11 Of The Best New Books Coming In Spring
Atmosphere
By Taylor Jenkins Reid
In the summer of 1980, astrophysics professor Joan Goodwin begins training to be an astronaut at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond; mission specialists John Griffin and Lydia Danes; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer. As the new astronauts prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined and begins to question everything she believes about her place in the observable universe. Then, in December 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes instantly. Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, creating complex protagonists, and telling a soaring story about the transformative power of love.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
Carrion Crow
By Heather Parry
Marguerite Périgord is locked in the attic of her family home, a towering Chelsea house overlooking the Thames. For company she has a sewing machine, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and a carrion crow who has come to nest in the rafters. Restless, she spends her waning energies on the fascinations of her own body, memorising Mrs Beeton’s advice and longing for her life outside. Cécile has confined her daughter Marguerite for her own good. Cécile is concerned that Marguerite’s engagement to a much older, near-penniless solicitor will drag the family name into disrepute. And for Cécile, who has worked hard at her own betterment, this simply won’t do. Cécile’s life has taught her that no matter how high a woman climbs she can just as readily fall. Of course, both have their secrets, intentions and histories to hide. As Marguerite’s patience turns into rage, the boundaries of her mind and body start to fray – and neither woman can recognise what the other is becoming.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
I Want To Talk To You
By Diana Evans
Diana Evans is the author of the novels 26a, The Wonder, Ordinary People and A House for Alice. Crafted over 25 years, her new non-fiction read I Want To Talk To You invites readers into a conversation about literature, art and music, identity, grief and everything in between. As a young journalist, Evans was catapulted overnight into the role of culture editor, going on to interview a roster of stars including Lauryn Hill, Viola Davis, Alice Walker and Edward Enninful. In these portraits of contemporary icons, the author remains the observer. Alongside them, in pieces collected here for the first time, we also see her turning the lens on herself. We watch as she dances on stages in London and travels through Cuba. We sit beside her desk as she develops her voice as a writer, shaped by her love for Jean Rhys, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We walk by her side as she navigates the world – her family and the midlife sandwich, reflections on fashion, yoga, the British monarchy and lockdowns, and the lasting impact of George Floyd and Grenfell.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
The Emperor Of Gladness
By Ocean Vuong
This is the next book from Ocean Vuong, the author of the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, 19-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family and a community on the brink. Following the cycles of history, memory and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the ways in which love, labour and loneliness form the bedrock of American life.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
Great Big Beautiful Life
By Emily Henry
If you’re heading on a spring holiday, Emily Henry’s latest is definitely one to throw into your hand luggage. When Margaret Ives, the famously reclusive heiress, invites eternal optimist Alice Scott to Little Crescent Island, Alice knows this is it: her big break – and a chance to impress her family with a ‘serious publication’. The catch? Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud, Hayden Anderson, wants to write the story too. The proposal? A one-month trial period to unearth the truth behind one of the most scandalous families of the 20th century, after which Margaret will choose who’ll tell her story. The problem? Margaret is only giving each of them tantalising pieces of information. Pieces they can’t put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning between them every time they’re in the same room.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
Vanishing World
By Sayaka Murata
Japanese author Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman was a publishing sensation. Her latest book is more sci-fi than that was – but it’s just as good. In our near-future world, children are solely conceived by artificial insemination. Even sex between married couples is viewed as taboo. Amane's family is irregular. Her parents copulated to create her and hope that she too will find love and have a child with the person she marries. But Amane falls in line with society's way of thinking and wants a regular 'clean' marriage. Then she hears of a place that is the subject of a social experiment. And everyone in Paradise-Eden will act as one big family. Could this be the perfect third way?
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
Sleep
By Honor Jones
Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a bush in her family’s back garden while her brother hunts for her in a game of tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes. Then one fateful summer, everything changes. A line is crossed and the simple pleasures of girlhood slip away. Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her. She’s newly divorced and navigating life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of having a new boyfriend. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush from all those summers ago. She must now reckon with the echoes between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child truly safe, and the family she carries inside herself as she builds a family of her own.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
So Good To See You
By Francesca Hornak
Serge, Rosie and Daniel are enjoying their final weeks of university in summer 2004. They are young, inseparable and full of optimism. Fast forward 15 years later, and they are guests at a lavish four-day wedding in Provence – and no longer friends. Life has not turned out quite as planned since their heady days at Oxford. Film-maker Serge is winning awards but hiding huge debt and a fractured relationship. Behind Rosie's social ease, she is heartbroken. And with Daniel's fame has come spiralling anxiety. Now, with four days of organised fun ahead, all three are armed with their best conversation and brightest smiles. At least everyone is following the same script: do not bring up the past. But as the champagne flows, appearances slip and true feelings emerge. So Good To See You is a funny, poignant and beautifully observed examination of relationships, class, creative differences and pretending to have it all.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
Story Of A Murder: The Wives, The Mistress And Dr Crippen
By Hallie Rubenhold
Hallie Rubenhold is the number one Sunday Times bestselling author of The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. Now the social historian is back with another deep dive. On 1st February 1910, vivacious music-hall performer Belle Elmore vanished from her north London home, causing alarm among her circle of female friends, who demanded an immediate investigation. They could not have known what they would provoke: the unearthing of a gruesome secret, followed by a fevered manhunt for the prime suspect – Belle’s husband, medical fraudster Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen. Hiding in the shadows of this tale is Crippen’s typist and lover, Ethel Le Neve – was she really just ‘an innocent young girl’ in thrall to a powerful older man as so many people have since reported? In this examination of one of the most infamous murders of the 20th century, Rubenhold gives voice to those who have never properly been heard – the women. Featuring a cast of eccentric entertainers, glamorous lawyers, zealous detectives, medics and liars, this is a meticulously researched and multi-layered read.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
Air
By John Boyne
Being 30,000 feet in the air offers time to reflect and take stock. For Aaron Umber, it’s an opportunity to connect with his 14-year-old son as they travel halfway across the world to meet a woman who isn’t expecting them. Unsettled by his past and anxious for his future, Aaron is at a crossroads in life. The damage inflicted upon him during his youth has made him the man he is, but now threatens to widen the growing fissures between him and his only child. This trip could bind them closer together or tear them further apart. In this penetrating examination of action and consequence, fault and attribution, acceptance and resolution, author John Boyne (The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, The Heart’s Invisible Furies) gives us a redemptive story of a father and a son on a moving journey to mend their troubled lives.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
Universality
By Natasha Brown
Natasha Brown’s debut novel Assembly was Foyles Fiction Book of the Year, shortlisted for several awards and translated into 17 languages. This is her follow up. On a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar. A young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist and a radical anarchist movement. She solves the mystery, but her viral longread exposé raises more questions than it answers. Through a voyeuristic lens, Universality focuses on words: what we say, how we say it – and what we really mean.
Available at AMAZON.CO.UK
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