigil follows one person’s transition from life to the afterlife. The novel unfolds at the bedside of an oil company CEO, as angelic beings attempt to force him to reflection. “I found myself wondering about that generation of climate change deniers who, through obfuscation and spin, put progress on hold for twenty or thirty years, and are now old and passing away,” as Saunders explained in a statement accompanying the book’s announcement. All of which sounds rather thoughtful and bittersweet—but, this being Saunders, the blurb also features the words “careening”, “hurtling”, “clamoring”… Buckle up, in other words: it’s going to be a wild ride. Saunders himself is an interesting man, who has spoken very honestly about his evolution from an “Ayn Rand Republican” and oil prospector to revered creative writing professor at Syracuse. But his fiction goes beyond honesty, beyond perceptiveness, and into something much weirder and more mysterious—and, I think, more profound. Don’t miss it."
Douglas Stuart · 2026 · Buy on Amazon
"That’s right. This is Douglas Stuart’s third novel. It follows a young, gay artist as he returns to the Scottish Outer Hebrides, where he grew up as the closeted son of a dour Presbyterian crofter and lay preacher. There, he encounters many people from his past, many of whom are hiding secrets of their own. Kirkus have already given it a starred review, noting: The central question of the book, which is facing all the main characters, is whether it’s possible to inhabit the place one calls home as one’s genuine self. Stay or go? Life or death? By the end, this issue is resolved in a variety of tragic and hopeful ways. Though the novel is highly specific to time (the 1990s) and place (the Isle of Harris), I suspect this is a question that haunts a great many people who have grown up in rural communities or conservative cultures. And, if John of John is anything like Stuart’s previous novels ( Shuggie Bain , Young Mungo ), this one will be a heart-breaker."
Gwendoline Riley · Buy on Amazon
"Yes, let’s. Riley’s previous book My Phantoms —about a woman’s difficult relationship with her mother—was very much admired in literary circles. This new novel features two friends, Laura and Edward, who face death and despondency, and balance a precarious life as writers in the British capital. Expect crystalline prose, an unflinching eye, and thoughtful digressions on life and art. This book, Riley’s seventh novel, was reportedly the subject of a six-way auction; Picador, the winning publisher, has described it as her “finest novel yet.”"
Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton · Buy on Amazon
"Yes, in March, there will be a new novel from Asako Yuzuki, whose earlier novel about a serial killer cook, Butter , has been an international sensation, selling almost 300,000 copies in the UK alone. This new novel, also translated into English by Polly Barton, features a highly strung Japanese food executive who becomes obsessed with a housewife who shares details of her chaotic lifestyle online. It’s described as “a thrilling and unsettling story of the line between friendship and dangerous obsession”, and it’s been selected as one of the most highly anticipated novels of spring 2026 by publications as varied as The Guardian, Vogue, The New York Times, Lithub, and Forbes."
Tara Menon · Buy on Amazon
"Tara Menon, an assistant professor at Harvard, has attracted a six-figure advance and sold the translation rights to more than 30 languages for Under Water , her first novel due to be published in March, which is set between the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand and the landfall of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. A Publishers Weekly review declared: “Menon crafts vivid depictions of tropical marine life and offers a visceral depiction of survivor’s guilt”, noting that it was “sure to pull at the reader’s heartstrings.” It has already attracted praise from many literary heavyweights—including Katie Kitamura (“a novel of remarkable delicacy and power”) and Namwali Serpell (“immersive and stirring, pellucid and mysterious, shot through with light and with shades”). It will certainly make a splash. What new novels are you looking forward to reading this season? Let us know on social media"
Notable Memoirs of 2023 (2023)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2023-09-23).
Source: fivebooks.com
Hua Hsu · Buy on Amazon
"Well, usually here I’d have two automatic answers: this year’s winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography, and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography or Memoir . But what would you know—in 2023, the same book won both. Bard professor and New Yorker writer Hua Hsu’s Stay True centres upon the death of a Berkeley classmate in a bungled armed robbery. The Pulitzer judges declared it an “elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives.” Stay True has been out in the United States since October 2022, but only reached UK bookshops this month. Also of note: The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras—a powerful memoir about Contreras’s Colombian heritage and an apparent supernatural inheritance—was also a finalist for both prizes. It traces her family’s history through decades of national upheaval; as the New York Times review noted , “spectral treasure hunts, abusive men, alcoholic ghosts and shape-shifting witches; paramilitaries set fire to a family farm, bomb blasts become a normal occurrence and an uncle is kidnapped by guerrillas four separate times.” Its reliance on oral history manifests as an unavoidably disjointed and unverifiable narrative, but it is nevertheless “a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”"
Janet Malcolm · Buy on Amazon
"Absolutely. The late, great Janet Malcolm’s final book, Still Pictures , was released posthumously at the start of this year. It’s a memoir in essays, inspired by a collection of black and white photographs of her Czech refugee family found in a box (labeled ‘old not good photos’) in her attic. They left Prague in 1939, she writes: “We were among the small number of Jews who escaped the fate of the rest by sheer dumb luck, as a few random insects escape a poison spray.” Malcolm was instinctively leery of autobiography. Memoir was a “novelistic enterprise,” she felt. But these candid images offered her an alternate way in, one befitting the former photography columnist for the New York Times: “Occasionally… like memory itself, one of these inert pictures will suddenly stir and come to life,” she writes, warming to her theme. Still Pictures will not, perhaps, be the work that Malcolm will be best known for, but it will greatly appeal to those who already admire her writing. I was also very excited to learn about a new book from the French Nobel Prize-winner Annie Ernaux . The Young Man — ably translated from the original French by Alison Strayer—is an exacting account of an affair with a student thirty years her junior. “Perhaps it was the desire to spark the writing of a book—a task I had hesitated to undertake because of its immensity—that prompted me to take A home for a drink after dinner at a restaurant,” she writes, analysing herself after the fact. The affair does not end well, but one does not read Annie Ernaux for happy endings. She has made her name by conducting live dissections of her emotional life, and The Young Man is no different. But it is, even for Ernaux, a very slim book, coming in at only 35 pages. It would be remiss of me not to mention Prince Harry’s Spare . I think I must have absorbed every revelation in that book by osmosis thanks to the exhaustive media coverage of its launch. So let’s lay that aside; there’s little point in me recapping what’s already well known, except to note that The New Yorker published an interesting behind-the-scenes account of the book’s creation by the ghost writer, J. R. Moehringer—a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer in his own right."
Elliot Page · Buy on Amazon
"Otherwise, the celebrity memoir of the year is probably Elliot Page’s Pageboy , which charts—among other things—his Hollywood career, coming out as gay, then his later gender transition. The Juno and Inception actor might be the most famous trans man in the world right now, and this thoughtful, non-linear account is thus not only a glimpse into the Tinseltown lifestyle but a valuable addition to trans literature . In its sensitivity and earnest tone, wrought from first-hand and sometimes painful experience, it is also, as was noted in the i , “a vital antidote to the toxic trans debate.” If you’d like to get a taste of the book before committing, People magazine published an extract from the first chapter here ."
Kate Zambreno · Buy on Amazon
"Kate Zambreno is a true writers’ writer; her books are always being recommended to me by other authors. (Most recently, the novelist Catherine Lacey told me that Zambreno’s Screen Tests is “a perfect book.”) Her latest, The Light Room , is billed as “a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty.” Annie Ernaux herself offered an endorsement, enthusing that Zambreno “has invented a new form,” comprising “a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.” That absolute present is a meditation on parenting, on the quiet joys of maintenance, and what Zambreno terms “life inside”—that is, both of being cooped up in the house during the pandemic, and interiority in that other sense. The life of the mind finds intellectual trapdoors that can relieve the tedium. Speaking to Lithub recently, Zambreno explained that she hopes the book will be “a balm for others, a space of joy as well as exhaustion and deep sadness, a space to think with.” The US poet Maggie Smith—whose bittersweet poem ‘Good Bones’ went viral several years ago, making Smith an overnight sensation—has released a memoir charting the disintegration of her marriage. (Its title, You Could Make This Place Beautiful , is a line from that poem.) Smith’s fans tend towards the devotional, but I do have the sense that this particular book has been unusually polarising. You’ll either love it and find its aphoristic style and motivational tone inspiring, or you’ll find it somewhat trying . Probably that description in itself will be enough to indicate which will be the case in your instance. Another social media darling, Oliver Darkshire—whose unexpectedly riotous helming of the Sotheran’s antiquarian bookshop Twitter account found an avid online audience—has published Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller . Sotheran’s, on London’s Sackville Street, is one of the world’s oldest bookshops, and is by all accounts a charmingly eccentric establishment, with a resident ghost, cursed books, and a byzantine cataloguing system. Darkshire’s whimsical and humorous account of his apprenticeship in this storied, somewhat shadowy, institution is a lot of fun. If you’re on the fence, Lithub has published an extract ."
John Niven · Buy on Amazon
"Yes. The Scottish novelist and screenwriter John Niven—perhaps best known for the cult favourite Kill Your Friends — has just released a searing account of his fraught relationship with his charismatic younger brother Gary, who took his own life in 2010. O Brother records how their lives began in tandem but diverged; while John made his way in the music business, and later as a writer, Gary worked manual jobs and dealt drugs in the small town they grew up in. By the end of his life, Gary had alienated most of his friends and family, and was in debt—although not insurmountably so. Looking through his dead brother’s belongings, John tallies up the overdue bills and has the sickening realisation that he could have written a cheque and solved his sibling’s financial crisis instantly. But what might have been a grim story of self-recrimination and despair is, in Niven’s hands, a moving and even exuberant story that reflects the chaotic energy of their brother and the dark humour that he and his sister Linda forge from an otherwise harrowing situation. Let me slip in a couple more quick ones: naturalist Amy-Jane Beer just won the UK’s Wainwright Prize for The Flow: Rivers, Waters, and Wildness , in which she revisits the waterway that claimed the life of a close friend, and in doing so opens herself again to fluvial beauty; and former Five Books contributor Thea Lenarduzzi ‘s lyrical family memoir Dandelions is currently in contention for the UK’s Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. And finally, the next thing on my to-be-read pile is The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland, a sufferer of retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that will ultimately result in complete blindness. The Millions editor Sophia Stewart raved that it was not only one of the best books she’d read in 2023, but “one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life. No descriptor feels capacious enough: an intellectually rigorous memoir, a moving cultural history, and a brilliant study of blindness, disability, and adaptation.” Sounds good to me."
Notable Novels of Spring 2025 (2025)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2025-01-29).
Source: fivebooks.com
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · Buy on Amazon
"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ( Americanah , Half of a Yellow Sun ) is publishing her first novel in more than a decade. Dream Count tells the story of four women: two Nigerian friends living in the United States, one of their cousins, and one of their housekeepers. Speaking to The Sunday Times, Adichie said: “The writing process was much more difficult than my previous novels because my life was very different. The devastation of losing both my parents in a short time hung like a shadow over the process. I’m a much slower writer now — fiction feels more hard worn and hard fought. And even more precious.” Dream Count is out on 4 March, but available to pre-order now."
Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris · Buy on Amazon
Abdulrazak Gurnah · Buy on Amazon
"Not to mention new books by the novelist and playwright Caryl Philips ( Another Man in the Street , in which a young West Indian man finds himself working for a slumlord in 1960s Notting Hill) and the creator of The Wire, Richard Price ( Lazarus Man , set during the aftermath of the collapse of an East Harlem tenement block)."
Aria Aber · Buy on Amazon
"I’ve heard a lot of people raving about Good Girl by Aria Aber, in which 19-year-old Nila—born in Germany to Afghan parents—attends raves, experiments with art, and grapples with her complicated cultural identity. “I knew that I wanted to write a character like her, who is first of all a wayward Afghan woman, and then someone who can shapeshift and code switch, who can go into different rooms and observe them,” Aber has explained . “I was interested in the innocence but also the slipperiness that youth allows you to inhabit, enact and perform, but that’s also often a little dangerous.” (Out now.)"
Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland · Buy on Amazon
"And okay, sure, maybe one Nordic septology is plenty for most people, but if you are willing to put Jon Fosse aside for a moment, why not have a look at Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume , a seven-part work of speculative fiction centring on a single, endlessly repeating day: a November 18th that, by the time the first book opens, has already re-run inexplicably 122 times. “Here, the time-loop narrative takes on new and stunning proportions,” reports The New York Times . It won Scandinavia’s biggest literary prize, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, in 2022. The first two books were published in English in the States in November last year and are to released in the UK in April—with swooning endorsements from such literary giants as Karl Ove Knausgård and Hernan Díaz."
Joseph O’Neill · Buy on Amazon
Marie-Helene Bertino · Buy on Amazon
Tony Tulathimutte · Buy on Amazon
"Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection has been out in the US since September, and will finally make it to the UK in February. It’s a collection of seven loosely linked stories from the author of Private Citizens (“the first great Millennial novel,” according to New York magazine). Expect nihilism, tragicomedy, and provocation after provocation. I liked what Jia Tolentino, writing in The New Yorker , had to say about it: “Not until I picked up Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection did I realize how fun it could be to read a book about a bunch of huge fucking losers.” It is, she added, “a thrill for the sickos among us.”"
Rebecca Yarros · 2025 · Buy on Amazon
"What have we missed? Let us know by getting in touch with us by email or on social media"
The Notable Novels of Summer 2022 (2022)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2022-05-30).
Source: fivebooks.com
Ottessa Moshfegh · Buy on Amazon
"There’s been a lot of buzz around Lapvona, the new novel from Ottessa Moshfegh. Set in a medieval fiefdom racked by plague, drought and famine, Lapvona features a wide cast of villagers struggling to survive in the face of corruption, cruelty and the occult. Although different in subject matter to her greatest hits—the why-dunnit noir Eileen and the comfortably numb tale of self-isolation My Year of Rest and Relaxation — Lapvona shares their macabre interest in the grotesque and the darker sides of human nature. (Out June 23.) If that sounds good to you, you may also be interested in Julia May Jonas’s debut Vladimir , the story of an English professor whose husband is facing a slew of accusations of sexual harassment, who herself goes on to develop an obsession with a much younger colleague. It’s provocative and darkly entertaining. Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman, a novel of sexual exploration and exhibitionism, has also been hotly anticipated. It has garnered endorsements from the likes of Sheila Heti (who called it “radical, daring and bracing”) and Raven Leilani (“thoughtful, savage”)."
Elif Batuman · Buy on Amazon
"Keep an eye out for Elif Batuman’s latest novel, Either/Or , too. It picks up where her previous novel, The Idiot , left off— following Harvard linguistics student Selin through a smart, witty, literary romp through her sophomore year. As the title suggests , Selin is much taken up with questions of how to live—specifically, whether ethics should trump aesthetics—but unlike Søren Kierkegaard (I assume), she is even more concerned with parties, her college syllabus and whether or not she’s going to get laid. The film director Werner Herzog has made a first foray into fiction with his novel The Twilight World , about a Japanese soldier who defended a small island for nearly three decades after the end of World War II, unaware that the war was over. The publisher describes his style as “part documentary, part poem, and part dream”, a quality that will be immediately recognisable to fans of his films."
Mohsin Hamid · Buy on Amazon
"Mohsin Hamid ( The Reluctant Fundamentalist , Exit West ) returns with The Last White Man, a work of speculative fiction in which people wake up, unexpectedly, with different skin tones. Kirkus described it as “a brilliantly realized allegory of racial transformation.” (Out August 2.) I’m also intrigued by Louisa Reid’s novel-in-verse The Poet ( out now in the UK , available as ebook or audiobook in the US), a story of a dysfunctional relationship that should appeal to fans of Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation . Plus there’s Nell Zink’s latest, Avalon , a coming-of-age story featuring a Californian plant nursery, biker gangs and a pretentious college student boyfriend. The book I’ve been raving about recently to anyone willing to listen is the French writer Emmanuel Carrère’s new (and somewhat controversial ) work of autofiction, Yoga . Autofiction is a slippery term—it usually refers to a novel that draws heavily on the author’s own life, but with a veil of doubt drawn over the narrative—and this case is one of the slipperiest of all. In it, we follow the author through a major life crisis as he suffers a mental collapse, spends time in a psychiatric institution, volunteers in a refugee camp, and (off-screen) experiences the break-up of his decade-long marriage."
Emmanuel Carrère · Buy on Amazon
"Carrère is, as Robert McCrum once described him , “the most important French writer you’ve never heard of.” We, in the Anglophone world, have not paid him his dues. This latest work is a difficult book to sum up, but suffice to say, it begins in an easy, breezy style that feels almost free-associative, before it swirls ever faster down the plug hole. Disparate, discordant elements come into alignment, and soon Yoga reveals itself to have been entirely orchestrated from beginning to end. By the closing pages I wanted to give it a standing ovation. You’ll either love it or hate it; clearly, I’m in the former camp. ( Yoga is out June 2 in the UK, August 2 in the US.) Also of note in translated fiction , the latest novel from Omani author Johka Alharthi: Bitter Orange Tree . Like Alharthi’s International Booker Prize-winning Celestial Bodies , Bitter Orange Tree has also been translated by the Oxford academic Marilyn Booth. And look out for Sayaka Murata’s collection of short fiction, Life Ceremony . There’s a steamy new novel from Nigerian author Akwaeke Emezi (best known for Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji ). Their new book, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty , is the moving story of a Brooklyn-based artist who—five years on from the death of her husband—is ready to consider dating again. Vogue called it “this summer’s must-read love story,” although be warned, it’s darker than your average romance novel. Other books you might want to slip into your suitcase for an upcoming beach holiday include Taylor Jenkins Reid’s latest, Carrie Soto Is Back (out August 30), and Bolu Babalola’s debut romcom Honey & Spice (July 5). R. F. Kuang (author of the Hugo-, Nebula-, Locus-, and World Fantasy Award-nominated The Poppy War trilogy) returns with a new fantasy epic: Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution , which should appeal to fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell . And thriller lovers should look out for Upgrade by Blake Crouch, a follow-up to his mind-bending Recursion ."
Abdulrazak Gurnah · Buy on Amazon
"Not quite. While I still have your attention, I also want to flag up a new book from Abdulrazak Gurnah —who won the 2021 Nobel Prize for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism.” His latest novel, Afterlives , is set in what is now Tanzania (then Tanganyika) during the period of German rule around the turn of the 20th century, following a large cast of characters facing oppression of various kinds during the run-up to the First World War. As Maaza Mengiste has written , “Gurnah is known for decentring European history: a structural decision that is also politically potent.” In Afterlives , Gurnah considers the intergenerational consequences of violence, and asks us to consider colonialism from the African perspective. Part of our best books of 2022 series. What books are you most looking forward to this summer? Let us know. Send us a tweet , or post on our Facebook page ."
Notable Novels of Summer 2024 (2024)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2024-06-25).
Source: fivebooks.com
Rachel Cusk · Buy on Amazon
"Let me kick off with Rachel Cusk’s latest offering, Parade. Every new novel by Cusk is a major literary event, although her experiments with form—and her unpicking of what she has previously called the “ underpinnings ” of narrative—are often initially received with bafflement . Parade is an extended exploration of identity in which multiple individuals, all identified as ‘G’, muse on the creation of art. Slowly, Cusk has been stripping away the layers of the novel—starting with plot, now character—to reveal its fundamental mechanisms. And so, though Parade is far from a light beach read to throw in your carry-on case as an afterthought, it’s certainly a notable new novel that pushes at the very bounds of what it means to write fiction. (It feels, reflects LitHub , “so much like the next stage in a complex journey the author has been undertaking for decades now.”) Parade is not the most obvious starting point if you are new to Cusk’s work; if you’ve never read her writing before, try the Outline trilogy first to get a feel for her (scalpel-sharp, intelligent, sometimes contemptuous) style."
Taffy Brodesser-Akner · Buy on Amazon
"Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s hit first novel, Fleishman Is In Trouble , was a sprawling, satirical account of the divorce of two Manhattan urbanites. It’s smart, great fun, and was adapted (by Brodesser-Akner) into an Emmy-nominated television series starring Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg. All this is to say that her second novel, Long Island Compromise , has been hotly anticipated on both sides of the Atlantic. It unpicks the long lasting consequences of the 1980s kidnapping of a wealthy businessman, as well as—more broadly—the story of his Jewish-American family and their pursuit of financial and social success. “The family epic is my favorite kind of novel, and, as a magazine writer I have learned there is nothing more revelatory of a person than where that person is from,” Brodesser-Akner told Vanity Fair . “That idea, plus my fascination with Long Island culture—which to me has always been equal parts romantic, criminal and tragic—gave birth to the family at the center of the book, the Fletchers—the kind of family that is wealthy enough for their money to have bought them security, but also to leave them in danger.” Long Island Compromise is a doorstopper of a novel with a huge cast of characters, and seems destined, again, for the bestseller lists. Out July 10."
Andrew O'Hagan · Buy on Amazon
"Well, it feels like all of London is talking about Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road . (All of England, apparently, according to the Washington Post . ) It is, as the Guardian describes it , a “state of the nation burlesque” in the Dickensian mould, that is, a social novel with an ensemble cast: “a bold, bullish tale of hubris and corruption, a book simultaneously dazzled and disgusted by the city it depicts.” It stars the celebrity art historian Campbell Flynn, who has risen swiftly through the social ranks thanks to his great intellect and aristocratic wife (and who bears, one might note, some superficial resemblances to the author himself, the Glasgow-born writer and LRB editor-at-large who has long been a stalwart of the London literati). Flynn is overdue a fall, it seems, and on his way down we meet a great many of his near-neighbours on the Caledonian Road , an Islington street that spans every social class along its mile-and-a-half extent. It is, adds the New Statesman , “a brick of a novel lobbed at the towering glass houses of London.” My own copy has just thudded onto my doormat, all 600 pages of it. I’ll report back. In the meantime, you can read an excerpt online ."
Miranda July · Buy on Amazon
"I mentioned the filmmaker Miranda July’s exuberant, autofictional All Fours as a forthcoming title in my spring highlights . Well, it’s now out and is shaping up to be something of a literary phenomenon. It’s a midlife crisis novel ( The New York Times reviewer hailed it “the first great perimenopause novel”) in which the protagonist, a married artist in her forties, upends her life, departs on a cross-country road trip, but instead holes up in a roadside motel barely 20 miles from home where she embarks on an affair with a much younger man. Soon the relationship is over, but she keeps the motel room where she interviews friends and loved ones about relationships and ageing. “The narrator of All Fours is in the process of losing her ability to carry a child,” explains Vox. “She fears she is losing her ability to attract men. She looks those problems straight in the face. Then she explodes them open with effervescent joy.” It’s saucy, strange, and “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40,” according to Alyson Krueger in the NYT. If you’re ready to radically reimagine what monogamy and midlife might look like, this is the book for you."
Jo Hamya · Buy on Amazon
"Thank you, yes. This one jumped out at me: it centres on the relationship between a noted novelist and his playwright daughter, as she presents a new drama written by her about the period they spent together in Sicily a decade earlier. “I had a clear image suddenly of a man in a theatre, watching a play of his life,” says Hamya of the sudden burst of inspiration that became this book, “and I knew that he would disagree with everything that was happening on stage, but he couldn’t leave. I thought about it for hours that night because it was a really interesting formal challenge. Could I write something where both parties were wrong and they were both utterly sympathetic, but the reader would still—especially if they spend time on the internet—feel conscious of wanting to take sides?” It is, essentially, an extended study of ethical grey areas and the manner by which the sense of moral correctness shifts from generation to generation. The Hypocrite, says the i , “confirms [Hamya] as a fine chronicler of modern anxieties. I have rarely underlined so many passages in a book.” Sounds good to me. I think we could all do with a little less moral certainty in life. If you’re at all interested in sci-fi, you’ll certainly want to know about the collaboration between China Miéville and the Hollywood star (and graphic novelist!) Keanu Reeves. Their first novel together, The Book of Elsewhere , is based on Reeves’ popular BRZRKR series. Hot on the heels of the hit Netflix adaptation of his high-concept romance One Day , David Nicholls recently released You Are Here , a witty and tender love story about two jaded divorcees hiking across the north of England. Kevin Barry ( Night Boat to Tangier ) will publish The Heart in Winter , a historical novel set in 1890s Montana; two-time Booker finalist Chigozie Obioma will publish a mystical Biafran war novel, The Road to the Country ; and the fantasy author and previous Five Books interviewee Lev Grossman will publish The Bright Sword , a highly anticipated follow-up to his The Magicians trilogy. What new novels are you looking forward to reading in summer 2024? Let us know: get in touch via social media."
Notable New Novels of Summer 2025 (2025)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2025-07-18).
Source: fivebooks.com
Susan Choi · Buy on Amazon
"I was very excited to learn that Susan Choi will also release a new book this summer: Flashlight , which the Wall Street Journal has declared to be the “first major American novel to be published this year.” It’s a complex family saga, which spans decades and continents. I won’t say much more, given Ron Charles’s warning in the Washington Post: “Watch what you read about it. Even categorizing this story as a mystery risks prematurely exposing the novel’s intricate structure to too much light… In these pages, timelines splinter, diverge and finally — trust her — come crashing back together with devastating revelations.” Out now in the US, and on 10 July in the UK. (I still think about Choi’s brilliantly readable and unsettling 2019 novel, Trust Exercise , which detangled the fraught power dynamics of a performing arts school, and which won a National Book Award for Fiction.)"
Catherine Lacey · Buy on Amazon
"Another very eagerly awaited book is Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book , although this is, technically, neither quite fiction nor nonfiction. Following a devastating break-up, the author deconstructs her relationships, as well as her memories of religious fanaticism and disordered eating in her youth—partly in the form of memoir and partly as a fictional retelling, the text of each being presented upside down beside its twin, so that when you reach the end of the book you flip it over and keep going—and so on, forever. Out mid-June on both sides of the Atlantic. (Previously, I spoke to Lacey about the best counterfactual novels while she was promoting Biography of X , a thrillingly inventive fictional biography of a female artist set in a near-future America after a devastating civil war has split the country in three.) And if you are interested in novels that play around with form, you might also be interested in Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory , a sharp, gossipy campus novel about two married literature professors grappling with romantic temptation in the workplace. It sounds like a lot of fun to me. Released 12 August."
Lucas Schaefer · Buy on Amazon
"Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip also seems to have appeared on all the major literary highlights lists this summer. Lithub described it as a “00-page tragicomic Texan epic that tackles race, class, gender, sexuality, police violence, mental illness, immigration, boxing, and clowning” and compared it to Nathan Hill’s The Nix , another big beast of an American novel that came out a few years ago to great acclaim. (To give you a sense of how highly buzzed this book has been, in a starred review , Kirkus noted that comparisons to Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth, and John Irving were “earned and deserved.”) Schaefer reflected, rather appealingly, on the decade he spent writing this novel during an interview : “To give you a sense of how long it took me to write The Slip , at a back-to-school meeting at the tutoring center where I worked, I was once gifted a watch for my service as a career tutor . Tutoring is great because it really keeps you humble. I busted into the study room like Kramer on Seinfeld : “I just sold a novel to Simon & Schuster!” I might as well have said, “I just got back from the dentist.” The student was happy enough for me, but he had a test coming up. So, we studied for that.” Out now."
Sarah Landenwich · Buy on Amazon
"I’m also intrigued by Sarah Landwich’s The Fire Concerto , described as “a literary pageturner” about a 19th-century Polish pianist, whose career was derailed when her hands were damaged during a concert hall fire. After the death of her former mentor, she finds herself owner of a priceless antique metronome with a mysterious past. The writer, herself a classically-trained pianist, has said she drew inspiration from her study of the Romantic movement, and sees it sitting alongside other plot-driven-but-artistically-respectable books like A.S. Byatt’s Possession . This is probably one for you if you enjoy love a well-written historical mystery ."
Charlotte Runcie · Buy on Amazon
"Yes. I just picked up British writer Charlotte Runcie’s first novel Bring the House Down , which is now out on both sides of the Atlantic and has been attracting a lot of positive attention. It’s about a theatre critic at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival who sleeps with the performer of a one-woman show he has just scathingly reviewed in print. Her response is to rebrand the show ‘The Alex Lyons Experience,’ dredging up all his previous misdeeds and hosting his ex-girlfriends on stage for a retrospective review. It’s a funny, biting premise, and it draws from Runcie’s real life experience of being written into a comedian’s show after giving a two-star review. But it has added elements, especially in the uncomfortable sexual dynamics and rowdy female response to the revenge show in the context of #MeToo. The Washington Post said it was “serious and thought-provoking” while remaining “fun and frequently witty,” declaring it “a five-star triumph.” For fans of Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age and Coco Mellors’ Cleopatra and Frankenstein . It might also make an interesting subject for book club discussions. What books have you been looking forward to this season? Let us know your summer 2025 fiction highlights on social media."
Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020 (2020)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2020-08-19).
Source: fivebooks.com
Raven Leilani · Buy on Amazon
"One debut that has managed to cut through the noise is Raven Leilani’s Luster. Out now in the US and Canada (but not available in the UK until January), this novel has been endorsed by the likes of Zadie Smith, Brit Bennett and Ling Ma, and highlighted as one of the most anticipated new novels of fall 2020 by everywhere from Vogue to Lithub. It’s about a young black woman working in publishing who begins an affair with a white man in an open marriage—then later comes to live with the couple and their adopted daughter in their family home. The book is an ultra-self-conscious interrogation of power balances, race, loneliness and non-monogamous relationships, and if that sounds intriguing you may be keen to read an excerpt published over at The Cut. Another first novel making waves is Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain ; only just out in the UK, it was published to enormous acclaim across the Atlantic in the spring and has already been longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. Stuart, a Glaswegian living in New York, has written a bleakly beautiful novel of an alcoholic mother and her son struggling to get by in the brutal, hyper-masculine culture of 1980s Glasgow. It will break your heart. And an honourable mention to Gabriel Krauze’s searing biographical novel of gang violence Who They Was – longlisted for the Booker Prize ahead of its UK publication in September, and still apparently in search of an American publisher which I hope will be resolved ASAP."
Nina Bouraoui · Buy on Amazon
"Other box-fresh novels of note include the French literary superstar Nina Bouraoui’s new novel All Men Want to Know. Hardly a debut, but this is the first time that Bouraoui’s work has been translated into English. This new work of autofiction , in an award-winning translation by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, is a dreamy, fragmentary account of Bouraoui’s coming of age as a French-Algerian gay woman, which has been a publishing phenomenon in continental Europe. Five Books alumnus Yiyun Li ‘s latest novel, Must I Go – released at the end of July – portrays a woman in her eighties as she reflects upon her life – and the suicide of her daughter some decades previously – by way of annotations in the diary of a former lover. Fans of Li’s work may be aware of her harrowing and remarkable book Where Reasons End , written after her 16-year-old son took his own life. This too is a poignant, experimental literary work wrought of intense pain – written with Li’s trademark intelligence and emotional complexity. By no means an easy read, but worthwhile. Science fiction and fantasy (SFF) fans may be excited to learn of Jeff and Ann Vandermeer’s new anthology, The Big Book of Modern Fantasy , in which they have gathered 91 stories by authors from Jorge Luis Borges to Stephen King, by way of Ursula K. Le Guin and Angela Carter. There’s also a lot of buzz around Lauren Beuke’s dystopian thriller Afterland – out now – billed as The Children of Men meets The Handmaid’s Tale . In it, a mother and son journey across a post-apocalyptic United States, where a pandemic has wiped out 99% of the world’s men. (Tom Hunter, our friend at the Arthur C. Clarke Award , also advises us to keep our eyes peeled for a new novel from Yoon Ha Lee, Phoenix Extravagant , in October.)"
Daisy Johnson · Buy on Amazon
"We have some real treats to look forward to in the coming weeks. Daisy Johnson (who became the youngest ever author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize with her previous book, Everything Under ), is imminently to release her second book, a work of gothic horror called Sisters, which is bound to be a novel on everyone’s lips throughout fall 2020 . It’s about a pair of uncannily close teenage siblings who move to the north of England after an incident at their previous high school in Oxford. Eerie and oppressive, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Fellow literary wunderkind Emma Cline (author of The Girls , the stylish novel of personality cult and murder that was just everywhere in the summer of 2016) is also publishing a collection of short fiction: Daddy , out 1 September. And, Americans: don’t miss The Discomfort of Evening by the Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, when it’s finally released in the US later this month. I discussed it with Ted Hodgkinson a few months ago; he called it “absolutely extraordinary,” adding: “I get tingles when I even think about this book.”"
Marilynne Robinson · Buy on Amazon
"In September, Five Books favourite Marilynne Robinson is to publish her latest novel, Jack – the fourth book set in her mythical world of Gilead, Iowa. Existing fans of the Pulitzer- and National Book Award-winning Gilead sequence will be intrigued to hear that Jack is the story of Jack Boughton, the bad boy son of the local Presbyterian minister, and his relationship with a beautiful and brilliant African American woman who becomes his common law wife in segregated St Louis. Robinson is surely one of the greatest living English language writers. Find a brief excerpt over at the publisher’s website, here . Other fall 2020 novels of note include Yaa Gyasi’s hotly anticipated second book, Transcendent Kingdom – a follow-up to her sweeping family saga Homegoing (2016), which catapulted her to celebrity. This new novel follows a Ghanaian-American PhD candidate at Stanford University as she seeks experimental explanations for her family members’ dysfunction. Martin Amis will publish his fifteenth, Inside Story , said to be an autobiographical novel inspired by the death of his friend, the polemicist Christopher Hitchens. It begins during their time as young magazine writers, and includes appearances from stars of the London literary establishment of that era, including Iris Murdoch, Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and his step-mother Elizabeth Jane Howard. Nick Hornby – author of the brilliantly funny and poignant High Fidelity , among other things – will publish his latest, a love story between a 40-something schoolteacher and a younger man called Just Like You . And Susanna Clarke, of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell fame, will publish her second, Piranesi . Jonathan Strange was a massive doorstopper of a storybook about two men rediscovering magic during the Napoleonic wars, and I simply can’t wait to get my hands on this new one, which promises to be another high concept work of literary fantasy set in an alternate reality."
Sayaka Murata · Buy on Amazon
"Another personal highlight is the Japanese writer Sayaka Murata’s new book Earthlings . I loved her charming and weird Convenience Store Woman , the first of Murata’s novels to be translated into English, and this latest work (which I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of) is, to an extent, more of the same. It explores many of the same themes – emotional weirdness, societal pressure to live a ‘normal’ life, phoney marriages, cold fish protagonists – but while Convenience Store Woman rolled gently along, Earthlings is a firecracker of a book. If you appreciate trigger warnings, this book requires them all – child abuse, violence, incest, and plenty more. But somehow the story skates along the top of all this darkness, and shimmers with a deadpan wit. I loved it. Any list like this can barely hope to scratch the surface, but I trust this brief list of fall 2020 novels gives you somewhere to start from. As ever, we’re desperate to hear what books you are most enjoying and most looking forward to – so don’t hesitate to get in touch with us via Twitter , Facebook , Instagram or by email."
Notable Novels of Fall 2021 (2021)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2021-08-26).
Source: fivebooks.com
Sally Rooney · Buy on Amazon
"Saying that, after the massive international success of Normal People and the phenomenon that was the subsequent television adaptation starring Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, one senses something of a backlash building against the Irish writer. The Atlantic offered a helpful roundup : critics have pointed to her books’ political posturing—one writer dubbing it “sanctimony literature”—and argued that her characters are too thin, too beautiful and too ironic for their own good, and not quite bisexual enough. Personally, I feel these criticisms to be slightly unfair, given that Rooney has never positioned herself as a ‘voice of a generation’ (and indeed, often insists on her own dullness and insignificance when interviewed—albeit not wholly believably). And I find it a little sad that Rooney’s books are more often discussed as an ultimate expression of millennial culture, than the smart, entertaining, thought-provoking, tear-jerking novels that they are. Needless to say, I pre-ordered my own copy months ago. Out Sept 7. Other big hitters bringing out new books in fall 2021 include fellow Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, whose The Magician is a vivid fictional biography of Thomas Mann, the Nobel laureate and author of The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice (23 Sept); Lauren Groff, who found huge success in 2015 with her two-headed story of a marriage Fates and Furies , and now returns with Matrix , about a nun exiled from the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine (Sept 7); and Karl Ove Knausgård, who steps away from autofiction with The Morning Star , a traditional novel about strange celestial happenings, which has received critical acclaim in his native Norway (Sept 28 in the US; Sept 30 in the UK)."
Colson Whitehead · Buy on Amazon
"Colson Whitehead, twice-winner of the Pulitzer Prize (for The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys) , is to publish Harlem Shuffle, a 1960s-set heist billed as “a family saga masquerading as a crime novel” (Sept 14). Whitehead’s high concept novels have often leaned on the conventions of genre fiction—and subverted them to glorious effect. For Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead turned for inspiration to caper films, crafting his comedic, intricately complex plot in their image. “I love the meticulous planning;” he has said , “the way the heisters try to outwit destiny and fate by exercising their own will.” The “complicated jigsaw” cover by Oliver Munday is, he says, a good clue as to what readers can expect inside. I should also note that Elizabeth Strou t is due to publish Oh William! , in which the title character of My Name is Lucy Barton reconnects with her ex-husband. It’s garnered advance praise from such luminaries as Hilary Mantel, Anne Patchett, Zadie Smith and Maggie O’Farrell. And Gary Shteyngart (author of the oft-recommended Super Sad True Love Story ) will release Our Country Friends , in which eight friends shelter together in the Hudson Valley during the first months of the Covid-19 lockdown (Nov 2). Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train —which sold 20m copies and was made into a Hollywood movie starring Emily Blunt—is shortly to publish a new thriller. A Slow Fire Burning offers a twisting, turning, cerebral mystery featuring—unusually—a male victim and several women suspects (Aug 31). There’s a large cast of complicated characters, a book within a book, and a murder on a houseboat. The Guardian has declared it “a return to form” after Hawkin’s slightly underwhelming last novel, Into the Water ."
Richard Osman · Buy on Amazon
"Richard Osman is about to release a follow-up to his likeable and funny first book The Thursday Murder Club , which has been a fixture on bestseller lists since its 2020 release. This new murder mystery returns to the sleepy retirement village of Coopers Chase, where our septuagenarian sleuths have returned to the jigsaw room—only to find their peace shattered again when a ghost from the past sends one of their number a letter, many years after his supposed violent end. The Man Who Died Twice looks set to charm all those who loved Osman’s earlier book; I’m told the second outing of the Thursday Murder Club is even more fun than the first (Sept 28/Sept 16). (Pssst. Looking for more books lik e The Thursday Murder Club ? Our editor Sophie Roell has some suggestions!) The new Stephen King novel, Billy Summers , is just out and has been receiving rave reviews; The Guardian called the assassination thriller “his best book in years”. And Graeme Macrae Burnet (author of the very excellent, Booker-shortlisted His Bloody Project ) will release Case Study , a legal thriller of exceptional intelligence and literary merit, on 7 October. Alas, it’s only available in the UK for now—although I hope the North American rights are snapped up soon. In romance , I’ve seen a lot of chatter about A Lot Like Adiós by Alexis Daria—a friends-to-lovers story released on 14 September—and Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore, billed as a feminist Regency romance that sits “sits squarely at the unique intersection of history, romance, and women’s rights”, according to Jodi Picoult (Sept 7). Science fiction fans should look out for Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race (Nov 16) and Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor (Nov 9)."
Alexandra Kleeman · Buy on Amazon
"I was a big fan of Alexandra Kleeman’s 2016 debut You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine , which was a numbly dystopic story of obsessive friendship and consumerism. Kleeman’s new book Something New Under the Sun , freshly out, is an equally unsettling story of Hollywood development hell in a future California so racked by climate change as to resemble Hell itself. Part cli fi , part social satire, this is literary fiction with a bite, for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Emma Cline. I’m also excited about Ruth Ozeki’s brilliantly inventive new novel The Book of Form and Emptiness (Sept 21); Dave Eggers’ tech industry satire The Every , which is his follow-up to The Circle (Oct 21); and past Five Books interviewee Elizabeth Day ‘s latest novel Magpie (Sept 2) . Plus don’t miss the new novel from Kia Corthron, the acclaimed playwright and author of award-winning doorstopper The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter ; this latest work, The Moon and the Stars , is a coming-of-age tale see through the eyes of a biracial girl in New York in the years leading up to the American Civil War . Oh, heaps. But I’ll be quick. There’s a new novel from Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Doerr ( All the Light We Cannot See ) —another sweeping literary epic that shifts from the past (1453 Constantinople) to the present (contemporary Idaho) to the future (an interstellar voyage). Cloud Cuckoo Land is a ambitious and moving book; a “magical literary puzzle”, according to Kirkus, which would make an excellent book club choice. I’ll also be looking out for The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , the first novel by the poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, the new Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads , and We Are Not Like Them, by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza, which focuses on the aftermath of the shooting of a Black teenager in Philadelphia."
Wole Soyinka · Buy on Amazon
"Another notable new novel of fall 2021 is Wole Soyinka’s Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, due to be published in the US and UK on 28 September, which is the Nobel laureate’s first novel in almost fifty years. It’s billed by the publisher as “at once a literary hoot, a crafty whodunit, and a scathing indictment of Nigeria’s political elite”, which features stolen body parts, Yoruba royalty and a murdered engineer. It’s dense and complex, but with a sense of humour. I should also note the imminent arrival in North America of several British novels of note: Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor, the story of an Antarctic accident and its aftermath which I recommended a few months ago ; also Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers, an uplifting tale of an apparent virgin birth in 1950s England that’s been a word of mouth hit; plus Dolly Alderton’s very popular dating disaster novel Ghosts , which will appeal to anyone who enjoyed her bestselling memoir of single life, Everything I Know About Love . And don’t forget When We Cease to Understand the World , the mind-expanding novel of scientific and mathematical discovery, translated by Adrian Nathan West and shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize . First published in the original Spanish back in 2017, and available in the UK since 2020, it’s finally made its way stateside. The Booker judges called it “dazzlingly clever” and I can only concur—it’s quite astonishing. It’s published by New York Review Books on Sept 28: don’t miss it. Part of our best books of 2021 series."
Notable Novels of Fall 2023 (2023)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2023-09-29).
Source: fivebooks.com
Zadie Smith · Buy on Amazon
"One of the biggest books of the season, for example, is Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud. It’s a work of historical fiction—her first—set in Victorian England, and exploring art-that-imitates-life, abolitionism, and a scandalous case of identity theft that gripped the nation. It was an instant New York Times bestseller and has garnered some brilliant reviews in the three weeks it has been out so far. ( The Observer said it was “almost flawless… her funniest novel yet.”) What I’ve most enjoyed about the publicity around its publication has been Smith’s own essay in The New Yorker in which she reflects wryly on English literary nostalgia (“any writer who lives in England for any length of time will sooner or later find herself writing a historical novel, whether she wants to or not”)—and now her own place in that movement, having folded and produced such a novel herself. When, finally, she put fingers to keyboard, she had one self-imposed rule: “My pride rested now on one principle: no Dickens.” Alas, in Victorian Britain, Charles Dickens is unavoidable, and it soon transpires that the author was tangled in the real-life events that inspired the novel. No point in resisting: “I let him pervade my pages, in the same way he stalks through nineteenth-century London.” Look out for two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward’s fourth novel, Let Us Descend, billed as a “a reimagining of American slavery” in which a young enslaved woman communicates with spirits of another realm. In a preview, Publishers Weekly called it “wrenching and beautifully told.” (Released October 24.) Lauren Groff ( Matrix, Fates & Furies) returns with a historical novel set in 17th-century colonial America. The Vaster Wilds follows a servant girl who has escaped from starving Jamestown and must now survive “the great and terrible wilderness”; seen through the eyes of this pious young woman, the landscape takes on a mystical air of unreality, like a religious trial. A Book of Job in the New World."
Benjamin Labatut · Buy on Amazon
"I’m particularly excited about The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut, a Chilean writer whose first book When We Cease to Understand the World was so powerfully written it made me want to go for a lie down after only a few paragraphs. (A good thing, in my opinion, although I appreciate it’s not for everyone.) That book, written in Spanish and translated by Adrian Nathan West, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021 . The Maniac is Labatut’s first novel in English, and as with that earlier book, it exists in a conceptual hinterland somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, plaiting the two together in a deeply disconcerting manner that reflects Labatut’s preoccupation with scientists whose brilliance and obsession lead them to the very edges of sanity. This new book explores the birth of artificial intelligence and the terrifying, godlike powers it might represent. Unmissable. And—can I really include this in a round-up of ‘novels’? I’m going to, sorry—Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad is an eagerly awaited follow-up to her 2017 translation of The Odyssey (described by The Guardian as “a cultural landmark”). Wilson, a previous Five Books interviewee , has written interestingly elsewhere about her fresh and contemporary approach to the epic; here she is in the Washington Post , for example, explaining five artistic decisions she made in selecting vocabulary. I also enjoyed this profile of the translator in The New Yorker —you might too ."
Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls · Buy on Amazon
"Of course. Look out for the new book from Jon Fosse , A Shining , which will be released 31 October in the US and 1 November in the UK. It’s a surreal, dreamlike sequence set in the Norwegian woods, in which the narrator’s car becomes stuck in a rut on a remote track. Like his remarkable Septology , which floored me last year , the English translation is by the US writer Damian Searls—who learned Norwegian specifically to translate Fosse. (If you’re interested in the art of translation , there’s some interesting discussion of Searls’s rendering of Fosse’s texts in this 2021 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books .) Another Norwegian literary sensation, Karl Ove Knausgård, will publish The Wolves of Eternity , a sequel to Morning Star . It’s an expansive work of speculative fiction with a metaphysical element; “like some 19th-century Russian novel,” notes Sven Birkerts in The New York Times , The Wolves of Eternity “wrestles with the great contraries: the materialist view and the religious, the world as cosmic accident versus embodiment of some radiant intention. Is this world shot through with meaning or not? Has there ever been a better time to ask?” There’s an extract available over on Lithub, if you want a taster. Translation by Martin Aitken. David Diop, author of the extraordinary (and extraordinarily brutal) 2021 International Booker Prize winner At Night All Blood is Black , returns with a new novel: Beyond the Door of No Return, translated from the French by Sam Taylor. It’s a nested, metafictional tale: in Paris, 1806, woman pieces together the notebooks of her late father, revealing his experiences in 17th-century Senegal and a strange tale of obsession, love, and adventure. Lithub has an extract of this too."
Olga Ravn, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell · Buy on Amazon
"And I am very excited about Olga Ravn’s My Work, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. It’s her second novel to be translated into English; her strange, beautiful little novel The Employees : A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century was a weird and haunting work of science fiction that got under my skin. Like The Employees, the chronology of My Work is scrambled. It’s ostensibly constructed of the pages of a notebook written by the narrator while in some kind of fugue state during the early days of motherhood: “In the notebooks, one event might follow another which took place years before, as if she suddenly gained access to a different layer of time”. It takes many forms—poetry, diary entries, half-written letters—reflecting the narrator’s own unravelling mental state: “She wanted to write a normal book because she wanted to speak to normal people, mothers who were too tired for complicated poetry.” But no matter how much she tried, Ravn writes, “she kept on writing strange texts that jumped all over.” It should be of interest to mothers, specifically, and also more generally to all those interested in experimental narratives. Too many. Let me run through a few more quickly. There’s a lot of buzz around C. Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey , in which a private chef living in a dystopian near-future takes a job at a decadent mountaintop colony for the world’s elite. The Washington Post said it was “tense, unnerving and creepy… an extremely atmospheric novel about the interplay of environmental destruction and class.” Tim O’Brien, the author of the perennial Five Books favourite The Things They Carried , returns with his first novel in more than twenty years: America Fantastica , a satire of Trump’s America, in which a bank robbery turns into a cross-country odyssey through the land of fake news."
A. K. Blakemore · Buy on Amazon
"The young British novelist A. K. Blakemore follows her cult hit debut The Manningtree Witches with another hard-edged historical novel, The Glutton. This new book is set during the French Revolution and is inspired by a man with an insatiable (perhaps even cannibalistic) appetite reported in an 18th-century paper. “Blood drips from every page as she creates a banquet of gorgeously crafted, unexpected images,” reports the Evening Standard. “You’ll find yourself turning them over in your mind for days.” At once horrible and hallucinatory, The Glutton should appeal to fans of Ottessa Moshfegh. Out now in the UK, and on 31 October in the States. And let me shoehorn in a last few name checks before I go. I’m currently enjoying The Dimensions of a Cave by Greg Jackson, who I recently spoke to about ‘metaphysical thrillers’ in an interview that will be published on Five Books shortly. It centres on a reporter whose investigation into a strange new interrogation method has been hushed up—one in which virtual reality calls us into question the very idea of reality. Joseph Conrad meets Bob Woodward. Plus there’s Samantha Harvey’s ( The Western Wind) small but perfectly formed Orbital —a novel set in a space station as a typhoon approaches landfall below, which brings all the lyricism and wonder of nature writing to a low Earth orbit. (“Hazy pale green shimmering sea, hazy tangerine land. This is Africa chiming with light. You can almost hear it, this light, from inside the craft.”) Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams offers a counterfactual history of Korea in which the Korean Provisional Government (established 1919 and dissolved after the Second World War) still exists and is fighting for the unification of North and South. Lots of literary editors have flagged this as one to watch. And the Nigerian crime writer Femi Kayode returns with another superior ‘whydunnit’, Gaslight , a sequel to his highly acclaimed mystery The Light Seekers . Finally, you should know about new publications from evergreen favourites Richard Osman ( The Last Devil to Die , the fourth novel in his cosy Thursday Murder Club series), J. K. Rowling ( The Running Grave , written under her crime fiction pseudonym Robert Galbraith), and Stephen King ( Holly , the first solo outing for autistic private eye Holly Gibney). Happy reading. Part of our best books of 2023 series"
Notable Novels of Fall 2024 (2024)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2024-10-30).
Source: fivebooks.com
Sally Rooney · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"Well, the most obvious answer to this question is Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo. Every Rooney book is a major publishing event, and this latest offering—which centres on the fraught relationship between two Irish brothers—has received rave reviews almost across the board. NPR called it “her most moving novel yet”; The Guardian said it was “perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements.” Intermezzo is set in Dublin, 2022, and unfolds over a period of around six months. Peter is a lawyer in his thirties; Ivan, his younger brother, is a chess player and data analyst in his twenties. Each has, as one might expect from a Rooney novel, a complicated love life. Peter’s unfolds as a triangle between himself, his former partner Sylvia, and a younger student, Naomi, who dabbles in sex work. Ivan falls for an older woman who fears the social repercussions of being seen together. “Is there a better novelist at work right now?” asked the Guardian reviewer, in exhausted admiration: “Rooney, author of four books in just seven years, has at this point already created more enduringly memorable characters than most novelists ever manage.” Rooney fans may also be interested in her recent interview with The New York Times , a relatively rare opportunity to hear her discuss her work at length. “With this ,” she explains of the novel’s stream-of-consciousness passages, “as soon as I conceived of Peter, the older-brother character, I wrote down what is now the first page of the novel almost instantly, and it has hardly changed. It was a fragmented, fluid way of trying to grapple with his interiority, and it started like that and basically went on like that.”"
Haruki Murakami · Buy on Amazon
"Speaking of literary buzz, many bookshops are opening at midnight to celebrate the launch of is Haruki Murakami’s The City and its Uncertain Walls , translated by Philip Gabriel, on November 19. It’s his first new novel in six years. Expect “DJs spinning jazz records and spaghetti bars,” says Publisher’s Weekly . “And in New York City, Christina Tosi, CEO of the Brooklyn-based bakery Milk Bar, is creating Murakami-themed muffins—Murakuffins—for local release parties.” It’s about a teenage boy whose girlfriend mysteriously disappears. He never gets over it, and finally finds her working in a dream library in a shadowy parallel world. But she doesn’t remember him at all. The publisher describes it as: “a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them [and] a parable for these strange times.” All that is to say: expect magical realism, dream logic, and plenty of Easter Egg surprises for longtime Murakami fans."
Rachel Kushner · Buy on Amazon
"Thanks for asking. I’ve just picked up a copy of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. I loved— loved— her earlier novel of strip bars and women’s prisons, The Mars Room , which fizzed with life and humour despite its sometimes bleak subject matter. This new novel follows a female American spy as she infiltrates a French eco-terrorist group, was an instant New York Times bestseller on its release in September, and it has already been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. “Rich with secrets and dense with vibe, you could say that all of Kushner’s novels are spy novels, exposés from someone on the inside,” observed the Los Angeles Review of Books. “So, what happens when she writes an actual spy novel? Everything you might expect— espionage , intrigue, heart-racing action sequences—and something you might not: an authentic ethical awakening.” I’ve also got my eye on The Hotel , a creepy new short story collection by Daisy Johnson ( Everything Under, Sisters ); Ali Smith’s newest novel, Gliff , which is out 31 October in the UK, but not until spring in the US; and the long-awaited new novel, Our Evenings , from Alan Hollinghurst ( The Line of Beauty )."
Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones · Buy on Amazon
"Plus there is Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s English-language translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s deliciously titled The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story. The Nobel Prize-winner returns with what has been described variously as a “satirical take” and a “feminist twist” on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain . In Tokarczuk’s version, an engineering student retires to a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers, in Silesia, 1913. Every evening, the residents gather to drink the local hallucinogenic liquor and debate life, the universe, and everything. But there’s something unsettling going on in the woods outside the walls. “Happily, all the various unlikely strands come together in the closing chapters,” declares the Times Literary Supplement. “The eerily majestic finale is haunting, cathartic and gleeful – a zany confection that could only have come from this unpredictable, unique writer.’"
Garth Greenwell · Buy on Amazon
"Yes, let me make a quick shout out for Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, author of the magnificent, passionate Cleanness . In Small Rain, a poet is struck down with a rare disease and finds himself confined to an intensive care unit. The Chicago Tribune described it as “one of the most profound reading experiences I’ve ever had,” adding: “A novel about a man stuck alone in a hospital bed should be inert, but Small Rain is anything but.” The Observer reviewer agreed: reading it, “you feel as though you were holding a single grain of rice in your hand which, upon examination under a microscope, reveals itself to be engraved with the history of the world.” Small Rain is a “vivid, generous” novel that “will provide sustenance.” All very promising. It’s just out, and there’s a copy sitting on my bedside table waiting to be read. What’s on yours? We love to hear from Five Books readers. Let us know which titles you’ve been waiting for by sending us a message on social media."
The Notable Novels of Spring 2023 (2023)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2023-01-21).
Source: fivebooks.com
Eleanor Catton & Saskia Maarleveld (narrator) · Buy on Amazon
"Sure! One of the biggest is Eleanor Catton, with her hotly anticipated third novel Birnam Wood . Catton became the youngest-ever winner of the Booker Prize in 2013 , with the longest-ever novel— The Luminaries , a complex, astrology-infused tale of goldrush-era New Zealand. This new book, which has been pitched (somewhat unexpectedly) as a psychological thriller , follows the members of a guerilla gardening group as they take over an abandoned farm in cautious partnership with a paranoid American billionaire with plans to build his own survivalist bunker. I liked what Francis Spufford had to say about it: “If George Eliot had written a thriller, it might have been a bit like this.” Sounds irresistible to me. Birnam Wood will be released at the start of March on both sides of the Atlantic. There’s also a new book from Salman Rushdie , Victory City , his fifteenth novel. It’s a fantastical epic, which opens in 14th-century India and features a nine-year-old orphan selected by the goddess Parvati to be her human vessel. The Times has described it as “a total pleasure to read, a bright burst of colour in a grey winter season,” full of “lush, romantic language.” (Rushdie, who is still recovering from a brutal knife attack last summer, is reported to be in daily contact with Hanif Kureishi , the acclaimed British writer who suffered a serious spinal injury in December and remains in hospital in Rome.)"
Salman Rushdie · Buy on Amazon
"Later that month, look out for Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. I love Lacey’s writing; her last novel Pew was an excellently eerie and ambiguous story from smalltown America (I described it back in summer 2020 as “Rachel Cusk meets Shirley Jackson”), and this looks like it could be her best yet. In it, the widow of a subversive artist digs into the history of her late partner, against a backdrop of an alternate America, in which the South split from the North in the wake of World War II , before coming back together in uneasy reunification. Sometimes it’s easier to look at the tensions of the present day through a speculative prism. Also of note: In April, Curtis Sittenfeld (author of the intense boarding school novel Prep , among other things) will publish her latest, Romantic Comedy , in which a female comedy sketch writer falls for an attractive male pop star in what is presumably a knowing nod towards (and gender reversal of) Pete Davidson’s romantic travails . Brandon Taylor will release his second novel, The Late Americans , in May—a follow-up to the Booker-shortlisted Real Life . It follows a year in the life of a loose circle of friends and lovers in Iowa City as they come together and fall apart; Taylor has an acute eye and a sharp pen, and is an excellent chronicler of contemporary American life."
Max Porter · Buy on Amazon
"Max Porter, the brilliant British author of experimental novels Grief is the Thing With Feathers , Lanny , and The Death of Francis Bacon , will return with Shy , the story of a troubled teenager escaping from a home for “very disturbed young men.” Porter consistently breaks new and interesting ground in his formally inventive, emotionally vibrant novels. Unmissable. You may also be interested to hear that R. F. Kuang, the author of many extremely popular fantasy novels including Babel and the Poppy War sequences, has made her first foray into literary fiction with Yellowface , which explores questions of cultural appropriation."
Sophie Mackintosh · Buy on Amazon
"I am always very excited to read anything by Sophie Mackintosh, author of the Booker longlisted The Water Cure and feminist dystopia Blue Ticket . She will shortly release Cursed Bread , a dreamy, fable-like tale of sexual infatuation, mysterious strangers, and deadly intoxication, which is based on the real-life mass-poisoning that took place in Pont Saint-Esprit, France, in 1951. I begged for an advance copy of Cursed Bread the second it was available; it’s sexy, stylish, and unsettling as we have come to expect of Mackintosh’s work. I’m also keen to read Jessica Johns’ Bad Cree , in which a young Cree woman haunted by her dream world, forcing her to confront the truth about her sister’s untimely death. Crimereads recently picked it out in an interesting article about what they called “an unprecedented era of Native American noir” , as indigenous and First Nations writers grapple with colonialism’s legacy of violence in fiction."
Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won · Buy on Amazon
"You’ll be interested to hear that there’s a new novel from Han Kang , author of the savage, International Booker Prize-winning The Vegetarian . Greek Lessons is another slim, brooding little novel about difficult protagonists facing inexplicable problems—this time, it features a woman who has lost the ability to speak, and her language tutor who is losing his vision. Elegaic and tender, it is more abstract and less violent than The Vegetarian . Given the linguistic complexities of imparting the experience of learning Ancient Greek as a Korean speaker, it must have been a nightmare to translate, but Deborah Smith and Emily Jae Won have created a clean, clear translation (albeit not without ambiguities—which I imagine are baked into Kang’s prose) that I zipped through during a single long train journey. Strange, thoughtful, compelling. And look out for The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali, one of Iraq’s most celebrated authors. It follows a father searching for his son in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein. This new translation from the original Kurdish by Kareem Abdulrahman is reportedly an excellent introduction to Ali’s work. Kirkus described it as “[a]ltogether extraordinary: a masterwork of modern Middle Eastern literature deserving the widest possible audience.” What books are you most looking forward to this summer? Let us know. Send us a tweet , or post on our Facebook page . Part of our best books of 2023 series"
The Best Novels of 2021 (2021)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2021-11-25).
Source: fivebooks.com
Torrey Peters · Buy on Amazon
"Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby took me—and the whole world—by storm when it burst onto the scene back in January. The story centres on an unexpected pregnancy: Ames, who until recently was living as a woman, has impregnated his boss and sometime-lover Katrina. Feeling unable to cope with the idea of traditional fatherhood, he proposes an unusual solution—that they invite his ex-partner Reese, a beautiful but self-destructive trans woman, to co-parent alongside them. The result is a funny, provocative and often profound novel-of-ideas, in which Ames, Katrina and Reese debate amongst themselves what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a family, in a series of raw and open-hearted conversations—sometimes clashes—interspersed with illuminating episodes from Ames and Reese’s past and present lives. What’s particularly notable about Peters’ writing is her willingness to interrogate emotional complexity: Reese is motherly and a trainwreck all at once; Ames’ bland exterior holds a reality of many-layered secrets; Katrina prides herself on her open-mindedness, but soon finds herself out of her depth. It’s a book that does not shy away from the big questions, and I’ve thought about it a great deal since. I’d recommend it to anyone."
A. K. Blakemore · Buy on Amazon
"If we’re talking Puritans and witch trials, one’s mind immediately zips to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible , but A.K. Blakemore’s fiction debut is, I feel, perhaps more spiritually in tune with Yorgos Lanthimos’s deranged period drama The Favourite, or perhaps Hilary Mantel’s dryly humorous Wolf Hall . It’s a darkly sardonic story based on the real-life witch craze that took place during the early years of the English Civil War, when a self-declared ‘Witchfinder General’ took it upon himself to root out malefaction, moral corruption and heresy among the women left behind by their soldier husbands, sons and neighbours. In real life, an estimated 200 women were executed for witchcraft during this period, and the trials dramatised in this book draw from contemporaneous accounts—although some characters and events have been altered. Nevertheless, Blakemore wears this research very lightly. The prose is deeply sensual and immersive; written in modern English but bejewelled with period-appropriate vocabulary. Blakemore is a published poet, and that comes through very strongly. Highly recommended."
Rebecca Watson · Buy on Amazon
"This dazzling work of experimental fiction explodes the literary conventions in its recreation of its protagonist’s anxious, discordant stream of consciousness over the course of a single day, in the wake of a sexual assault. That might sound like hard work, but it’s an absorbing and often playful book, which made a deep impression on me. When I spoke to Rebecca Watson earlier this year , she said: “I think that it began with the challenge of feeling that prose does not really represent the bombardment and overwhelming simultaneity of everyday live experience. There’s so much going on. But when we write prose, we have this very neat, linear way in which we inhabit a moment. So my challenge was to represent the opposite of that on the page.” The result is fascinating, and I think anyone who writes themselves will find it quite inspiring. If you’d like to get a flavour of the novel, I suggest reading the award-winning short story that acted as the initial spark over at The White Review . An adaptation for the stage also recently opened at the Hampstead Theatre in London ."
Caleb Azumah Nelson · Buy on Amazon
"Nelson’s debut novel is a contemporary love story set in London. When two unnamed twenty-somethings, a photographer and a dancer, lock eyes from across a crowded room, they find themselves irresistibly drawn to one another. Their subsequent relationship—intimate but undefinable—and artistic collaboration forms the basis of this intense and lyrical novel, which also serves as a meditation on the making of art and the experience of being young and Black in modern Britain . In some ways, it occupies similar ground to Sally Rooney’s Normal People , so if you snapped up Beautiful World, Where Are You the moment it came out, this is likely a book for you. Nelson takes some bold literary decisions—it’s written in the second person, and in a very distinctive, dramatic register—which I suspect may be divisive, but altogether this is an impressive, tender and deeply moving dissection of an intoxicating love affair."
Calvin Kasulke · Buy on Amazon
"I’m not normally a fan of comic novels , but I make an exception for Calvin Kasulke’s surreal office comedy, told entirely through the medium of Slack. In it, an underperforming public relations executive finds his consciousness mysteriously uploaded into the servers of the instant messaging system, while his body remains unharmed, comatose in his apartment. His increasingly frantic requests for help are assumed by his superiors to be merely an irritating improvisational ‘bit’—and one they are willing to overlook, now that he is always online and apparently never more committed to his work. This is a compulsively readable novel that genuinely made me laugh out loud. I think it will appeal to anyone who has spent the pandemic working from home—read: almost everyone. Reminiscent of And Then We Came to the End , Joshua Ferris’s workplace novel told in the third person plural, it perfectly captures the choppy, polyphonic Greek chorus of a company’s #general channel. As one worker asks, rhetorically: “what is a workplace but a cult where everyone gets paid?” Is it a gimmick? Sure, but it’s one that I really enjoyed and I think you will too."
The 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction Shortlist (2023)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2023-06-13).
Source: fivebooks.com
Priscilla Morris · Buy on Amazon
"Morris’s debut novel is set during the Siege of Sarajevo—a four-year ordeal in which the city’s residents were trapped in their homes without heating, power, or clean water, and subjected to daily shelling and sniper fire. She told The Irish Times that it was partly based on the experiences of her mother’s family, and that she and her sisters had spent the war in London, “watch[ing] the news anxiously each night, scanning faces for a glimpse of a relative.” Black Butterflies, whose title references the ash that would flutter down over the city, follows the painter and art teacher Zora who has refused to leave the city as she adapts to this harrowing new normal. It’s been shortlisted for a number of other prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize (for ‘evoking the spirit of a place’) and the Author’s Club award for first novels. It will suit fans of humane and literary war novels, such as Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong ."
Barbara Kingsolver · 2022 · Buy on Amazon
"A daring reimagining of the David Copperfield story, transposed to an opioid-ravaged Appalachia, from the author of The Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behaviour . It is, declares Elizabeth Lowry in The Guardian, a “ferocious critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children” and the book Kingsolver “was born to write.” Damon Fields, nicknamed ‘Demon,’ was born to a drug-addicted young mother in a Virginia trailer park, then orphaned and passed from home to home. The Dickensian plot transfers remarkably well to contemporary America—worryingly so—and Kingsolver’s Demon speaks with a verve and intensity that is difficult to put down. Demon Copperhead has found both critical and commercial success, having won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and been selected for Oprah’s Book Club."
Maggie O'Farrell & narrated by Genevieve Gaunt · Buy on Amazon
"O’Farrell’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to Hamnet (which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020) is based on a scandalous real-life story from Renaissance Italy. Young aristocrat Lucrezia de’ Medici was married off at 15 to the much older Duke of Ferrara. The match was brief and unhappy. When the duchess died less than two years later, there were strong suggestions that she had been poisoned on the orders of her powerful husband. O’Farrell’s novel is richly atmospheric and deeply researched, although she has altered some historical details for narrative effect. It met with a somewhat mixed critical reception on publication but has found a wide and largely appreciative fan base. If you enjoy lushly descriptive historical fiction, this will be the book for you."
Laline Paull · Buy on Amazon
"This novel is written from the points of view of marine creatures, including a spinner dolphin living mutely among bottlenose dolphins, and a parasitic remora fish. But don’t get the wrong idea—this is not Finding Nemo; there are graphic scenes of (species-appropriate) rape and environmental disaster, so come prepared. Pod takes an unflinching look at human impacts on the underwater world, seen from below the surface, just as Paull’s earlier book, The Bees (also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, back in 2015), offered an insider’s view of the succession scandals within the alien—one might even say dystopian—culture of a honeybee hive. It’s creative, challenging, and quite literally immersive. One for open-minded readers with an interest in animal behaviour and writing from unusual perspectives."
Jacqueline Crooks · Buy on Amazon
"The fifth book on the 2023 Women’s Prize shortlist is Jacqueline Crooks’ Fire Rush , another debut that made a huge splash on arrival. Fire Rush is set between London, Bristol, and Jamaica in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is written partly in patois, and brings readers into a world of gangsters, raves, and police brutality. “I believe that literature and music intersect and so I wanted to bring that strong dub reggae soundtrack into the telling of this story,” the author told the Chicago Review of Books . “I did a lot of experimenting with language, dub reggae sound effects, and toasting lyrics to tell the story of this sub-culture in a way that evoked that time and place and the extraordinary people within it.” It’s a novel with a strong sense of setting, community, and musicality—one that is drawn from the author’s own experiences and took sixteen years to write."
Louise Kennedy · Buy on Amazon
"Trespasses, set in 1970s Northern Ireland, is Kennedy’s first novel and it has found considerable acclaim—garnering endorsements from the likes of Sarah Moss, Max Porter , and Nick Hornby. It follows a young, female teacher who falls for a married man as The Troubles tear their community apart. He’s a barrister, he tells her, but this is a place where it doesn’t matter what you do—it’s all about “what you are.” They must keep their relationship a secret from everyone they know, for their own safety as much as for marital continuity. The New York Times called it “brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking.” Kennedy, who started writing fiction in her forties, previously published a well-regarded collection of formally inventive short stories, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac . Despite the statistics given above, it does seem the tide has been turning . Female writers have been increasingly dominant on fiction shortlists in recent years, prompting some to mourn the decline of the “literary bloke” , or wonder aloud where all the young male novelists have gone . The literary gender gap is now, in fact, most exaggerated in nonfiction; an equivalent prize for factual writing by women will be launched by the same organisation in 2024 . Whether or not you agree with the concept of gender-specific prizes, here’s to hoping that there’s little call for them in the not-so-distant future."