Best new books: April 2021

As the UK reopens for business, the scope of our April books roundup reflects the broadening of our horizons as we adjust to life post-lockdown. It features a major non-fiction study of human bodies and freedom, a memoir of identity and belonging, gothic short stories translated from Spanish, a postmodern thriller set in Berlin, a tale of a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and what might just be the cult hit of 2021: a novel about a woman’s relationship with a bear.
By Madeleine Feeny

Everybody: A Book About Freedom, by Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing’s genre-bending The Lonely City, fusing scholarship and memoir, was translated into 17 languages and spawned many imitations. Everybody – ‘a book about bodies in peril, and bodies as a force for change’ – is her first major non-fiction work since then. Investigating the life of maverick psychoanalyst and sexual evangelist Wilhelm Reich, Laing traces the long struggle for bodily freedom, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement. She explores the legacy of complex figures such as Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X, and argues that our rights to protest, migrate, reproduce or remain childless are being fiercely challenged today. Written with Laing’s trademark rigour and radical thinking, Everyone celebrates our bodies’ power – even in the information age – to resist oppression.

(Picador, 29 April)

Bear, by Marian Engel

First published in 1976, this rediscovered Canadian classic has been described by Margaret Atwood as ‘a strange and wonderful book.’ It follows a timid librarian who works relentless hours at the Heritage Institute. With nothing awaiting her at home, she has accepted her humdrum lot, which includes functional sex on her desk with the director of the Institute. Then she’s sent to a remote island to spend a summer cataloguing the estate of the late Colonel Cary. The presence of a bear comes as a surprise, but an intimacy develops between them, bringing fulfilment in unexpected ways. Blending folklore and realism, this is a funny and profound meditation on solitude, nature and desire.

(Daunt, 30 April)

My Phantoms, by Gwendoline Riley

Gwendoline Riley writes economical, sharply focused novels narrated in the first-person. First Love, a portrait of a toxic relationship, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2017. My Phantoms applies the same minute observation and unsparing ear for dialogue to a parent-child dynamic in which the roles are often reversed. To her daughter Bridget, an academic in her 40s, Helen Grant is a source of mystery and frustration: her strange intransigence, her fruitless attempts at happiness, her disastrous marriages – not least to Bridget’s bullish narcissist of a father. Bridget sees her mother once a year, but when Helen seeks to penetrate the barriers her daughter has erected, Bridget must balance their painful history with filial duty. This study of mother-daughter tensions is at once brutally funny and quietly devastating.

(Granta, 1 April)

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021, these short stories are gloriously gothic and unnerving. Mariana Enriquez is a prize-winning Argentinian writer whose work has been translated into over 20 languages. In the uncanny magical realist world of these tales, death, desire, madness and obsession stalk the streets of Enriquez’s native city of Buenos Aires. Babies come back from the dead, teenage girls wreak unspeakable revenge, and a chain of strange misfortunates tips a neighbourhood into crisis. If you enjoy the books of Daisy Johnson, Samanta Schweblin and Carmen Maria Machado, this modern horror collection is for you.

(Granta, 1 April)

Speak, Okinawa, by Elizabeth Miki Brina

A brave, redemptive memoir of growing up biracial as the daughter of an American soldier and an Okinawan war bride. Elizabeth Miki Brina’s mother was born in poverty after the Second World War, into a small island kingdom that had lost a third of its population to bombing. Okinawa was handed to the US after the war and became one of its largest military bases. The author’s father, a solider raised in uptown New York, married her mother and they returned to the US to fulfil the American dream. But their daughter always felt like an outsider. This is the story of her angry, wayward teens and the shift in perspective that came in her 30s, followed by reconciliation and atonement. An indelibly powerful tale of family history, identity and belonging.

(Granta, 1 April)

A Lonely Man, by Chris Power

From the author of the acclaimed short-story collection Mothers comes a metafictional thriller about an English writer, Robert, struggling to work on his first novel while living in Berlin. A chance encounter leads him to meet a fellow Englishman, hard-drinking and evasive, who gives a startling account of a Russian oligarch whose memoirs he was ghost-writing, who has recently been found hanged. But is Patrick really a hunted man? Robert is unsure what to believe but decides to appropriate Patrick’s story in order to revitalise his stalled writing efforts. Reflecting on male loneliness and alienation, this stylish tale of literary cat-and-mouse asks: where is the line between artistic inspiration and theft?

(Faber, 1 April)