As the days lengthen and restrictions ease, our thoughts turn to al fresco reading – the moment the weather catches up. Our pick of books published in May travels from Italy to Ireland, Paris to rural Punjab and features new novels from some of today’s finest writers: Rachel Cusk, Sunjeev Sahota, Lisa McInerney and Jhumpa Lahiri, as well as a third memoir from Deborah Levy and Natalia Ginzburg’s beautifully republished stories of postwar Italy.
By Madeleine Feeny
Rachel Cusk is one of our most distinctive and pioneering literary voices. Her Outline trilogy dismantled the conventions of fiction and helped fuel the popularity of autofiction over the past decade. Her new novel is modelled on another real life: that of female artist, Mabel Dodge Luhan – specifically her 1933 memoir of D.H. Lawrence’s visit to her home in Taos, New Mexico. Like its inspiration, Second Place depicts a charged relationship between two artists, although in Cusk’s novel Lawrence is replaced by a painter. Interrogating male privilege and female creative identity, this atmospheric, hypnotic novel reveals the perils of wishing to see oneself through an artist’s eyes.
(Faber, 6 May)
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In 2011 the American writer Jhumpa Lahiri – author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection Interpreter of Maladies and the Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Lowland, among others – moved from Brooklyn to Rome. She exiled herself from English and dedicated herself to studying Italian, an experience chronicled in her 2015 memoir In Other Words. Whereabouts is her first novel written in her adopted tongue – unusually, also self-translated into English. This haunting, dreamlike portrait of a woman alone in an Italian city explores female solitude and identity, the desire to cross borders, and the tension between security and freedom. Subtle, meditative and searching, it is a rare literary achievement.
(Bloomsbury, 4 May)
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Following on from Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living, the third memoir in Levy’s tripartite ‘living autobiography’ investigates property and possession. It finds the thrice-Booker-longlisted author nearing sixty, her daughters about to leave home, considering what constitutes her real estate, her legacy. As work takes her from London to Mumbai, Paris to Hydra, she wonders how to transform her fantasy property portfolio into reality. Wittily scrutinising the patriarchal narratives that restrict women, from Greek mythologies to Hollywood scripts, and the connections between art and life, Real Estate is an invigorating celebration of female autonomy and an imaginative meditation on home.
(Hamish Hamilton, 13 May)
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From the author of The Glorious Heresies, winner of the Women’s Prize, and The Blood Miracles, winner of the Encore Award, comes a riotous, technicolour state-of-the-nation novel about intersecting lives in Cork in 2019. Lisa McInerney is known for her unflinching portrayal of Ireland – a country of contradictions, always reinventing itself in the wake of colonialism, Catholicism, the Celtic Tiger – and this novel features a homecoming from Brexit Britain. Blending mordant wit, lyricism and humanity in its examination of gender, class, nationalism, love, music and motherhood, The Rules of Revelation is a tale for our tumultuous times, praised by the likes of Sally Rooney, Kevin Barry and Roddy Doyle.
(John Murray, 13 May)
Inspired by his family history, Booker Prize-shortlisted author Sunjeev Sahota’s multigenerational third novel interweaves a story of an alienated youth with that of his great-grandmother. In 1929, Mehar is a 16-year-old bride confined to the ‘china room’, a farm building in rural Punjab, along with two other newlywed women. All three have been married to three brothers; all three submit to conjugal intercourse under veil of darkness. In 1999, the narrator – fleeing an adolescence of racist exclusion and addiction in northern England – travels to that same farm, where his estrangement echoes his ancestor’s. China Room is a finely crafted tale of repeating trauma, oppression and the quest for freedom.
(Harvill Secker, 6 May)
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The Sicilian-born novelist, activist and chronicler of twentieth-century European life has experienced a revival in recent years, with modern fans including Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson and Tessa Hadley. Following on from the essay collection The Little Virtues and the novel Family Lexicon, Daunt Books are publishing two novellas set in postwar Italy, written in the 1940s and unavailable in Britain for thirty years. The Dry Heart is an intense, acutely observed portrait of an unhappy marriage that culminates in murder. The Road to the City is a devastating coming-of-age story of longing and loneliness. If you love Elena Ferrante and Françoise Sagan, these slender volumes are for you.
(Daunt, 20 May)
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