From eagerly-anticipated debuts and world-bending adventures in time to the chilling lessons of history, we round up the books to put on your reading list this April.
Book award’s season continues this month with exciting announcements due for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker International Prize as well as the Desmond Elliot, Orwell and Wellcome prizes. April has plenty of fresh reads to offer too. We begin with a fantastic line-up of crime fiction and thrillers led by the paperback release of Lee Child’s latest, which sees Reacher walking The Midnight Line into the deserts of Wyoming where trouble inevitably looms. It’s a still darker path that waits for Inspector Macbeth in Jo Nesbo’s take on The Scottish Play for The Hogarth Shakespeare series. A troubled drug addict, Nesbo’s Macbeth treads a psychological tightrope between ruthless ambition and murderous paranoia in this electrifying revision.
Then we look to the past, for two impressive historical whodunnits. Returning after the success of his seventeenth-century Waterstones Thriller of the Month, Ashes of London, Andrew Taylor delivers a tour-de-force sequel in The Fire Court. The precarious lives of his two protagonists, Cat and Marwood, are once more drawn inexorably together and into a complex web of murder, political intrigue and powerful enmity. Turning to Golden Age crime for her inspiration, Jessica Fellowes impressive debut novel The Mitford Murders – now in paperback – is ideal reading for those with a taste for classic crime. Combining a country manor, a notorious real family and a murder on a train, it’s a recipe for a perfectly pitched mystery that’s set to be the first in a new series.
From country manors to a residential thriller. Our House is an exceptionally well-plotted novel by author of The Swimming Pool, Louise Candlish, woven around contemporary family drama and the property crisis. Beginning with the unimaginable scenario of a woman coming home to find strangers moving into a house she doesn’t believe she’s sold, Candlish unravels a story of a devastating crime and a marriage built on deception – it’s gripping stuff.
Elsewhere in fiction, there’s invention and re-invention aplenty. In Madeleine Miller’s glorious Circe - her first novel since her Orange Prize-winning The Song of Achilles - the classical world revolves again for a reimagined story of the mythical sorceress and seducer stepping out from her bit-part role in Homer’s Odyssey to take centre-stage. And, in a change of pace, the novelist David Peace take a leap from the gritty Yorkshire realism that made his name to give us Patient X, an inventive symphony of stories based on the life and works of Rashomon author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of Japan's greatest and most influential writers.
There are three impressive new debuts to look out for too. Included in the Independent’s ‘10 Novels to Look out for in 2018’, Libby Page’s The Lido brings together two women from very different generations in a life-changing friendship forged from a campaign to save their local lido. Its themes of kindness, compassion and community also resonate in A.J. Pearce’s hugely funny and moving novel Dear Mrs Bird, set in the offices of a 1940’s agony aunt. April also sees the paperback release of Omar El Akkad’s acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel American War which hones in on the fracturing of American society and the psychology of radicalisation.
In non-fiction we lead with To Throw Away Unopened, a bitingly frank and funny new book from icon Viv Albertine. The follow up to the bestselling Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys, it’s part-memoir, part record of truth-telling and self-discovery that’s as much about modern womanhood as her own inimitable life.
For those looking to revitalise their recipe repertoire, there’s a double treat in store. Already an online sensation, BOSH!: the Cookbook is a revolution in plant-based cookery that’s designed to bring fast, easy-to-cook meat-free food to everyone’s tables whilst Diana Henry’s latest, How to Eat a Peach, advocates a slower, more contemplative approach to the relationship between recipes, family and memory.
Lastly, we’ve a collection of new titles to change how you see the world, led by physicist Carlo Rovelli’s follow-up to Reality is not What it Seems. A mind-bending journey of temporal discovery, The Order of Time is a book that’s as beautifully packaged as it is illuminating. It comes alongside a wealth of new history, including the much-anticipated release of Christopher de Hamel’s, award-winning Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, a book which merges history, memoir, and travelogue with stunning visual imagery. Also in paperback, journalist Bridget Kendall’s revisionary history of The Cold War brings together a unique collection of personal stories illustrating the scale of impact of the global conflict. It’s a book that’s complemented by Timothy Snyder’s new book The Road to Unfreedom. Casting a probing and interrogative eye over the ongoing interrelationship between Russia, Europe and America, it’s hard to imagine a book more of-the-moment.
Jack Reacher is having a bad day. Reacher sees a West Point class ring in a pawn shop window. Reacher was a West Pointer too, and he knows what she went through to get it. He'll have to go through bikers, cops, crooks, and low-life muscle.If she's ok, he'll walk away. If she's not ... he'll stop at nothing.
The gripping new thriller from the author of The Snowman inspired by one of Shakespeare's darkest and most psychologically haunting plays. Combining classic Nesbo noir with an interrogation into the psychology of crime, Macbeth is a novel that turns the tables on criminal and detective, victim and perpetrator, leading readers down an ever-darkening path.
Somewhere in the soot-stained ruins of Restoration London, a killer has gone to ground. The Great Fire has ravaged London, wreaking destruction and devastation wherever its flames spread. Now, guided by the incorruptible Fire Court, the city is slowly rebuilding, but times are volatile and danger is only ever a heartbeat away.
A Golden Age-style mystery bursting with period detail and set amid the Mitford household, The Mitford Murders is the glittering start to a thrilling and sumptuous new series written by Jessica Fellowes, author of the bestselling Downton Abbey books. Drawing on the real life eccentricities of one of Bitain's most notorious and glamorous families, this is historical detective fiction at its best.
A gripping psychological drama about the lies within a marriage and the real cost of what we think we own. When Fi Lawson arrives home to find strangers moving into her house, she is plunged into confusion. How can this other family possibly think the house is theirs? What has her husband hidden from her - and what has she hidden from him? And will either survive the chilling truth?
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From the imaginative power that summoned the global bestseller The Song of Achilles, Orange Prize-winning author Madeline Miller returns with an electrifying take on Greek Myth’s most misunderstood deity: the proud and vengeful Circe.
An extraordinarily inventive, virtuoso novel inspired by the stories of one of Japan's most revered and influential writers, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who died at the age of 35. An intense, passionate, haunting paean to one writer and an extraordinary life cut too short, it's also a sharply evocative novel that examines the role of the artist in times which darkly mirror our own.
Meet Rosemary, 86, and Kate, 26: dreamers, campaigners, outdoor swimmers... Together they are determined to make a stand, and to prove that the pool is more than just a place to swim - it is the heart of the community. An uplifting novel about the importance of friendship, the value of community, and how ordinary people can protect the things they love.
London, 1941. Emmeline Lake and her best friend Bunty are trying to stay cheerful despite the Luftwaffe making life thoroughly annoying for everyone. Emmeline finds herself typing letters for the formidable Henrietta Bird, agony aunt of Woman's Friend magazine. Dear Mrs Bird by is a love letter to the enduring power of friendship and the courage of ordinary people in extraordinary times.
Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she is turned into a deadly instrument of war.
With the inimitable blend of humour, vulnerability, and intelligence that makes Viv Albertine, one of our finest authors working today, her new book, To Throw Away Unopened, smashes through layers of propriety and leads us into a new place of savage self-discovery.
Want to cook ridiculously good plant-based food from scratch but have no idea where to start? With over 140 incredibly easy and outrageously tasty all plants meals, BOSH! The Cookbook will be your guide. Whether you're already sold on the plant-based lifestyle or you simply want to incorporate more meat, dairy and egg-free meals into your week, BOSH! The Cookbook is your plant-based bible.
From her early childhood habit of recording delicious recipes in exercise books, How to Eat a Peach is the supreme fusion of taste and memory. This is food to take you places, from an afternoon at the seaside in Brittany to a sultry evening eating mezze in Istanbul.
The bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics takes us on a journey to discover the meaning of time. With his extraordinary charm and sense of wonder, bringing together science, philosophy and art, Rovelli unravels time's mystery. Enlightening and consoling, this book hows that to understand ourselves we need to reflect on time - and to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves.
As fascinating as it is erudite, de Hamel's modern classic traces the elaborate stories behind twelve of the most famous manuscripts in existence, reflecting on these artefacts' enormous impact on human history.
From pilots making food drops and Japanese fishermen affected by H-bomb testing to families fleeing the Korean War and children whose parents were victims of McCarthy's Red Scare, in this meticulously researched account, the accompaniment to a landmark BBC R4 series, Bridget Kendall explores the Cold War through the eyes of those who experienced it first-hand.
In this visionary work of contemporary history, Timothy Snyder shows how Russia works within the West to destroy the West. But this threat presents an opportunity to better understand our future: equality or oligarchy, individualism or totalitarianism, truth or lies? The Road to unfreedom helps us to see our world as if for the first time. It is necessary reading for any citizen of a democracy.
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