Best new books: autumn 2020
From Elena Ferrante’s follow-up to her internationally acclaimed Naples trilogy to a new memoir by Caitlin Moran, here’s what we’ve read this month
The Lying Life of Adults, by Elena Ferrante
The author of the internationally acclaimed Naples trilogy returns with a perceptive study of adolescence and its struggles. Narrated in the first person by Giovanna, it tells of her painful and confusing attempts to deal with her own transition from childhood to teenage, even while the adult world that cosseted her in infancy reveals itself to have been built on a shocking and, to her, incomprehensible web of lies.
As in the Naples trilogy, this novel, too, offers a sharp and fascinating look at Neapolitan society in its complex and overlapping layers. It is built like a storm, from the ominous rumblings of its approach, to full-blown destructive and seemingly endless raging, that is finally becalmed as Giovanna becomes an adult.
A deeply satisfying, engrossing and unmissable read.
Teresa Guerreiro, dance editor
Click here to buy it for £13.99
More Than a Woman, by Caitlin Moran
Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman – part-memoir, part-feminist manifesto – became an instant bestseller when it was released nearly a decade ago, discussing everything from what to name intimate female body parts to abortion.
Now in her mid-40s, Moran concedes that while she got a lot right in her first book, there was a lot she got wrong, too – and More Than a Woman explores and celebrates what is to be in middle age, married, with children, and to live so many of your adventures within the four walls of your home.
Hysterical and heartbreaking (Moran’s portrait of her teenage daughter’s battle with an eating disorder is something many parents will find relatable), this book is a delight.
She talks anything and everything: Botox (yes, you can still be a good feminist and get it done), ‘maintenance shags’, domesticity, ageing parents, divorcing friends, and even why we need to be compassionate to how men, without their own version of feminism, are coping.
Jennifer Barton, kids' editor
Click here to buy it for £13.59
Blue Ticket, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sopie Mackintosh is becoming something of a maestro of dystopian fiction. Just two years after the publication of her first novel The Water Cure, which explored themes of familial abuse and estrangement from the wider world through the lens of three sisters, Mackintosh is back with her second, Blue Ticket. This time, we’re thrust into a world in which all women are entered into a two-tier lottery following their first monthly bleed. Those who receive a white ticket can have children, those who receive a blue ticket cannot, but are instead granted freedom.
Through the first-person accounts of blue ticket-holder Calla, we’re drip-fed the chilling reality of how the lottery system determines every aspect of a woman’s life in this world loomed over by a violent patriarchy. With faint allusions to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Mackintosh depicts a totalitarian society with an omnipotent ruling body, neighbours who may be government spies and the promise of borders beyond which a fairer world exists. When rules are broken and a tense chase commences, Mackintosh has us hooked and rooting for her protagonist like our own lives depend on it.
While details of the world in which Blue Ticket is set could be more fully fleshed out, the intimate, insular story presented is a gripping read. And, there’s undoubtedly potential for Mackintosh to head back into the unsettling world she has created here to tell another story in the future.
Holly O’Mahony, acting editor
Click here to buy it for £10.49
Intimations, by Zadie Smith
A collection of incisive reflections on life in 2020, Zadie Smith’s Intimations is a timely commentary on the state of affairs and the varying lenses through which we have experienced and continue to experience them. Written through lockdown Smith’s essays – some more vignettes than essays – address Covid-19, privileges and the other virus, racism, with an honesty that often includes frank examinations of her own positionality. Equally considered are the hidden truths we have been forced to reckon with in this time: about work and value, mundanity and the absoluteness of suffering.
Smith is donating all royalties from the sale of Intimations to the Equal Justice Initiative and New York’s Covid-19 emergency relief fund.
Chinasa Chukwu, contributing editor
Click here to buy it for £5.29
Islands of Mercy, by Rose Tremain
Tremain’s latest novel Islands of Mercy takes place between Bath, Borneo, Dublin and Paris, and follows characters in their quest to find meaning in life in the hyper-controlled Victorian England. The very tall Jane Adeane, fleeing a marriage proposal from her father’s colleague, embarks on a lustful romance with a married woman. The eccentric Sir Ralph Savage, besotted with his Malay lover, desperately tries to build a road in the jungle that leads to nowhere. At times mischievous, at times dark, Tremain’s lively prose is an engrossing read but leaves you longing for a bit more.
Eleonore Dresch, founder and editor-in-chief
Click here to buy it for £13.99