THE BEST NEW FICTION

Juno Loves Legs

Karl Geary

Harvill Secker £18.99 Geary’s second novel is a luminous ode to an unforgettable friendship forged between two misfits in the dark days of 1980s Dublin. Juno and Legs are volatile and vulnerable. Caught up in cataclysmic home lives, and at the mercy of callous clergy and cruel classmates at school, the duo find defiant salvation in each other’s company until a brutal act separates them. It’s a story saturated with hardship and heartbreak, but Geary’s pared-back, poetic prose and radiant characterisation transform all the haunted hopelessness into something sublime.

Cursed Bread Sophie Mackintosh

Hamish Hamilton £16.99

In the early 1950s, Elodie looks back on mysterious events in the small French town where her husband was the baker. They begin with the arrival of the beautiful Violet and her diplomat husband, whose relationship comes to obsess her. The two women form a close, almost sexual bond, but most of the locals harbour suspicions of the newcomers – which prove to be well founded. Mackintosh’s macabre and sensuous novel is often overwritten but packs a punch nevertheless.

Wandering Souls

Cecile Pin Fourth Estate £14.99

Pin’s intimate debut shifts between multiple perspectives to tell the story of Thi Anh, who is only 16 when she sets off on a perilous voyage from Vietnam to Hong Kong, her two younger brothers in tow. It’s 1978, and her parents have promised to follow with the rest of her siblings, but when they fail to arrive, it’s down to Anh to secure their new lives in faraway Britain. Tenderness, courage and the balm of storytelling provide glimmers of salvation amid a wrenching portrait of loss.

I Will Find You Harlan Coben

Century £20

David Burroughs is serving a life sentence for murdering his young son, Matthew. Not even his ex-wife truly believes in his innocence.

That’s before his sister-in-law spots a boy who is the spitting image of Matthew. Such is Coben’s world, a place where ordinary folk are regularly confronted by the seemingly impossible. This may not be the most plausible of his stories, but it certainly delivers pace and the requisite sugar rush of excitement.