Best new books: spring 2021

Asylum Road, by Olivia Sudjic

The second novel from the author of Sympathy is a taut, disquieting story of a relationship that comes under strain when a young woman confronts her traumatic childhood. Anya and Luke are on holiday in coastal Provence when he proposes, but the coveted ring doesn’t confer the sense of security she’d imagined. Her anxiety is heightened when they travel to Sarajevo, the city she escaped as a child refugee. As Anya’s life fragments, so does her sense of self, and the tension builds to an electrifying climax. In precise, elliptical prose, Sudjic paints a powerful portrait of a psyche damaged by war and family schisms. A meditation on identity and belonging, Asylum Road speaks to our unsettled times.

(Bloomsbury, Thursday 21 January)

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Luster, by Raven Leilani

An immediate New York Times bestseller, Raven Leilani’s debut is the most hyped millennial novel since Normal People. Fans include Barack Obama, Zadie Smith, the author’s mentor in the MFA fiction programme at New York University, and a chorus of others, including Candice Carty-Williams, Brit Bennett and Mary Gaitskill. Luster traces the fortunes of Edie, a 23-year-old New Yorker whose creative dreams are hostage to the forces of capitalism. Painting is on ice while she makes rent – just – at the mundane publishing job where docility is expected of a rare ‘diversity hire’. Then she meets Eric, a white guy 23 years her senior, and gets sucked into his open marriage, with unpredictable consequences. Luster is a high-octane tale of desire, power and artistic coming of age.

(Picador, Thursday 21 January)

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Aftershocks: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Identity, by Nadia Owusu

In her searing debut – praised by Margot Jefferson, Xialou Guo and Claire Messud – Nadia Owusu expands the metaphor of aftershocks, both literal and symbolic, to explore the geopolitical, geological and psychological traumas that marked her young life. Caught between nations, languages and identities, Owusu came to think of her life ‘as existing on fault lines’. As the half-Armenian, half-Ghanaian daughter of a United Nations employee, she grew up shifting between African and European countries. Later, maternal estrangement, her father's death, and living through a civil war in Ethiopia and the 9/11 attacks amplified her sense of rootlessness, triggering a personal unravelling. Now she describes the experiences that led to that descent, and how she found the resilience to rebuild herself.

(Sceptre, Tuesday 2 February)

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Open Water, by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Praised by Candice Carty-Williams, Yaa Gyasi and Benjamin Zephaniah, among others, this debut is both a modern love story and a piercing reflection on masculinity and race. The author, 26-year-old British Ghanaian Caleb Azumah Nelson, is also a prize-winning photographer. The novel traces a relationship between two young Londoners, both budding artists – he a photographer, she a dancer. Each won a scholarship to a private school where colour and background marked them as outsiders; each is trying to forge a path through a city that embraces them with one hand and rejects them with the other. But how to be vulnerable with one another when they’ve learnt to show only strength? Considering the ways identity shapes experience, Open Water is a soulful meditation on art and love.

(Viking, Thursday 4 February)

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Sea State, by Tabitha Lasley

When Tabitha Lasley’s London home was robbed and she ended a toxic relationship, she quit her job at a women’s magazine. Wanting ‘to see what men were like, with no women around,’ she rented a flat in Aberdeen to research and write a book about life on oil rigs, one of the last remaining well-paid jobs open to working-class men. The offshore workers she’d met previously lived hard, spent fast. Among them in Aberdeen, Tabitha relives her youth in Merseyside, partying with abandon. But retaining journalistic impartiality becomes difficult when she falls headlong into a precipitous relationship with one of her subjects, a married rig worker. Illuminating the subculture of an industry often overlooked, this memoir interrogates class, masculinity and female desire.

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No One is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood

Are we inhabiting a digital dystopia of our own making? Judging from this American poet and memoirist’s first novel, it would seem so. Jia Tolentino nailed it when she said, ‘reading Patricia Lockwood feels like looking through a kaleidoscope built by a mischievous sorcerer.’ This funny, existential portrait of a life lived online uses a fragmented form to reflect how we interact in the digital space. The narrator spends her days transfixed by the infinite scroll, digesting the melange of facts, misinformation, speculation and trivia that’s fed to her. But as her sense of reality, and self, dissolve, she starts questioning who’s in charge: us or the internet. Satirising its distortions and absurdities – the desensitisation, the mutation of language, the collective experience – this novel is smart, experimental and surprising.

(Bloomsbury, Tuesday 16 February)

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Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

A new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day is this spring’s standout literary event. Like Never Let Me Go, which was adapted into an acclaimed film starring Keira Knightley, Klara and the Sun imagines a speculative reality that probes the boundaries of science and what it means to be human. It tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend, who, from her position in the store, observes the behaviour of browsing customers and passers-by. She remains optimistic that she will be chosen, but when it becomes clear that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to stake too much on the promises of humans. Contemplating the uncharted possibilities of AI to human relationships, Ishiguro poses the eternal question: what does it mean to love?

(Faber, Tuesday 2 March)

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Acts of Desperation, by Megan Nolan

Set in Dublin, this booze-soaked portrait of a relationship explores the traps laid by deifying love. Yet another Irish debut minted in the Sally Rooney mould, we hear you sigh. Well, not so much, as this one’s all heady first-person prose, rather than the cool, spare variety. Having dropped out of university, the narrator – aspiring writer, established drinker – is working restaurant shifts while haunting Dublin’s literary scene, where she falls for beautiful Ciaran. She’s so stunned by his interest that she’s happy to accept the power imbalance; happy, too, to ignore his sudden silences and petty rages. Love is a drug, its withdrawal agony, but can she learn to live and value herself without it? Acts of Desperation captures what it means to be young, alone and suffused with longing.

(Jonathan Cape, Thursday 4 March)

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Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi’s epic debut, Homegoing, traced the legacy of the slave trade in Ghana across three continents and seven generations. Now she’s back with her second novel, the story of a Ghanaian immigrant family in America. After Gifty’s teenage brother dies from an opiate addiction, her mother succumbs to a depression she refuses to name or treat, convinced only God can save her. High-achieving Gifty looks to science for answers, embarking on a neuroscience PhD. But when her mother comes to stay in California, Gifty discovers that their traumas have deeper roots. Unravelling her family’s past will take Gifty across continents and into the dark heart of the modern US. This scalding tale examines the tensions between religion and medicine in the context of America’s charged racial climate.

(Viking, Thursday 4 March)

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The Last House on Needless Street, by Catriona Ward

The most exciting thing Stephen King’s read since Gone Girl, this is spring’s must-read thriller. Ted Bannerman lives in the last house on Needless Street, on the edge of the woods, venturing out only for beer and candy. Busy caring for his daughter Lauren and beloved cat Olivia, he doesn’t want for company. But when a woman moves into the vacant property next door, he panics. He doesn’t like prying eyes. Meanwhile, Dee gets a new lead in her ongoing investigation into the disappearance of her six-year-old sister Lulu from the lake, 11 years ago – an event that shattered her family irrevocably. Chilling, stylish, wholly unexpected, this is the book we’ll all lose sleep to come March.

(Viper, Monday 8 March)

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Double Blind, by Edward St Aubyn

The author of the Patrick Melrose books – brilliantly adapted for TV, starring Benedict Cumberbatch – is known for his distinctive prose style, delivering lacerating wit with devastating elegance. Most recently, he reworked King Lear for the Hogarth Shakespeare series and published a satire of the prize-obsessed literary world. In his ambitious new novel, he turns his gaze to more expansive themes: ecology, genetics, neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Spanning London, Cap d'Antibes, Big Sur and Sussex, it follows three close friends – Olivia, her new lover Francis, a naturalist living off-grid, and her best friend Lucy, just back from New York – over one transformative year. Double Blind is an intelligent, playful story of unexpected connections, inheritance, freedom and consciousness.

(Harvill Secker, Thursday 18 March)

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