January: never exactly prime time for footloose adventures, and certainly not this year. Thank goodness for the cornucopia of reading matter landing in bookshops this month, in whose pages we’ll be taking refuge until the rain stops and the Covid subsides. Here’s our pick of the latest releases, which includes hotly anticipated novels from prize-winning authors, dazzling debuts and lens-shifting non-fiction.
Who could forget A Little Life, the must-read novel of 2015? Now its visionary author – the editor in chief of The New York Times’s T Magazine – has written another epic destined for the bestseller lists, but very different to its predecessor. Layered and profound, it’s a book about time that feels almost timeless: think Edith Wharton meets David Mitchell. Its tripartite structure comprises three New York stories set in three different periods: an alternate 19th-century fin de siècle where gay marriage is legal and the genders have equal rights, but race and class inequalities remain; a 1990s where AIDS is ravaging the gay population; and a late 21st century where pandemics assail the globe, disrupting the civic order and weakening humanity. Yanagihara’s immersive prose takes us inside her characters’ heads, and this emotional precision is balanced by an overarching sense of shrinking possibilities across time, as she explores entropy, mental and physical health, marginalisation, colonialism, inequality and America.
(Picador, Tuesday 11 January)
Read more ...
In February 2020 Helena Lee, features director of Harper’s Bazaar, founded the East Side Voices cultural salon to raise the visibility of East and Southeast Asian-heritage talent in Britain. Now she’s edited this conversation-starting collection of essays and poetry by 17 ESEA contributors, which aims to build empathy through storytelling and break the cycle of systemic nonrepresentation. It includes: Sharlene Teo on internalising the white gaze, and being mistaken for strangers; Katie Leung on being cast as Cho Chang, and racial stereotyping in acting; Romalyn Ante on her mother nursing in the Covid ward; Tash Aw on multi-layered identity; Rowan Hisayo Buchanan on names; and Zing Tsjeng on the rise in anti-Asian discrimination fuelled by the pandemic. What these diverse narratives share is a desire to honour, rather than elide difference: to acknowledge cultural complexity and celebrate the family, food and stories that comprise it.
(Sceptre, Thursday 20 January)
Read more ...
Tessa Hadley is that rara avis: a literary writer whose prose is as beautiful and characters as lifelike as her plots are compulsive. It’s almost impossible not to finish her books – which include The Past and Late in the Day – in a sitting, which is why you should find a clear day to settle down with her latest, Free Love. Set in the late 1960s, this is the story of a conventional London family whose lives are upturned when impulsive 40-year-old mother Phyllis falls in love with a younger man. Her personal awakening mirrors the public upheavals taking place across the world, challenging the old order. Contrasting suburbia with Ladbroke Grove, then a melting pot of cultures and ideas, Hadley vividly evokes the spirit of the age, the clash of tradition and modernity, and the lure of the era’s new values.
(Jonathan Cape, Thursday 20 January)
Read more ...
This searing portrait of a life from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliott was chosen by Barack Obama as one of his Books of the Year and as one of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2021. Based on nearly a decade’s reporting, it traces eight tumultuous years in the life of Dasani Coates, who was born at the turn of the millennium and came of age into an escalating homelessness crisis. As she leads her seven siblings from one New York shelter to the next, they grapple with hunger, violence, parental drug addiction and the child-protection system. But when a place at boarding school offers Dasani the chance to escape poverty, what does this mean for her family? This transformative true story of resilience and the cost of equality will haunt you long after you turn the last page.
(Hutchinson Heinemann, Thursday 27 January)
Read more ...
This sweeping and accomplished debut novel from the prize-winning poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers follows a young African-American woman, Ailey, as she traces her family’s roots in the deep South across two centuries, from the colonial slave trade through the American Civil War to the present day. An instant New York Times bestseller, the multigenerational saga was named one of the Top Ten Books of 2021 in The New York Times and The Washington Post, was selected as an Oprah Book Club pick, and was chosen as a book of a year by Kirkus, Time and NPR. In luminous prose, Jeffers delineates the everyday impact and ongoing aftereffects of oppression, bondage and trauma on Black American lives, with this mesmerising journey into the nation’s history.
(4th Estate, Thursday 20 January)
Read more ...
Acclaimed by Emma Cline, Nicole Flattery and Megan Nolan, this debut short story collection from 25-year-old British author Saba Sams announces the arrival of a striking new talent. Send Nudes includes the story Tenderloin, which was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize in 2019, and Overnight, which was published in The Stinging Fly, edited by Sally Rooney. Playing out in music festivals, student pubs, warehouse parties and on family holidays, these 10 stories explore the intricacies of coming of age as a young woman in modern Britain: the boundaries tested, the connections forged, the swell of desire, the sting of rejection. Wry, visceral, astute, they capture the intensity of adolescent self-consciousness and fledgling experience.
(Bloomsbury, Thursday 20 January)
Read more ...If you click «Log in with Facebook» and are not a Culture Whisper user, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and to our Privacy Policy, which includes our Cookie Use
.png)
