Best new books: winter 2020

Ghosts, by Dolly Alderton

Dolly Alderton won the hearts of millennials with her hit memoir Everything I Know About Love. Now, in her first foray into fiction, the High Low podcaster vividly captures 30-something single life. Nina Dean is a successful food writer whose life is upended when she braves her first app date – and falls headlong for textbook charmer, Max. It's the ideal time for a fairy-tale romance: Nina’s friends are lost to suburban procreation, and her mother’s in denial about her father’s dementia. But is Max too good to be true?

Tackling ghosting and gaslighting, this bestselling novel offers a bracing critique of modern dating culture. As fans would hope, Alderton unleashes her satirical pen on smug married gal-pals, dreary plus-ones and gruesome hen parties – but her sensitive depiction of dementia’s impact on a family imbues Ghosts with real emotional depth.

(Fig Tree, 8 October)

Earthlings, by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

What if you don't want the same things everyone else does? This was the question posed by Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata’s debut novel, an international bestseller that probed the tyranny of social norms. Her new novel Earthlings revisits this idea, but is an altogether more provocative, disturbing read. As a child, Natsuki believes she and her cousin Yuu hail from a distant planet, and await a spaceship to carry them home. But when the cousins transgress and are parted by the family, they make a pledge to survive, no matter what. In adulthood, Natsuki has learnt to conform.

A sham marriage keeps intrusive questions and childhood trauma at bay, until the past rears its head, threatening her hard-won equilibrium. Possessed of a dazzlingly kooky imagination, Murata uses surrealism to address themes of abuse, alienation and survival. The effect is shocking, funny and darkly hypnotic.

(Granta, 8 October)

The Searcher, by Tana French

The Wych Elm confirmed Tana French’s reputation as a suspense writer in a class of her own. Now she’s back with another sophisticated page-turner, a so-called ‘neo-western’. Shattered from a messy divorce and 25 years in the Chicago police force, Cal Hooper is starting a simpler life in the west of Ireland – whose landscape and rhythms are hauntingly evoked. But the back of Cal's neck keeps prickling and, sure enough, trouble soon finds him. A local kid approaches him for help: his brother’s been missing for six months but the police aren’t interested. Cal becomes mired in a complex case that reveals the impenetrability of small communities, and shakes his faith in the system he represents.

A masterclass in moral ambiguity and nuance, The Searcher is especially resonant at a time that traditional justice systems are coming under scrutiny.

(Viking, 5 November)

Poor, by Caleb Femi

Twenty-eight-year-old Caleb Femi, the Young People’s Laureate for London from 2016 to 2018, counts Michaela Coel and Max Porter among his fans. Shaped by a 1990s upbringing on the North Peckham estate, his elegiac, confronting poems speak of boyhood, fraternity, violence, desire and inequality. His formally inventive verse fuses spiritual rhythms with street slang, splicing pain with humour. Because of the Times ends with a sucker punch: the death of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor, whom Femi knew. Thirteen chronicles the police’s discriminatory treatment of Black youth, regardless of age. Survivor’s Guilt, or Anikulapo explores how it feels to live when many of your peers have died young.

Femi’s arresting, lyrical photographs of Peckham – the parties, the people, the concrete – are interwoven with his words. A must-read for Londoners, Caleb Femi’s poetry is a paean to city’s chaotic, brutal beauty.

(Penguin, 5 November)

Cobble Hill, by Cecily von Ziegesar

From the author of Gossip Girl comes a modern comedy of manners about midlife misbehaviour and stagnation, fading fame and creativity. When the British author Roy Clarke and his editor wife Wendy move into the well-heeled Brooklyn neighbourhood of Cobble Hill, it causes a ripple of interest, although he’s hardly the first celebrity. There’s also former rock star Stuart Little and his gorgeous wife Mandy, who’s bunking off life by faking illness, and the eccentric art/design couple Elizabeth and Tupper Paulsen. Peaches, the school nurse, feels unbearably ordinary by comparison. As the characters’ lives and children become entangled, one thing's clear: these parents have a lot of growing up to do.

Von Ziegesar displays all the comic flair and ear for dialogue that made Gossip Girl such a hit. Even the phoney Britishisms can’t diminish the pleasure of this smartly observed novel.

(Orion, 10 November)

Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam

Shortlisted for the US’s National Book Award, this New York Times-bestselling apocalypse novel strikes to the heart of the moment: is anything more terrifying than the unknown? When Amanda and Clay take their kids for a week’s vacation in a luxurious Long Island rental, they expect no drama. They certainly don’t expect a nocturnal knock on the door heralding the house's owners, an older couple seeking refuge from an unexplained power outage in New York. Forced into an uneasy unity, they await information, but the TV, internet and phones are dead. Panic spirals as they confront the limits of their own rationality, and their own impotence.

Writing in taut, intense prose, Alam excels at social nuance, and this novel’s compulsive power lies as much in his acute depiction of the micro-tensions of ownership, intrusion, race and wealth, as in the chilling portrait of fear.

(Bloomsbury, 12 November)

A Promised Land, by Barack Obama

It seems serendipitous that, as another Democrat claims the White House and a new era dawns, the first volume of Barack Obama’s long-awaited memoirs lands in bookshops. This frank, intimate memoir traces his personal and political journey: from the roots of his ambitions to the landmark victory in 2008 when he became the first Black president of the United States; from the realities of governing to its impact on his family.

Moving from the Oval Office to Moscow, Cairo to Beijing, he explores the scope of presidential power, offering behind-the-scenes insights into the challenges of his first term: the global financial crisis, hostility to Obamacare, foreign policy in Afghanistan and Russia, and the special forces operation that led to the death of Osama bin Laden.

His wife’s record-breaking book Becoming is a tough act to follow, but this is the essential memoir of 2020.

(17 November)

Strangers, by Rebecca Tamás

Acclaimed by the likes of Sinéad Gleeson, Melissa Harrison and Sara Baume, and selected as a London Review Bookshop book of the week, the first essay collection from poet Rebecca Tamás is a word-of-mouth indie favourite. Presenting a refreshingly vital perspective, these seven essays interweave cultural criticism with personal reflection to explore a bold new ecological vision for a world under attack.

Drawing connections between the environment, the arts, politics and history, Tamás argues that our current state of emergency is the result of a protracted crisis of inequality, but that if we could rebalance the relationship between human and non-human – and perceive the latter as our equal – we would unlock fresh possibilities. Beautifully published by independent Stoke Newington press Makina Books, this is an inventive, stirring collection.

(Makina Books, 8 October)

The Purpose of Power, by Alicia Garza

In 2013, Alicia Garza wrote a Facebook post responding to yet another acquittal in a trial investigating the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, and her friend Patrisse Cullors shared it with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. The most significant social movement of the last decade was born. Now Garza – who already had over a decade’s experience as an activist, before co-founding Black Lives Matter – shares her wisdom on organising people to make change happen. Her focus is on collective grassroots action that goes deeper than hashtags and celebrity. Blending personal and political history, she also looks to the future, asking how we might continue the work of challenging inequality. This is a rousing, rigorous book to enlighten and inspire.

(Doubleday, 22 October)

Also not to be missed is Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods, Otegha Uwagba's piercingly astute essay on racism and anti-racism through the prism of Black Lives Matter. (4th Estate, 12 November).

Lost Cat, by Mary Gaitskill

This incisive essay about love, loss, care and responsibility is the closest work yet to a memoir from the author of Bad Behaviour. In Tuscany, Mary Gaitskill encountered some stray kittens and, almost involuntarily, adopted one-eyed Gattino, taking him back to the US. When he disappeared, Gaitskill’s grief was so abject, so all-encompassing, as to seem disproportionate. But, she asks, who gets to decide the appropriate level of love, or pain? Could it be that each wound acts as a gateway to other, past tragedies – such as the death of her father, a difficult, disappointed man who struggled to express emotion? Or the protective yet fraught love she feels for two inner-city kids she fostered, despite the relationship’s many tensions.

Like Gattino himself, Lost Cat’s slightness belies its impact. In its precise, economical pages, Gaitskill excavates the human soul.

(Daunt Books, 5 November)

To the End of the World, by Rupert Everett

Rupert Everett’s voice is so distinctive, confiding and irreverent that it’s a blow when you finish the book and remember he's not your friend, but an A-list actor (despite his gloom on the subject of his career). The third volume of his bestselling memoirs finds him in fabulously acerbic, self-deprecating form, flogging a dying horse of a project: a script he's written about his idol, Oscar Wilde. The film – The Happy Prince – actually turned out very well, but it’s not Everett’s way to miss an opportunity for a good laugh at his own expense.

Little surprise that he’s become as famous for his books as his acting, for he’s an excellent writer – ironic, observant, elegiac – who shares a knack for well-turned witticisms with his hero. Among other things, he’s deliciously candid on his misspent youth, the painful caprices of showbiz, and incurring Joan Collins’ displeasure.

(Little, Brown, 8 October)