Good Good Loving by Yvvette Edwards

Ellen is at the end of her life and is frankly waiting to die while her extended family surrounds her, discussing her shortcomings:

It felt very unfair to be so completely mentally alert while she was lying there on her hospital bed trying to await a peaceful passing. Her hearing was perfectly intact, and as a consequence she was forced to endure the never-ending discussions about the mass of her failings.

This is the first novel from Yvvette Edwards for a decade. Her debut, A Cupboard Full of Coats (2011), longlisted for the Booker, was inspired by a friend showing her a newspaper cutting about her former partner being convicted of the murder of his next girlfriend. The Mother (2016) was about a woman whose son is murdered. The violence in this latest novel, however, is largely of the emotional kind.

Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer

Claire and Eliot have been happily married for nearly four decades. They live in a quiet town in Connecticut and take idyllic-sounding holidays in Maine. When she was diagnosed with cancer eight years ago, he retired to care for her. And yet, as Some Bright Nowhere begins and Claire decides with her oncologist that further treatment is futile, instead of seeking the solace of her seemingly devoted husband, she asks him to leave. She wants to be cared for by her friends Holly and Michelle.

Ann Packer has said that her latest novel was inspired by a true story: “It blew my mind that you could just expel your spouse because they weren’t exactly right for the job, whatever that was going to be.”

Claire’s decision seems to have been influenced by the example of a friend, Susan, who, when she was told she had only months to live, was cared for by her sisters, daughters and friends — including Claire. Claire explains to her husband: “It’s wanting A . . . rather than not wanting B.”

Chosen Family by Madeleine Gray

Madeleine Gray’s first novel Green Dot (2023) was a witty account of a messy office affair whose fans included Nigella Lawson and Gillian Anderson. Her follow up, Chosen Family, is an altogether more expansive book. She has said described it as “the result of years of thinking obsessively about two things for a long time. First, why is it that every queer person I know (including me) has a story about having an intense friendship breakup in high school that years later they realise was probably their queer root? […] Two, why do more people not choose to have children with their platonic best friends? Surely raising a child with someone you trust implicitly and don’t have sex with makes more sense than the other way round?”

The novel is set in Sydney and has a dual timeline, spanning 18 years between the school days of Eve and Nell to their adulthood and becoming parents. In 2006, Nell “does not enjoy being twelve years old. Adults around her are always telling her that she’s too smart for her age. Nell often finds it difficult to tell these adults that they are too old to be so stupid.”

On Friendship by Andrew O'Hagan

When I interviewed Andrew O’Hagan ten years ago about his Booker longlisted novel The Illuminations, the most striking thing that he said was:

Friendship is more important than almost anything. I always thought it was a sort ofdeliverance, having a good friend, that they would bring a generosity and an unprejudiced eye to your ambition, your hopes and your thoughts in a way that family can’t always do. I mean what is family but a lovable collection of prejudices, some in your favour and some not?

Although I agreed with him, I was intrigued that someone who was both a parent and a sibling would feel this way.

Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian

There is a fine tradition of campus novels that stretches from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) through Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (2024). Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory, her fourth novel for adults, shows the author’s awareness of her predecessors in the genre. One of its main characters even regards Pnin (1957), a campus novel by Vladimir Nabokov, as his comfort book.

Ethan, the character in question, feels he needs comfort because he has cheated on his wife with their secretary. He is married to Simone, and the two are goodlooking creative writing professors at Edwards University in upstate New York. Adrian herself taught creative writing at Sewanee, the University of the South.

Breasts by Jean Hannah Edelstein

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a British-American journalist and the author of a 2018 memoir entitled This Really Isn’t About You, which was about her dating life, the death of her father and her discovery that she had Lynch syndrome – which predisposes her to some cancers, as it had her dad. There is a sickening inevitability that her Breasts is at least partly about her being diagnosed with breast cancer. Yet, this is an uplifting volume, as well as a short, sharp shock.

The three sections of the book, ‘Sex’, ‘Food’ and ‘Cancer’, mean that readers will know what’s coming. But before the final section, Edelstein writes perceptively about adolescence, her first bra and being made to feel even by her schoolteachers that she and her female classmates ‘walked around in our flagrant, provocative teenage bodies day in and out. If men regarded them as invitations – well, had we tried hard enough to stop them?’