18 New Books To Add To Your Reading List

Hot on the heels of the return of Rachel Walsh in Again, Rachel, Marian Keyes is back with another Walsh family novel. This time, we’re back in the world of Anna. Anna has a life to envy – an apartment in New York, a well-meaning partner and a high-flying job in beauty PR. Who wouldn’t want all that? Anna, it turns out. Trading a minor midlife crisis for a major life event, she ups sticks from Manhattan for the tiny Irish town of Maumtully, helping old friends Brigit and Colm set up a luxury coastal retreat. Alas, the locals hate the idea. So much so, there have been threats – and violence. Anna, however, worked in the beauty industry, so there’s no wrinkle she can’t smooth over. There’s just one fly in the ointment – old flame Joey Armstrong, who’s on hand as her wingman. Because no matter how far you go, your mistakes will still be waiting for you. 

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Girls follows sisters Mattie and Nora, and their thorny relationships with their famous late mother, the brilliant yet deeply troubled artist Ingrid Olssen. As they embark on an all-or-nothing road trip across the US to preserve Ingrid’s legacy – her last request to her daughters was to throw her ashes in the canyon and her paintings in the sea – they start to unpick the scars of the past… and realise that the ties that bound them might also break them. Told partly in interview form, Girls is as devastating as it is hilarious, and as tender and moving as it is shocking – this is a book that will stay with you long after you have turned the final pages.

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When Asa’s husband is offered a new job away from the city, the couple end up relocating. And since his new office is very close to his family’s home, it makes sense to move in next door to his parents. Through the long hot summer, Asa does her best to adjust to their new rural lives, to the constant presence of her in-laws, to the emptiness of her existence and the incessant buzz of cicadas. Then one day, while running an errand for her mother-in-law, she comes across a strange creature, follows it to the embankment of a river, and ends up falling into a hole – a hole that seems to have been made specifically for her. Thus begins a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape and the family she has married in to, leading her to question her role in this world and, eventually, who she even is.

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In the archives of the national library, a researcher named Linda sees a nine-year-old girl's face in the pages of a yellowed newspaper, and the seed of an obsession is planted in her mind. Birgitta Sivander was brutally murdered one night in May 1948. The culprit was never found. Linda feels a deep connection to Birgitta, and in the months that follow she compulsively researches the case. Meanwhile, a life is taking root inside Linda; she is to have a daughter of her own. As she grapples with the wonder and anxiety of motherhood, she gradually pieces together Birgitta's story, closing in on the possible killer. Driven to redeem a lost child, Linda must find a way to lay Birgitta to rest. Moving and unputdownable, The Eighth House is a gripping examination of why cycles of violence persist, and the hope that new life brings.

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If you loved revisiting One Day in the recent Netflix adaptation, then this new story by author David Nicholls could be your next read. Marnie is stuck – whether that’s working alone in her London flat, battling the long afternoons or feeling like she’s living a life that often feels like it’s passing her by. Michael is coming undone. Reeling from his wife’s departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on long, solitary walks across the moors. When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship. But can they survive the journey?

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Daphne always loved the way her fiancé Peter told their story. How they met, fell in love and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it… right up until the moment he realised he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra. Which is how Daphne starts her new story, stranded in Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak. Scruffy and chaotic, Miles is the exact opposite of practical Daphne, whose co-workers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan to post deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together. But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex… 

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Long Island is an exhilarating novel that asks whether it’s possible to truly return to the past and renew a great love that seemed gone forever. In this sequel to Tóibín's prize-winning, bestselling novel Brooklyn, a man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island, and everything changes. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn – perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but 20 years married and with two children, they’re looking towards a good future. Yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years, she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late to take a different path?

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In his new book, Amor Towles – of A Gentleman In Moscow fame – shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood. The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate in modern marriages. In Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves NYC in September 1938 with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, Eve in Hollywood describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself – and others – in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows and dive bars of LA.

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This is the newest book from the author of bestseller The Essex Serpent. Thomas Hart and Grace Macauley are worshippers at the Bethesda Baptist chapel in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits – torn between their commitment to religion and their desire for more. But their friendship is threatened by the arrival of love. Thomas falls for James Bower, who runs the local museum. Meanwhile, Grace meets Nathan, a fellow sixth former who represents a different, wilder kind of life. They are drawn passionately together, but quickly pulled apart, casting Grace into the wider world and far away from Thomas. In time, the mysteries of Aldleigh are revealed, bringing Thomas and Grace back to each other, and to a richer understanding of love and life.

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Kathleen Hanna and her Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill’s rallying cry to feminists echoed through the punk scene of the 1980s, 90s and beyond. In Rebel Girl, Hanna’s new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes clear, being in a ‘girl band’, especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or a safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination. But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her – including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox and Billy Karren; her friendship with Kurt Cobain; and her introduction to Joan Jett – and they were a testament to how the true punk world nurtured and cared for its own.

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A Spanish hit that’s been translated into English, Bad Habit takes us deep into the lives of the residents of a Madrid neighbourhood named after a holy saint. An unnamed young trans woman grows up in a working-class suburb that has no place for her. She discovers community and kinship in downtown Madrid, amid a dazzling party scene animated by charming junkies, glamorous pop divas and fallen angels. With each step she takes forward in the city, she finds herself confronted by an antagonism she does not yet know how to counter. In this thrilling and often frightening place, each decision can have the highest of stakes, yet she knows that only she can forge a path forward to the life she wants to live. This story of self-realisation illuminates the ties between gender and class, the search for identity, and the power of chosen family. 

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From the author of Mayflies comes this unputdownable, state-of-the-nation novel about one man’s epic fall from grace. It’s May 2021, London. Campbell Flynn – an art historian and celebrity intellectual – is entering middle age. Fuelled by an appetite for admiration, controversy and novelty, he doesn’t take people half as seriously as they take themselves. Then there’s Milo Mangasha, his provocative student. Milo inhabits a more precarious world, and has experiences and ideas that excite his teacher. Over the course of an incendiary year, a web of crimes, secrets and scandals is revealed, and Flynn may not be able to protect himself from the shattering exposure of all his privilege really involves.

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