Best new books: April 2022
Sea of Tranquillity, by Emily St. John Mandel
What links a disgraced English émigré to early twentieth-century British Columbia with a young widow in modern Brooklyn, and a moon-dwelling author on tour in 2203? That’s what Gaspery Roberts, security guard-turned-time traveller, sets out to discover in the year 2401, when he’s despatched to investigate an inexplicable ‘anomaly’ or glitch in history. Mandel deftly interweaves narrative threads across space and time, before pulling them tight, as if shaking a kaleidoscope and watching the shapes settle into a sharp new symmetry. The Station Eleven author excels herself again with this elegant sci-fi mystery, which reflects on time, reality and apocalypse.
(Picador, 28 April)
The Odyssey, by Lara Williams
Lara Williams’s debut novel Supper Club, about a secret society of women dedicated to overindulgence, won the Guardian Not the Booker Prize in 2019. Her new book tells the story of Ingrid, a woman in flight from her past who has been working on a cruise ship for five years. Repetitive tasks on board and boozy benders on land help her suppress the unwelcome memories that keep intruding. But when she’s chosen for the competitive employee mentorship scheme, the ship’s mysterious captain-cum-guru, Keith, starts pushing her in unexpected ways. How much can Ingrid take before something snaps? This subversive satire on consumer capitalism and the millennial search for meaning is darkly comic existential fiction at its best, for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Sam Byers and Sayaka Murata.
(Hamish Hamilton, 26 April)
The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize winner A Visit from the Goon Squad comes another intricate masterwork that charts interlinked lives across decades, from the mid-twentieth century to birth of the internet and beyond. Broad in ambition and intellectual scope, it imagines the consequences of tech tycoon Bix Bouton’s game-changing invention, Own Your Own Unconscious, which allows users to download and exchange memories with others. From the ‘counters’ who exploit the ’Collective Consciousness’ to the ’eluders’, the Candy House’s refuseniks, Egan depicts a society that’s reconfigured itself around this technology. She darts between perspectives to create a tapestry of overlapping experience that explores the burning issues of our era: privacy, authenticity, memory and connection.
(Corsair, 29 April)
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo
Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut We Need New Names was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her new novel is a political satire narrated by a chorus of animal voices: Animal Farm for Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Tracing the history of one nation – a familiar tale of colonisation, the fight for independence, and a dictatorship – Glory depicts an age-old cycle, and reveals the devices needed to maintain the mirage of absolute power. Yet it also offers the hope of an alternative, within reach of those willing to resist and ask for more. Rooted in our digital era, this visionary novel combines satire, allegory and fable to craft a tale that is both timeless and strikingly contemporary.
(Chatto & Windus, 7 April)
Muse, by Ruth Millington
‘At their ancient origin, the muses were far from passive subjects for an artist to paint or write about. Instead, they were agents of divine inspiration’. Art historian and critic Ruth Millington digs into the mythology and history of muses in this fascinating study of art, inspiration, power and desire. Tracing the world's ancient origins through to true stories of notable muses such as Dora Maar and Gala Dalí, Millington dismantles diminishing stereotypes, revealing the active role muses play. She explores the way artists such as Frida Kahlo have framed themselves as muses, and the collaborative working relationships enjoyed by modern muses such as Beyoncé Knowles and Grace Jones. An exhilarating feminist reclamation of a figure freighted with reductive, outdated baggage.
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 7 April)
One Day I Shall Astonish the World, by Nina Stibbe
Susan is in crisis: after twenty years of marriage, she’s questioning whether she loves her husband, and if her very opinionated daughter is right, and she’s been wrong about pretty much everything. Nina Stibbe’s new novel traces the meandering course of a friendship between two women, from its origins in a haberdashery shop in 1990s Leicestershire to the present day. As ever, her wryly observed writing treads the fine line between humour and pathos, as she reflects on family and fulfilment. As the author of Reasons to be Cheerful, the only book to have won both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the Comedy Women in Print Award, Stibbe is arguably Britain’s funniest author.
(Viking, 21 April)