This week’s new books move between intimate reckonings and far-reaching questions, tracing lives under pressure and in transition. Expect fiction and nonfiction that probe identity, memory and power, stories that stay with you, quietly reshaping how you see the world.
'One of our boldest writers' - Deborah Levy
Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound.
When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.
'An astonishingly gifted writer' - Marian Keyes
Edenscar, a town in the Peak District, has more than most. 17 years ago, its inhabitants were hit by tragedy when a school bus veered off the road and everyone on board drowned. Everyone, that is, except Joseph Ashe. His miraculous survival has haunted him and the town ever since.
Now a Detective Sergeant in the local police, Joe is called to the scene of a brutal and apparently inexplicable crime. The whole town is spooked, but Joe’s new boss, DI Laurie Bower, more used to inner-city police work, has no time for superstition. She just wants to find the very real killer who has left no trace and apparently had no motive.
'Jean Sprackland’s poems are an uncommon pleasure to read' - Observer
Each of the three sections in Goyle, Chert, Mire focuses on one of the distinctive elements characteristic of the Blackdown Hills – a little-known, sparsely populated area straddling the border between Somerset and Devon – and in particular the remote springline valley where the author lives. In this unique landscape, relatively unchanged over the centuries, the past is so evident that it can come to seem indistinguishable from the present.
Illness causes a similar slippage in an individual’s sense of time. The poems trace an overlapping narrative of meningitis and the cognitive symptoms – at once distorting and revelatory – that came in its aftermath.
'Beautiful and thought-provoking' - Cal Flyn
Ben Rawlence began writing to his eldest daughter before she was born, trying to understand what it means to bring a child into a world facing ecological breakdown. Over the next twelve years, these letters – written to his two daughters as they grow – chart one father’s attempt to live with the central contradiction of our age: raising children within a system that threatens all life, including our own.
By turns moving and funny, and always bracingly honest, Think Like a Forest explores love, fear and responsibility in perilous times. Rawlence finds the answers might lie in learning to see the world again through the eyes of a child so that we may embrace interdependence and regain our place in nature. To think like a forest, he shows us, may be the key to how we parent, how we live, and even whether we have a future on our planet at all.
'Impeccably researched, elegantly written and compellingly argued' - The Times
Allies at War is a fast-paced, narrative history, based on material drawn from over a hundred archives. Using vivid, first-hand accounts and unpublished diaries, we enter the rooms where the critical decisions were made, revealing the political drama behind the military events.
Ambitious and compelling, Allies at War offers a fresh perspective on the Second World War and the origins of the Cold War.
'A joyous and fascinating corrective' - GQ Magazine
This is the lost story of a hidden Britain. A Black Britain. One that existed outside London and rewrites our idea of British culture.From Bradford’s towering mills and Northern Soul’s euphoric dance floors to the multicultural docks of Cardiff Bay and rolling hills of rural Britain, from Rastafarians and rugby stars to artists and activists, Lanre Bakare unearths the overlooked places and people who made Britain what it is today. Alive with energy and purpose, We Were There is a dazzling, profoundly important new portrait of modern Britain and a shared legacy which belongs to us all.
'Original and detailed' - Guardian
In the late 1930s, Len Howard packed up her life in London, bought a plot of land in Sussex and built herself a little house there. This was to be Bird Cottage, a place where the doors of the house were open to the birds of the garden – great tits, blue tits, robins, blackbirds, willow warblers and many others. Len lived the rest of her life alongside her bird neighbours, with some sleeping in her bedroom and many flitting in and out all day long.
This edition contains the two books she wrote about the birds, Birds as Individuals and Living with Birds .
'Hrabal bounces and floats... with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail' - Julian Barnes
Between pocketing stolen change from unsuspecting customers and reminiscing on nights spent at the local brothel, he fantasises about his immense - and imagined - riches.
Then, ludicrously, Ditie’s dreams start to become reality.
Yet while his chaotic adventures lead him to ever more glamorous hotels, beyond the sparkling dining halls, the forces of twentieth-century European history march on.
'A dark domestic fairy tale' - New York Times
Magda is a writer, Emerence her housekeeper. Magda is new to their quiet Hungarian town, while Emerence, fierce and enigmatic, knows and is known by all. Though she enters Magda’s home whenever she pleases, the door to Emerence’s own strange abode remains barred. Still, somehow, over the course of twenty years, an intimate trust is built between the two, rich with secrets.
Yet when this trust is betrayed one dark afternoon, the pair’s complex relationship will be left forever altered, and Magda will find herself haunted until the end of her days. For not all doors are made to be opened.
