Our pick of the latest releases
Saraswati Park
Anjali Joseph
Fourth Estate, £7.99
Both a coming-of-age novel and a portrait of a long marriage, Anjali Joseph's promising debut novel is a bittersweet, charming and likable book. It's set in a Mumbai suburb where 58-year-old Mohan lives with his wife, Lakshmi. He's a professional letter writer who fills out forms and writes messages for illiterate customers but who once dreamed of becoming a writer of fiction. She spends her days watching soaps in which "the villains always had absurd and frightening eyeliner". Their peaceful if slightly boring life is shaken up by the arrival of Mohan's nephew Asish, a disorganised 19-year-old student with a complicated love life: he's involved first with a fellow student, a boy from a more privileged background, then with an older academic. Suddenly nothing in Mohan and Lakshmi's life is as predictable as it used to be. Joseph's good-humoured and elegant prose, her appealing, complex characters and a beautifully realised Mumbai setting make for a bewitching read. Anna Carey
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
David Mitchell
Sceptre, £7.99
David Mitchell's previous novels have been pointing to the future of literary fiction, but his latest is an old-fashioned romance set in Japan in 1799. It follows the fortunes of a pastor's son, Jacob De Zoet, an interpreter for the Dutch East India Company who, under the shogunate, is prohibited from following his religion. Jacob hopes to return to the Netherlands rich and eligible for his beloved Anna, but he soon falls in love with a Japanese woman, who is then packed off to a convent. Teeming with scheming traders, servants and concubines, the quick-on-its-toes staccato prose is full of detail, although the narrative interruptions can at times overdescribe the characters' thoughts and movements. But Mitchell's clever weaving of thriller and love story within a historical setting makes for a gripping read, full of nuance and colour, as two cultures come together. Adam Wyeth
The Dead Republic
Roddy Doyle
Vintage, £7.99
The final volume of Roddy Doyle's historical trilogy begins as its central character, Henry Smart, returns to Ireland minus not only his leg and his youth but also his wife and children. In the previous books Henry overcame an impoverished Dublin upbringing to become a player in the war of independence (in A Star Called Henry), then got to be Louis Armstrong's manager in Chicago (in Oh, Play That Thing). Now grief and guilt are causing him to have blackouts, which gives the first third of this book a monochrome, out-of-time feel – even Henry's cushy job as consultant to John Ford on the film The Quiet Manprovides more grief than joy. As the book moves from Ford's Oirishry to the posturings of post-Thatcher republicanism, it's still in bleak black and white, but Henry is nothing if not a colourful character, and by the end his customary irreverence is tempered by benign, or perhaps despairing, wisdom. Bizarre, brave, elegiac and funny, Doyle's reimagining of Ireland Inc stands as both indictment and celebration. And the scene with Shergar is sheer genius. Arminta Wallace
The Life of Irène Némirovsky, Author of Suite Française
Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt
Vintage, £9.99
Her name, Némirovsky, meaning she "who knows no peace", proved eerily appropriate. Born in Kiev in 1903 to Jewish financier parents, exiled to Paris during the Bolshevik revolution, forced into hiding during the second World War, Irène Némirovsky compared her life to a film script or a "song of the world". She died in Auschwitz in 1942, leaving behind two daughters and a store of fiction. This is a scholarly biography of a literary paragon who found fame at 26 but whose work has only lately been resurrected. It is saturated with her writings, revealing her passions, hubris, moods and anxieties, as well as her thoughts on fiction, Jewishness and mothers (it was Némirovsky's hatred for her adulterous mother that, seemingly, caused her to write unstoppably). Russian social history, anti-Semitism and the Vichy regime's collusion with the Nazis are handled adroitly. Mostly, we get to understand this spirited storyteller and her love for France, the nation that rescued and ultimately rejected her. Maggie Armstrong
The Red Dust Road
Jackie Kay
Picador, £8.99
As a happy child growing up in Scotland Jackie Kay had been told that her birth father and mother met when he was a student at Aberdeen University in 1961. He had to return to Africa because he was betrothed, and was said to be "broken-hearted" at leaving her mother. As a mother herself, a poet, an academic and an MBE, she embarks on the journey to find both her birth parents. Kay is able to combine detective and literary work when, as a lecturer, she travels and stays at the home of the Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. That her birth parents do not welcome her, and that they live on separate continents (one in Scotland, the other in Nigeria), is the stuff of life writing, but it is unclear why a poet would want to use this genre. The taut moral trope of "the past is a foreign country" is so insistent that it makes the elegantly written Red Dust Roada salutary rather than an enthralling read. Kate Bateman