8 Cosy New Reads For The Rest Of The Year
Shadow Ticket
Thomas Pynchon
In Milwaukee 1932, private eye Hicks McTaggart thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s decided to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s on a transoceanic liner, ending up in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement – and of course, no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and, as it happens, he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him to somehow Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world is another question.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
The Land In Winter
Andrew Miller
December 1962, the West Country. Local doctor Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps in their warm cottage. Across the field, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He's been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel. Where do you hide when you can't leave home? And where, in a frozen world, can you run to?
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
The Wax Child
Olga Ravn
Based on an infamous 17th-century Danish witch trial, The Wax Child is the extraordinary novel from Olga Ravn. It was a pitch-black night in 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, melting down beeswax and setting it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet – it watches and listens. It looks on as Christenze is haunted by rumour, it hears what people say. In time, it begins to understand that once a suspicion of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove impossible to shake.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
The Eleventh Hour
Salman Rushdie
Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Salman Rushdie’s famous Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor. These five new works of fiction move between the three countries that Rushdie has called home – India, England and America – and explore what it means to approach the eleventh hour of life. They are the reckoning with mortality that we all must one day make and speak deeply to what the author has come from and through. Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? How can we bid farewell to the places that we have made home? How do we achieve fulfilment with our lives if we don't know the end of our own stories? The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity with the insight and imagination that have made Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers of our time.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
The Four Spent The Day Together
Chris Kraus
On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, depressed town, on the fringes of a so-called ‘meth community’, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they’d bought years earlier as a summer escape from LA. Locked into a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota – between the art world and the urban poverty of Paul’s addiction therapist jobs, the rural poverty of the icy, depressed Iron Range – Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the brutality and despair surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers’ lives, Catt is led back to the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut. Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent The Day Together explores the tensions of unclaimed futures and unchosen circumstances in the age of social media, paralysing interconnectedness, and the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
Heart the Lover
Lily King
From the award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria comes this fresh read. Its narrator understands good love stories – their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules. She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love. Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth. Written with heart and wit, Heart the Lover is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
Manners & Mischief
Anne Glenconner
Lady Anne Glenconner, lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret and maid of honour at the Queen’s Coronation, returns with a rich, sparkling memoir told through an A to Z of her life. From affairs of the heart and Basil’s Bar to dinners with the King and the art of entertaining each chapter reveals a vivid moment of joy, mischief or resilience. Whether offering tips on getting out of the bath with grace, or how to lose at cards with Princess Margaret, she shares wisdom and memory in equal measure. This book is a love letter to a disappearing world and a reminder that life, at any age, should be faced with laughter, a stiff upper lip, and the odd vodka tonic. Filled with sparkling anecdotes and tales of living life to the full, it also features previously unseen photographs from Lady Glenconner’s personal collection.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
The Wedding People
Alison Espach
It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding guests, but she's actually the only person at the hotel who isn't here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she's dreamed of coming for years. She hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she's here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan – which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can't stop confiding in each other. In turns absurdly funny and tender, Alison Espach's The Wedding People is a nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
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