Number one with a bullet in my picks for this spring is Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time. If you, like me (and more importantly, like Kaliane Bradley), got deeply obsessed with the television show The Terror during lockdown, this is the book for you: the cleverest, most imaginative, most well-written HMS Erebus fan fiction you’ll ever have the pleasure to read. Come for the fun time travel premise; stay for the romance! sex! postcolonial discourse! generational trauma! hot repressed naval officer! Great Plague-era lesbian navigating Tinder! If you don’t already have a debilitating crush on Commander Graham Gore, prepare yourself.
Also in my picks: Allen Bratton brings Shakespeare’s Prince Hal to 21st century London in the funny and devastating Henry Henry; Sarah Perry is on excellent form, exploring love, faith and astronomy in Enlightenment; the second novel from Holly Williams, The Start of Something, is a La Ronde for the 21st century – ten brilliantly drawn glimpses into the lives of ten people during ten interlocking sexual encounters; Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite is a fascinating and generous exploration of the generational divide as it plays out between a boomer novelist and his millennial playwright daughter; food writer Kate Young’s first work of fiction Experienced is a fun, sexy queer rom-com about working out who you are and what you want after everyone else already has; and Glen James Brown’s Mother Naked is a novel in the form of a medieval gleeman’s monologue, inspired by a single payment entered into Durham’s Cathedral rolls for the lowest-paid performer in over 200 years of records.
From the publisher:
'Holy smokes this novel is an absolute cut above! Exciting, surprising, intellectually provocative, weird, radical, tender and moving. I missed it when I was away from it. I will hurry to re-read it. Make room on your bookshelves for a new…
From the publisher:
They knew each other because their families knew each other: had known each other, for a long time.An elegant, audacious and blisteringly funny portrait of inheritance, defiance and love - from a major new talent'Carnal and…
From the publisher:
‘Bold, playful, generous and lush, it’s a story that feels both timeless and urgent – I loved it. Gorgeously and relentlessly queer!’ DAISY BUCHANANA lover. A bartender. A husband. An artist. A student.A poet. A…
From the publisher:
What happens when we stop idolising the generations above us? Stop idolising our own parents?What happens when we become frightened of the generations below us? Frightened of our own children?The Aeolian islands, 2010. Sophia, on the cusp…
From the publisher:
The sexy, most romantic debut novel of 2024'Clever, sexy and joyful. I loved it' BETH O'LEARY, AUTHOR OF THE FLATSHARE'A fizzing roller-coaster of a rom-com. The sexiest book you'll read all year and the most…
From the publisher:
An unforgettable story of love, faith and science, Enlightenment is Sarah Perry’s finest novel to dateThomas Hart and Grace Macauley are fellow worshippers at the Bethesda Baptist chapel in the small Essex town of Aldleigh.…
From the publisher:
The City of Durham, 1434. Out of a storm, an aging minstrel arrives at the cathedral to entertain the city’s most powerful men.Mother Naked is his name, and the story he’s come to tell is the Legend of the Fell Wraith: the…
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