As summer draws to a close there are some amazing books waiting in the wings (or on the bookshelves) ready for you to open. From the end of August through to November publishers release their ‘big titles’. These include literary stars, authors with a huge following, or a new book from an author who’s previous touched the heart of many.
Readers have been waiting all year for some of these books and we have selected a few that we can almost feel the anticipation for.
The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier (£20, 12th September, HarperCollins)
Girl with a Pearl Earring made her name but her subsequent novels have established her as one of the most highly regarded writers of historical fiction. The story starts in Murano in 1486. Women are not meant to work with glass, but Orsola Rosso flouts convention to save her family from ruin. She works in secret, knowing her creations must be perfect to be accepted by men. But perfection may take a lifetime.
Skipping like a stone through the centuries, we follow Orsola as she hones her craft through war and plague, tragedy and triumph, love and loss. The beads she creates will adorn the necks of empresses and courtesans from Paris to Vienna – but will she ever earn the respect of those closest to her? Tracy Chevalier is a master of her own craft, and The Glassmaker is vivid, inventive, spellbinding: a virtuoso portrait of a woman, a family and a city that are as everlasting as their glass.
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (3rd Oct, Pan Macmillan, £22)
From the Booker-prize winning author of The Line of Beauty comes a dark, luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from one of the finest writers of our age. Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school.
This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles’ envy and violence. As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys’ careers will diverge dramatically. Moving and beautifully written this is one that will stay with you long after the story has ended.
Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer (Aug 29th, Simon & Schuster, £22)
Bob is well-loved not for his comedy and TV appearances, but now for his fiction too: the The Satsuma Complex became a number one Sunday Times bestseller, and won the Bollinger Everyman prize for Comic Fiction. So fans are waiting hungrily for more of his surreal humour with the publication of The Avocado Complex, which, as Bob says, contains excitement, fear and planning applications.
Gary Thorn is struggling with a big decision. Should he stay in London, wallowing in the safety of his legal job in Peckham and eating pies with his next door neighbour, Grace and her dog Lassoo, or should he move to Brighton, where his girlfriend Emily is about to open The Hotel Avocado? Either way, he’d be letting someone down. But sinister forces are gathering in a cloud of launderette scented-vape smoke, and the arrival of the mysterious Mr Sequence puts Gary in an even worse predicament: soon he might be dead. All Gary wants is a happy life. But he also wants to be alive to enjoy it…
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (24th Sept, Faber, £20)
Normal People became a multimillion-copy bestseller as well as a hit TV series. Her fourth novel, Intermezzo, is an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable, but in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother.
Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Playground by Richard Powers (26th Sept, Cornerstone, £20)
We’ve been championing The Overstory by Powers for years (you’ll never look at a tree in the same way again), and we also loved the incredibly moving and thought-provoking Bewilderment, so we can’t wait to dive in to his forthcoming book which promises to be an exhilaratingly entangled narrative that encompasses such themes as the tension between economics and environment, climate change, AI and colonialism. Set on a Polynesian island as residents prepare to vote on a proposed seasteading project led by an unidentified American billionaire we follow four lives that become interlinked. Powers is brilliant at tackling the important topics of our time with psychological insight and intelligent, gripping writing. We are not surprised this has made it onto the Booker Longlist.
Precipice by Robert Harris (29th August, Cornerstone, £22)
The Berkshire based no. 1 bestselling author, Robert Harris, is the master of the intelligent thriller. You would be hard-pressed to find another author that weaves together fact and fiction so expertly, and with so much pace and suspense. Precipice has been heralded as ‘Vintage Harris’. It’s Summer in 1914 – the world is on the brink of catastrophe. In London, 26-year-old Venetia Stanley – aristocratic, clever, bored, reckless – is having a love affair with the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, a man more than twice her age. He writes to her obsessively, sharing the most sensitive matters of state. As Asquith reluctantly leads the country into war with Germany, a young intelligence officer is assigned to investigate a leak of top secret documents – and suddenly what was a sexual intrigue becomes a matter of national security that will alter the course of political history.
Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers (29th August, Orion, £20)
Small Pleasures by this author is beloved by many readers – the sort of novel that once read you want to share immediately. So it was with slight trepidation I read an early copy of Shy Creatures. I need not have worried.
Helen Hansford is in her thirties and an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital where she has been having a long love affair with Gil: a charismatic, married doctor. One afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance from a derelict house not far from Helen’s home. A 37 year old man called William Tapping, with a beard down to his waist, has been discovered along with his elderly aunt. Though he has been shut up in the house for decades, it emerges that William is a talented artist. Helen is determined to discover his story. This is a life-affirming novel about all the different ways we can be confined, how ordinary lives are built of delicate layers of experience, the joy of freedom and the transformative power of kindness.
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig (29th August, Canongate, £20)
At one point it seemed like Matt Haig’s previous book – the No. 1 bestseller, The Midnight Library – was being read by every book group in the country. Now readers looking for an uplifting, life-affirming new novel from the author can open The Life Impossible.
“What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet”: ‘When retired Maths teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the Balearics Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past. Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (12th Sept, Viking, £22)
This chap needs no introduction. From the number one bestselling author of The Thursday Murder Club series (which has also just been made into a film – release date tbc), comes a brand new series.
Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favourite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now. Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job.
Then a dead body, a bag of money and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a deadly enemy?
A change of detectives and scene has not stopped Osman’s latest from becoming a huge hit.