Editorial reviews

Searing, lyrical, and ultimately devastating, Appanah’s latest novel might be her finest yet.

In The Other Bennet Sister, Hadlow builds an immersive and engaging new version of a familiar world; her approach feels at once true to the source material and to life.

To read this novel of shrouded pilgrimages is also to arrive at a meaning that is “bewitching, and utterly private, a secret for me, a single ship, a single concealed place”.

This is a delightful, mischievous, and mysterious collection that’s perfect for fans of Lydia Davis and Mary Ruefle.

Strange Hotel is a finely controlled, complex and emotionally absorbing novel that manages to burrow deep into the heart of something essential about the human experiences of love and loss.

Reading Strange Hotel is indeed a matter of strange immersion, and one that will often puzzle and sometimes frustrate the reader, but its portrait of sadness and alienation is, in the end, also strangely revivifying.

Washburn has given us a meditation on the tragedies of living too long in the darkness.

“The Book of V.” is a meditation on female power and powerlessness, the stories told about women and the ones we tell about and to ourselves.

A quiet study of a man struggling to find a serenity to quell his long-entrenched terror.

A rousing, funny, feminist workplace romp that also takes a frank look at modern poverty.

A heartbreaking yet hopeful debut.

Though ultimately unsatisfying as a mystery, it works as an existential parable, with a protagonist whose character is destiny.

This is a spellbinding, heartbreaking tale.

Greenwell’s book is a sort of wistful paean to the place where his protagonist lived in uneasy exile, or learned to grow up, or both.

Although the book is uneven, the things in Barn 8 that work are so aesthetically perfect and philosophically profound that it doesn’t matter much if the caper plot falls a little flat.

Complex and resonant.

With useful maps and stories within stories, this is an ingenious look at an often misunderstood country.

A timely and resonant novel.

If you enjoy books that keep you on edge, wondering how things will work out, then No Bad Deed is perfect for you. There are twists, followed by more twists, and plenty of excitement and mystery.

In addition to The Bad Seed, THE ONLY CHILD carries overt references to The Silence of the Lambs. It’s easy to imagine this suspenseful, multilayered novel being adapted into a pretty sinister film in its own right.