These are the works of fiction you need to add to your reading list for the year ahead.
Ordinary People by Diana Evans
From the author of 26a comes Ordinary People, a remarkable novel about two couples who are drifting apart. Michael and Melissa used to be head over heels in love, but now they have two kids and Melissa is convinced she is going slowly mad in her crooked Victorian tumbledown house in south London.
Damian and Stephanie are out in residential Surrey with the perfect home, but have never seemed right for each other, and Damian is increasingly drawn to Melissa instead. The development, or disintegration, of their relationships is intensely relatable, especially for readers who can empathise with Melissa’s point of view and know about the trendy term “emotional labour”.
The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton
Jaxie is a foul-mouthed fugitive – his voice is reminiscent of Irvine Welsh’s characters – but he is also incredibly articulate and crafty. When he meets Fintan MacGills, a mysterious fellow outcast and rambling Irishman who lives in an old shepherd’s hut, Jaxie allows himself to form a wary and strange friendship. This book is not for animal lovers or the squeamish, as it contains a lot of eating of innocent goats and kangaroos.Tim Winton’s brilliant novel The Riders was about a journey with a potentially perilous ending, and his new novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, revisits some of these themes. Jaxie Clackton is a deeply damaged teenager who flees his dead parents’ house in Australia to finally reunite with the one person in the world he can “be himself” with.
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar
Described by The Bookseller as the next The Essex Serpent, this astounding debut delivers a wonderful romp through Georgian London, charting one merchant’s unlikely rise through society when he is gifted an unusual creature from the sea and decides to display it to the public.
He then meets sex worker Angelica, who leads a dangerous life and is looking for a way out. The book is deliciously rich with authentic detail of 18th-century life, without dumbing it down for the reader. It may be a long read at more than 400 pages, yet each one feels essential to the plot.
The Queen of Bloody Everything by Joanna Nadin: £14.99 Mantle
The prolific children’s author Joanna Nadin is back with her first book for adults. Dido has grown up under the shadow of her mother Edie, who swears, drinks, has sex and doesn’t mould herself into the conventions expected of motherhood or suburban Cambridge.
But as Dido grows up, falls in love with the boy next door and moves on with her life, she has to wrestle with guilt about abandoning her mother and fear about her health. The book expertly follows funny and chubby eight-year-old Dido into adulthood, swinging from gentle comedy towards something sadder, and wiser. This book is a must-read for an analysis of a modern mother-daughter relationship – a topic that is all too often left unexplored in today’s fiction.
The Only Story by Julian Barnes
If you want gentle melancholy and a complex love affair in mid-century England, here it is.19-year-old Paul meets 48-year-old Susan, a charming housewife who turns from a tennis partner into a lover – one which Paul’s prim English parents thoroughly disapprove of. The new couple move to London and Susan leaves her husband.
In the second half of the book, Paul retells the story in a less charming light. It is not the happy love affair the reader first came to expect. For fans of The Reader (which also explores a complex relationship between a young man and an older woman) and Alain de Botton (both authors like to ponder what love really means, and how we remember it over time), there is plenty of philosophising and nostalgia in this book, as well as dozens of references of male genitalia to keep the prose “edgy”. If you enjoyed Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, you will definitely enjoy The Only Story.
The Missing Girl by Jenny Quintana
For anyone who enjoys racing through a pacey thriller in one sitting, this debut from Jenny Quintana is not to be missed. Gabriella disappeared 30 years ago. Her sister Anna, now a middle-aged woman, comes back to her childhood home for her mother’s funeral. While mysterious neighbours and memories come and go, Anna starts to piece the puzzle of her then teenage sister’s absence.
The author does well to flip between the past – a richly painted 1990s setting with chicken kievs and Top of the Pops – and the lonely, wine-swilling present-day Anna. Quintana writes succinctly, and her page-turning prose will keep you guessing until near the end. (Complete with an attractive male character, who just happens to have moved to the village.)
The Lido by Libby Page
When 86-year-old Rosemary meets 26-year-old Kate, they have one thing in common – a desire to save their lido in Brixton, the hub of the community, and in doing so they enrich their own lives. The Lido is the literary equivalent of looking at one of those Christmas cards of snow, sparkle and a solitary robin. It’s nice and pleasant, but also makes the odd tear spring to your eye.
Libby Page’s debut, for which she gained a six-figure advance, will go down well with fellow Brixtonites as well as anyone who cares about community. The flashbacks to the past with Rosemary and her husband George are vivid and pull on the heartstrings.
The book is touted as the next Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, and certainly the love interest in the book (photographer Jay) almost mirrors bumbling Raymond. While The Lido is less wacky, it certainly makes you chuckle and cry a few tears along the way.
Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit
This thriller tells us the end at the beginning – that Randolph’s father shoots his son’s stalker in the head. At least, so we are led to believe. Randolphe is the successful architect living in Berlin with his beautiful wife and two children and all seems well until a fat, unemployed man living on benefits moves into the basement flat below his.
When the new neighbour, Dieter Tiberius, starts leaving Randolphe’s wife obscene letters and accusing the couple of child abuse, Randolphe faces up to the cracks in his life and what part he had played in creating them. The backstories are interesting: how Randolphe’s father obsessively bought guns, how Randolphe’s marriage with his wife Rebecca gradually falls apart.
This book would feature in a top five round-up, however, if the wife, the true victim of the stalker, had been a strong character and “shrieked” a little less, even if her anger in itself serves as a plot point. The book is sparse and addictive. And of course, there’s a twist at the end that is worth waiting for.
Hotel Silence by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
Bizarre, black humour can be a good thing, as Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s fifth novel proves. Jónas is a middle-aged man whose daughter isn’t his and whose mother has dementia, and who decides to end his life in Hotel Silence in a war-torn country.
Turns out he is good at DIY and making new friends, and perhaps life has some good parts worth fighting for. It has won rave reviews from the New York Times and Stylist, as well as the Icelandic Literary Prize 2016. For fans of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.
Friend Request by Laura Marshall
Maria Weston disappeared in 1989. Or did she? When Louise receives a Facebook friend request from a classmate that died 25 years ago, it brings up a dark secret in Louise’s past. Friend Request, a debut from Laura Marshall, was one of the best-selling psychological thriller ebooks last year, and the paperback is out in 2018.
The twist is genuinely unexpected, and the racy plot is nicely interwoven with domestic life. Cue plenty of wine-guzzling and seemingly innocent bystanders. This is an obvious choice if you enjoyed The Girl on the Train.
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