The Ferryman
By Justin Cronin; Orion, £22
Proctor Bennett lives on the isolated island of Prospera, whose inhabitants live in comfortable luxury. When their health begins to fail, they’re taken by ferry to the Nursery island, where their memories are wiped and bodies rejuvenated before they’re returned to Prospera to start a new life. But when Proctor has to escort his father on to the ferry to oblivion, he starts to realise that there’s something very wrong about Prospera. Cronin is the author of the excellent Passage trilogy, and while The Ferryman is as compellingly readable as that post-apocalyptic saga, this is a very different dystopian tale, with some truly surprising twists.
The Bandit Queens
By Parini Shroff; Allen & Unwin, £16.99
Ever since her abusive husband Ramesh disappeared, Geeta has been an outsider in her Indian village. Everyone believes she killed Ramesh, and she doesn’t contradict them, because being a dangerous widow means people leave her alone to enjoy her independence. But then Greeta’s neighbour Farah asks her to help get rid of her own horrible husband – and she’s only the first of several woman in the village who want Geeta to make them widows. A satisfying black comedy about female solidarity – and revenge.
Romantic Comedy
By Curtis Sittenfeld; Doubleday, £14.99
Sally Milz is a writer on a comedy TV series that bears a striking resemblance to Saturday Night Live. When her distinctly average-looking male colleague starts dating a glamorous film star, Sally writes a sketch mocking the fact that everyone would be shocked if an average girl went out with a hot male celeb. Then hunky pop idol Noah Brewster is a guest on the show, and there’s an instant spark between him and Sally that’s quickly extinguished because she can’t believe he’s interested in her. But two years later the pandemic happens – and their paths cross again… Both a brilliantly realised portrait of the comedy world and a witty grown-up love story, Romantic Comedy lives up to its name.
My Hot Friend
By Sophie White; Hachette Books Ireland, £14.99
Lexi is the co-host of the hit podcast Your Hot Friend – but when her outrageous co-host and best friend Amanda goes too far at a live show, both podcast and friendship are in danger. Claire is a huge fan of the podcast – but she feels that her own friends are shutting her out, especially since she had a breakdown. And new mother Joanne’s old friends don’t understand her new life. Sophie White’s unputdownable new novel brings all three women together – along with a lovable heavy metal band – in a darkly funny, raw story about friendship, vulnerability, and honesty.
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#Panic
By Luke Jennings; John Murray, £14.99
Kai, Dani, Jaleesa and Ilya all feel like outsiders in their small towns, but they find solace in the cult TV series City of Night. Having bonded online, they finally meet in person at a City of Night event in Los Angeles, and when they discover the show’s star Alice Temple is in danger, they’re determined to protect her. Soon these unlikely action heroes are on the run across the United States, pursued by both law enforcement and a far-right anti-LGBT organisation who think City of Night is corrupting public morals. The new thriller from the creator of the Villanelle books, adapted as Killing Eve, is a wild and entertaining ride.
The List
By Yomi Adegoke; 4th Estate, £12.99
Ola Olajide and Michael Koranteng seem like the perfect couple. Michael’s a successful podcaster, Ola writes for a cutting edge feminist website, and as far as their social media followers are concerned, they’re an inspiration. Then, a few weeks before their wedding, The List appears online. It’s an anonymous spreadsheet naming abusive men working in the media – and Michael’s name is on it. Yomi Adegoke explores a tricky subject with enormous skill and delicacy, and the result is a brilliant, emotionally engaging novel, as taut as a thriller and just as compelling.
Happy Place
By Emily Henry; Viking, £14.99
Harriet and her fiance Wyn have broken up, but they haven’t yet told their close-knit group of college friends the sad news. Unwilling to spoil the vibe during their gang’s last ever group holiday in their “happy place” in Maine, Harriet and Wyn decide to fake it for one final week. With its sparkling, snappy dialogue and genuine heat, romance queen Emily Henry’s delicious new novel is a “comedy of remarriage” full of the sparky tension that drives all the best screwball comedies, with added emotional depth.
Youth
By Kevin Curran; Lilliput Press, €18
Summer is approaching, and Balbriggan teenagers Angel, Dean, Tanya and Princess are all facing uncertain futures. Angel dreams of musical and YouTube fame. Dean wants to escape the shadow of his boxer father. An explicit video of Tanya has gone viral but she’s determined not to let it bother her. And Princess wants to study pharmacy at college and live a life where she’s not constantly viewed with suspicion. Moving between the perspectives of these four very different teenagers, Youth is a tender, unsentimental portrait of young Ireland.
No One Saw a Thing
By Andrea Mara; Bantam, £14.99
It’s the stuff of nightmares. Sive’s young daughters get on a crowded Tube which leaves the platform before a horrified Sive can get on board. One of the children is found safe and sound at the next station, but the other has vanished. And no one saw a thing. Is little Faye lost or kidnapped or worse? And if she’s been taken, is this a personal attack on Sive and her family? The tension never flags in this twisty thriller.
The Paper Man
By Billy O’Callaghan; Hamish Hamilton, £18.99
Billy O’Callaghan’s powerful new novel begins at a football match. But this is no ordinary game. It’s April 1938, just after the Anschluss, and the Austrian team are playing Germany. The star of the match is Austrian Matthias Sindelar, known as the Paper Man, and several decades later, a young man in Cork called Jack Shine will find newspaper cuttings about Sindelar amid his late mother’s belongings. Jack’s mother Rebekah was a Jewish refugee who left Vienna for Cork in 1938 – and the narrative moves between Vienna and Cork as Jack begins to uncover her story.
Yellowface
By Rebecca F Kuang; Borough Press, £16.99
June Hayward and Anthea Liu were at Yale together, but now Anthea is a literary sensation, while June’s writing career has gone nowhere. When Anthea dies in a freak accident, June steals her latest unpublished manuscript about Chinese labourers in the first World War and publishes the novel, with a few tweaks, under the ethnically ambiguous name Juniper Song. June convinces herself she’s doing nothing wrong – but if the truth comes out, will the rest of the world agree? A spiky satire that will keep readers gripped until the very last page.
Miss Hart’s Marriage Bureau
By Sheena Wilkinson; HarperCollins Ireland, £14.99
Having left her native Ulster after the death of her father, April McVey is determined to be independent. And so, despite the fact that she has no interest in romance, in 1934 she gets a job as a matchmaker at a respectable “marriage bureau” in the north of England. But when she meets widower Fabian Carr and his difficult daughter Prudence, April faces unexpected challenges. The first novel for adults by award-winning children’s author Sheena Wilkinson is a briskly witty delight, reminiscent of the best interwar popular fiction.
Nothing Special
By Nicole Flattery; Bloomsbury, £13.99
In 1968, Andy Warhol published a, A Novel, an ostensible work of fiction based on transcribed recordings of his friends and hangers-on at the Factory. Award-winning short story writer Nicole Flattery’s debut novel imagines who might have done the actual transcribing. It’s 1966 and 17-year-old Mae has dropped out of high school and gets a job as a typist for Warhol. Soon she and her fellow transcriber Shelley are both observers of and participants in an extraordinary scene. A brilliantly original coming-of-age story.
The Shadows of London
By Andrew Taylor; HarperCollins, £20
With their complex characters, clever plots, political intrigue and vivid depiction of London just after the Great Fire of 1666, Andrew Taylor’s books about troubled civil servant James Marwood and prickly architect Cat Lovett are historical crime fiction at its finest. The Shadows of London is the sixth book in the sequence; it begins in 1671, when the discovery of a horribly mutilated body at a site where Lovett is working triggers another investigation for Marwood. If you’ve never encountered Marwood and Lovett before, this is the perfect opportunity to binge on the whole fantastic series.
The Cassandra Complex
By Holly Smale; Century, £14.99
Cassandra Dankworth has always found it hard to interact with other people. She likes order and predictability – but now her housemate has kicked her out, her boyfriend Will has dumped her, and her boss has fired her. Then Cassandra discovers that she can turn back time and change the past. Surely with infinite chances to get things right, she can undo all her mistakes and sort her life out? Inspired by Smale’s own experiences of being diagnosed with autism in her late-30s, this is a very funny and emotionally engaging novel, with a wonderful heroine.
Dispatches from the Diaspora
By Gary Younge; Faber, £14.99
From reports on Nelson Mandela’s first election campaign and Hurricane Katrina, to critiques of Bridgerton and interviews with everyone from Angela Davis to Stormzy, award-winning journalist Gary Younge has been writing thoughtful and insightful pieces for 30 years. Dispatches from the Diaspora collects three decades of his writing on events and people that have made a significant impact on the Black diaspora from Africa to Europe, from the Caribbean to North America. A must-read.
Queen Bee
By Ciara Geraghty; HarperCollins, £13.99
Agatha Doyle has writer’s block. She’s meant to be writing her next novel, but one of her sons is wallowing in heartbreak; the other has dropped out of college to become a self-taught beekeeper; her husband is busy with his struggling cafe; her widowed father has a glamorous new girlfriend; and she herself is going through menopause. When a video of her ranting at a literary event goes viral, Doyle becomes an unwilling menopause poster girl. But how can she be anyone’s heroine when she can’t sort out her own life? Written in a deliciously deadpan tone, this hilarious, heartfelt novel will appeal to readers of any age.
How To Sell a Haunted House
By Grady Hendrix; Titan Books, £19.99
Grady Hendrix is one of the best contemporary horror writers, and like all his books, How To Sell a Haunted House is laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving – and genuinely terrifying. It’s the story of Louise, who returns to her hometown after her parents are killed in an accident. She has to clean out the family home – including her mother’s huge puppet collection – with her estranged deadbeat brother Mark. Her mom’s favourite puppet was a cheeky little guy called Pupkin. And Pupkin, it turns out, has plans for his old friends… You’ll never look at a puppet the same way again after this fantastically unsettling novel.
The Grass Ceiling: On Being a Woman in Sport
By Eimear Ryan; Penguin Sandycove, £14.99
Over the last decade, women’s team sports have finally started attracting the public attention they deserve – but we’ve still got a long way to go, as novelist Eimear Ryan demonstrates in her new book. Exploring everything from sports injuries to gender inequality and the GAA, it’s a must read for sports fans of all genders.
The Rachel Incident
By Caroline O’Donoghue; Virago, £14.99
It’s 2010 in Cork, and Rachel Murray is obsessed with Dr Fred Byrne, one of her lecturers in University College Cork. After she organises a launch for his new book in the shop where she and her housemate James both work, all their lives change forever. And when Rachel starts working for Dr Byrne’s wife, things get even more complicated. In this tragicomic novel, O’Donoghue perfectly captures both Ireland immediately after the economic crash and the heady intensity of youthful friendships and shared obsessions.
Small Mercies
By Dennis Lehane; Abacus Books, £14.99
In 1974, the city of Boston decided to integrate its racially segregated public schools. This caused racist outrage in the Irish-American enclave of south Boston, and this ugly chapter of his hometown’s history has inspired Dennis Lehane’s powerful new thriller. Mary Pat Fennessey is happy to join the anti-integration protests, but then her teenage daughter goes missing, and a young Black man is found dead, and soon Fennessey’s quest for the truth starts drawing the attention of the local Irish mob.
Catfish Rolling
By Clara Kumagai; Zephyr, £8.99
Sora was visiting her mother’s family in Japan when it happened. In the debut novel by Japanese-Irish-Canadian author Clara Kumagai, a huge earthquake has created “zones” in Japan where time moves faster or slower than the rest of the world. As Sora grows up, both she and her father are convinced that her mother is still alive in one of the zones, but spending too much time there can be very dangerous. Inspired by the 2011 earthquake that devastated parts of Japan, this is a beautifully written, engrossing story about love, grief, and the passing of time.
Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War 1929-1939
By Florian Illies, translated by Simon Pare; Profile Books, £20
How did writers, artists, activists and thinkers experience the decade that saw Europe plunge into darkness? Beginning with the build up to the Great Depression and ending with the outbreak of war, Florian Illies’s superb new book explores the complicated personal and creative lives of everyone from Marlene Dietrich and the Mann family to Salvador Dalí, and F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Divided into three parts – Before, 1933 and After – and told in a series of vignettes, it’s a brilliantly readable and evocative social history.
The Other Side of Mrs Wood
By Lucy Barker; 4th Estate, £12.99
It’s 1873, England is obsessed with spiritualism, and high society medium Mrs Wood is the toast of London. But the younger generation are turning to flashy new American mediums, and Mrs Wood is worried she’s going out of fashion. Then she meets a young would-be medium called Emmie Finch. But will Miss Finch revitalise Mrs Wood’s career – or destroy it? Lucy Barker’s debut novel has been described as “All About Eve… in the spellbinding world of Victorian mediums” and it’s just as entertaining as that sounds.
Arthur and Teddy are Coming Out
By Ryan Love; HQ, £12.99
When 79-year-old Arthur Edwards finally tells his family and friends that he’s gay, they don’t all react well. His wife supports him, but his daughter Elizabeth does not, and his bestfriend turns against him. Elizabeth’s son Teddy is also shocked – not least because he’s in the closet too. Can Arthur and Teddy find happiness? Readers will be rooting for them in this charming debut novel by Fermanagh writer Ryan Love.
