So much interesting fiction is landing in bookshops this month, whittling this list down has been testing. Yet here we are: one remarkable memoir, and five novels – four of them debuts – that balance light with dark and share a rare perspicacity about human relationships. Nights in: sorted.
Monica Ali, bestselling author of Brick Lane, is back after a ten-year hiatus. Her new novel, Love Marriage, is the addictive, scalpel-sharp tale of an impending wedding between two young Londoners from very different backgrounds: Joe Sangster, the son of an outspoken Primrose Hill feminist, and Yasmin Ghorami, the daughter of Bengali immigrants. In the Ghorami household, sex is never mentioned. By contrast, Harriet Sangster is writing a book about penises. When they meet, events take an unexpected turn, resurrecting painful secrets in both families’ pasts. Ali balances devilish satire with tenderness, as her characters reach for self-knowledge while grappling with sexual repression and awakening, British Muslim identity and discrimination, and family and freedom.
(Virago, 3 February)
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One for all the struggling creatives who’ve cursed their thankless jobs and ghastly flatshares. Aged twenty-four, Anna is a trainee opera singer struggling to make ends meet in London, unlike her fellow students, who seem to float on invisible currents of privilege. She starts singing jazz in a City bar, where she meets Max, a financier in his late thirties. Seduced by his confidence, their chemistry, and the window he opens into another, more adult world, Anna is drawn into a relationship that places increasing demands on her time and emotions. Caught between Max and her fledgling career, she realises she’s losing control. Funny, poised and darkly compelling, Imogen Crimp’s debut is catnip for Naoise Dolan fans.
(Bloomsbury, 3 February)
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The shocking memoir of a woman who had a serious relationship with an undercover policeman. Donna McLean met Carlo Neri at the anti-Iraq War protest in September 2002, and he moved in quickly. Three months later, he proposed, but he never introduced her to his family. His behaviour became erratic, and in November 2004 he moved out. Then, in July 2015, old friends contacted Donna: they suspected Carlo had been a spy cop investigating her activist friends. This is her courageous, affecting account of coming to terms with the truth, bringing a case against an unsympathetic, sometimes menacing police force resistant to accepting accountability, and campaigning for exposure and justice. It illuminates the devastating impact this abuse of power has had on her life and those of many other women.
(Hodder Studio, 3 February)
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You start off thinking Coco Mellors’s debut is simply an escapist novel about beautiful people drinking champagne and discussing Art – and, joyously, it does contain those elements – but then her vivid characterisation draws you in and you realise it's so much more. Cleopatra and Frankenstein depicts the impulsive marriage of Cleo, a twenty-four-year-old English artist, and Frank, an American ad man twenty years her senior, who meet on New Year’s Eve in New York, and the ripple effect their tumultuous relationship has on their circle of friends. Written with emotional insight and crackling dialogue, it’s about the pain and euphoria of love, the struggle to reconcile creative ambition with financial necessity, the shadows cast by family trauma, and the impulse to self-destruct. You’ll be hooked from the beginning.
Literary agent Abigail Bergstrom’s debut novel is a wry, poignant meditation on female shame, healing and friendship. When Mathilda’s father dies and her long-term boyfriend leaves her, her life becomes defined by lack. Still hollowed out months later, she senses the concern emanating from her flatmates – although she isn’t the only one approaching thirty with fear and self-loathing. But will the unorthodox fixes her friends suggest put Mathilda back together or tear her apart? What a Shame perceptively captures that daunting age when life suddenly feels serious. It’s about the rocky road to self-acceptance and learning to extricate what you want from the things society says you should want.
(Hodder & Stoughton, 3 February)
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This subtle, accomplished debut, a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, was inspired by the author’s father’s family mythology. Set against the heightened backdrop of wartime Britain, its split narrative intertwines the lives of two protagonists, both named Violet, to explore the way women’s lives are shaped by their ability, or not, to bear children. The first Violet is a young married woman whose first pregnancy is ectopic, necessitating a hysterectomy. The second travels to Naples with the women’s branch of the British Army to avoid facing the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy at home. Hyde’s spare, precise prose allows the reader space to draw moving parallels between these stories of thwarted and unwanted motherhood.
(Granta, 3 February)
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