THE BEST NEW FICTION

Case Study Graeme Macrae Burnet

Saraband £14.99

A woman suspects maverick therapist Arthur Collins Braithwaite of causing her sister’s suicide and begins to visit him under an assumed identity in order to gather evidence. Her accounts of these

1960s sessions apparently came into the possession of Burnet who intersperses them with his biography of Braithwaite. You’ll be completely beguiled by this sly, darkly comic offering with its unreliable narrator and equally unreliable author.

Neil Armstrong

Chronicles From The Land Of

The Happiest People On Earth

Wole Soyinka Bloomsbury Circus £20

Nigeria has had no sterner critic than its Nobel laureate playwright Soyinka. His first novel in half a century is both an elegant whodunnit and a political satire lampooning the ‘People’s Steward’ presiding over a Board of Happiness and Festival of the People’s Choice. It is a ponderous yarn, with too many in-jokes for most readers, but there are some gloriously sarcastic passages.

Max Davidson

Three Sisters Heather Morris

Zaffre £16.99

From the bestselling author of The Tattooist Of Auschwitz comes another heartwrenching, deftly told tale of the triumph of the human spirit over evil. This is the real story of three Jewish sisters from Slovakia who survive the horrors of Auschwitz and a death march across Europe before voyaging to Israel. The novel’s slightly saccharine sensibility feels inappropriate but it is hard not to be moved by such a chronicle.

Simon Humphreys

Silverview John le Carré

Viking £20 A year after his death, one last le Carré novel emerges. It’s a short, elegiac book, the story of a young Suffolk bookseller who becomes fascinated by a mysterious elderly customer. There’s not much in the way of action but instead a serpentine investigation into how a career spy can balance their morality with the demands of the job. A fitting coda to the work of our greatest spy novelist. John Williams