Matrix by Lauren Groff

Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff’s third novel, told the story of a long marriage, first from the perspective of a complacent husband and then from the perspective of his less complacent wife. It was also chosen by Barack Obama as his best book of the year in 2015. Groff has said the attention this brought her made it difficult for her to write another novel, but there was another problem: “I wanted to get as far away from Trump’s America as possible.”

Her fourth and latest novel, Matrix, offers another perspective from the female experience but is far removed from the present day. The setting is a 12th-century convent, which Groff describes as a “flawed female utopia”. The real-life medieval poet Marie de France — about whom so much is unknown — is Groff’s heroine. What is known about Marie de France is that she wrote a translation of Aesop’s fables and, more importantly, a collection of Breton lais, or romances, which celebrated courtly love.

Manifesto by Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo came to popular attention when her novel Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019. She was of course joint winner alongside Margaret Atwood (for The Testaments) but Atwood had won the prize before (for The Blind Assassin, 2000) whereas Evaristo – somewhat staggeringly – was the first black woman and also the first black British person to win the prize in its 50 year history. As she points out in this lively and important memoir, although her life changed overnight, she was far from an overnight success.

Her story up until this point is worth reading not just because it is an entertaining account of a noteworthy life, but because she is unfailingly generous in delineating how she became herself. I have read few memoirs where the author demonstrates so explicitly how they arrived at their current success. This kind of self-actualisation is always hard-won and Evaristo had – as she points out – no privilege to draw on in her ascent to become a successful, happy and recognised woman of letters.

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

The American Civil War can hardly be said to be underexplored in fiction, from Gone with the Wind to Little Women to Cold Mountain. Until recently, however, novels featuring the backdrop have tended to focus on macho soldiers and the women they left behind.

The 29-year-old Texas-based author Nathan Harris was drawn to a fresh perspective on this subject matter in his debut novel as a way to understand the history of his own family: “All black writers are drawn to filling in their past,” he has said.

In Harris’s book, it is not just race that makes his characters’ lives precarious as the war ends. A passionate affair between two Confederate soldiers who were childhood friends must be kept secret as they return to Old Ox, the Georgia town they are both from. This is perhaps an echo of the gay couple fighting in the American Civil War in Sebastian Barry’s Costa Prize-winning novel Days Without End.

In The Sweetness of Water, last week longlisted for the Booker Prize, there are also two brothers, Landry and Prentiss, who have recently been freed from slavery and must work out what to do with their freedom.

The Black Dress by Deborah Moggach

Here is a rare dud from the usually reliable Deborah Moggach. Her protagonist, Pru, finds herself alone at 69 after Greg, her husband of decades, leaves her out of the blue. There is a further loss to come for Pru, and Moggach is good on her ‘howling loneliness’; but what she decides to do about it doesn’t quite ring true.

Urged on by her sexy, bolshy friend Azra (who was Linda from Sunderland before a sudden reinvention) to meet someone new, Pru begins searching out the funeral notices of strangers, so that she can gatecrash the ceremonies and hit on the widowed husbands. Azra has told her that widowers are less likely than divorcees to be bitter, and that young women don’t understand bereaved men.

Pru buys a Breakfast at Tiffany’s-type cocktail dress in a charity shop for these escapades and is invited home by at least one widower. There is some light farce here as Pru — with limited knowledge gleaned from Facebook — has to persuade grieving men and their families that she really did know their dead wife/mother/grandmother.

Consumed by Arifa Akbar

Arifa Akbar’s older sister Fauzia died unexpectedly of tuberculosis at the age of 43. In her first book, the Guardian’s chief theatre critic painstakingly traces her complicated but loving relationship with her sibling. She also seeks to uncover how it was possible that someone could die of undetected TB while being treated in a modern hospital in the UK. It remains “the greatest infectious killer in history,” and—alarmingly—in 2015 she discovers that TB rates in Britain were higher than those in Rwanda, Eritrea and Iraq.

Akbar also explores her complicated family dynamics with candour, including the contempt with which her father often treated Fauzia when she was a child. Their parents were an ill-matched couple and often rowed. This was made worse when the family returned from a brief period living in Lahore, and moved to a single room squat in Hampstead which had neither hot water nor heating. 

I Couldn't Love You More by Esther Freud

The springboard for Esther Freud’s eleventh novel comes from her own life – as it did for her debut novel, Hideous Kinky (1992), which told the story of her childhood adventures in Morocco with her mother and sister. This time around, Freud has drawn on her mother’s concealment of her pregnancy with her first child, Freud’s elder sister Bella. Bernardine Coverley – Esther Freud’s late mother – became pregnant at eighteen by the artist Lucian Freud and kept this a secret from her strict Irish Catholic parents. Even after Coverley had a second child with Freud, she decided not to tell her family. The first her parents heard of their grandchildren was when a relative wrote to tell them she had seen their daughter waiting at a bus stop with two small girls.

I Couldn’t Love You More is, as Freud writes in the acknowledgements, “a response to the idea: what would have happened if she’d been found out, or if she’d asked for help from the wrong people?”