Land by Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel follows Tomás, an Irish patriarch-cartographer working on the British Ordnance Survey mapping project in post-famine Ireland, says the FT. He is transformed by an encounter with an ancient, unrecorded site, which leads to an experience that changes the way he views himself and his country. It’s a story “replete with intensely emotive renderings of family stresses, strains and loss”.
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Whistler by Ann Patchett
When protagonist Daphne unexpectedly encounters her former stepfather years after they were involved in a near-fatal car crash, the pair get a chance to reconnect. What follows is an unravelling of what she understood of her mother’s failed marriage and a reflection on how fleeting relationships manage to acquire immense emotional power. Few novelists capture the wistfulness of suburban life better than Ann Patchett, says The Telegraph. This is “a comfort read for a warm summer afternoon”.
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Departures by Julian Barnes
In what is expected to be his final novel, Julian Barnes mixes fiction with memoir in this reflection on failed love and his own mortality. Half the book tracks a decades-spanning romance between university friends, while the other half offers a poignant look at the deaths of close contemporaries such as Martin Amis. Meditating deeply on memory, says The Times, it’s a “beautifully hybrid, bittersweet send-off from a master of the English contemporary novel”.
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Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Caro Claire Burke’s “utterly ubiquitous” debut is worth the hype, says The Independent. It takes one of the most debated internet topics of late – the rise of the trad-wife influencer – and imagines what would happen if one of these “homesteading Instagram queens” were forced to actually live out the pioneer life that she espouses on social media. The writing is sharp and pacy, and Burke is adept at pulling the (handloomed) rug from under our feet.
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The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet
Lyse Doucet’s sweeping social history of the Inter-Continental, Kabul’s first luxury hotel, offers all the richness and narrative pull of fiction, “and then some”, says The Independent. It tells the story of the war-stricken Afghan capital through the eyes of the staff who worked there, living through a Soviet evacuation, a devastating civil war, the US invasion and the rise and fall and rise again of the Taliban. As Doucet herself has said: “Aren’t all the best stories true?”
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Famesick by Lena Dunham
Lena Dunham became an overnight celebrity in 2012 when, aged 24, she wrote and starred in the HBO drama Girls, says The Times, “a kind of scuzzy Sex and the City and a work of total brilliance”. Her compulsively readable new memoir is a bracing account of the physical and psychological toll her immediate fame took on her – chronic illness, addiction and heartbreak – as well as a glorious love letter to the show that made her name.
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London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe
In 2019, 19-year-old Zac Brettler fell to his death from a luxury riverside flat in London after becoming obsessed with the lifestyles of the city’s super-rich and masquerading as the son of a Russian oligarch to access elite circles. Asked by Brettler’s grieving parents to investigate their son’s death, New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe uncovered a world of terrifying criminality and extraordinary police incompetence, says The Guardian. “A tour de force of contemporary storytelling.”
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Jan Morris: A Life by Sara Wheeler
From reporting on the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 to having a sex change in the 1970s and enjoying a long career as a pre-eminent travel writer, Morris’s story is “unique and astonishing”, says the FT. Covering everything from interviewing Che Guevara in Havana to marrying, divorcing then remarrying her wife after her transition, Wheeler’s authorised biography is “more than a match for its fascinating and at times elusive subject”.
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