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FICTION

DEMON COPPERHEAD Barbara Kingsolver Faber £20

Kingsolver has long been a Dickens devotee, and her retelling of David Copperfield, set in Appalachia at the start of the current opioid crisis, is a triumph. Its opening paragraph is full of the ‘gallows humour and lapelgrabbing verve’ that our critic loved, and throughout it’s powered by larger-than-life characters, a deep sense of place and electrifying twists of fate.

OUR MISSING HEARTS Celeste Ng Abacus £20

Enfolded within this intricate dystopian fable is a paean to the power of books and all who love them, from readers and writers to humble librarians, who’ll turn out to be part of an underground resistance movement. Its hero is Bird, a boy on a quest to find his long-lost mother, mining the stories she told him when he was small for clues.

LUCY BY THE SEA Elizabeth Strout Viking £14.99

You needn’t have read Strout’s earlier novels about author Lucy Barton to delight in this latest instalment. It begins as Covid arrives in Manhattan and, at the insistence of her exasperating ex-husband, Lucy retreats with him to Maine. Reflections on family, loss and a tough and troubling childhood fill pages enlivened by wry wisdom and humour.

SHRINES OF GAIETY Kate Atkinson Doubleday £20

Follow Atkinson to 1920s Soho, where the inimitable Nellie Coker rules over a demi-monde teeming with starlets, gangsters and toffs. She has ambitions for her children, but with enemies on both sides of the law, can she survive to fulfil them? Exuberant, immersive storytelling featuring intrigue and betrayal is matched with wit

and tenderness.

YOUNG MUNGO Douglas Stuart Picador £16.99

Our critic called Booker-winner Stuart’s second novel ‘bleakly brilliant’. Like his first, it’s set in 1990s Glasgow, where shy teenager Mungo falls for a boy from the other side of the sectarian divide. Bigotry, violence and a thoroughly sinister fishing trip ensue, yet no matter how dark it gets, writing this vivid and heartrending creates its own radiance.

LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY Bonnie Garmus Doubleday £16.99

The 1960s trappings and idiosyncratic wit of this year’s blockbuster debut are instantly appealing, but it’s also a narrative with real bite. Its heroine is Elizabeth Zott, a whip-smart scientist who accidentally becomes the host of a hit TV cookery series, using it to empower housewives across America. Uplifting and irresistibly zany, the novel also features a show-stealing mutt named Six-Thirty.

SUNDIAL Catriona Ward Viper £8.99

The Mojave Desert provides a menacing backdrop in the new novel from the author of The Last House On Needless Street. Once its mother and daughter protagonists are installed in the wilderness, what starts out as suburban domestic noir morphs into a taut, twisty tale of psychological horror, drawing on toxic family relationships and CIA experiments.

ACT OF OBLIVION

Robert Harris

Hutchinson Heinemann £22 Colonels Edward Whalley and William Goffe were among the signatories of Charles I’s death warrant. In Restoration-era England they became wanted men, and Harris’s classy historical thriller imagines the fugitives being pursued across the Atlantic by a fictional official intent on bringing them to justice. It’s pacy and tense, and the pungently evoked past offers up some shrewd present-day parallels.

BAD ACTORS Mick Herron Baskerville £18.99

The latest book in Herron’s satirical espionage series, this is an ingeniously structured caper that finds his misfit ‘slow horses’ tasked with foiling a Russian intelligence operation in Westminster. Herron seems primed to take up John le Carré’s mantle while simultaneously channelling the best of Ian Fleming.

A WORLD OF CURIOSITIES

Louise Penny

Hodder & Stoughton £16.99

The 18th title in the Gamache series, but newbies needn’t worry about starting with Penny’s chief inspector on a case that will stir up tragic memories and trigger fresh fears in the Quebec village of Three Pines. Look out for hidden messages, puzzles within puzzles, and some resonant ruminations on forgiveness and redemption.

Books Of The Year

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