Paddy Crewe’s second novel is set in his native north-east England in the 1980s, a particularly grim period for the region when unemployment was high due to the closures of steel works and coal mines. It is a gear-change from his much-praised and expansive debut novel My Name is Yip (2022) which was set in the 1830s Georgia gold rush. Many of the scenes in True Love instead conjure up the kind of parochial English melancholy that the singer Morrissey specialises in. Its open-hearted title is also perhaps a clue to how earnest this novel is. The main characters are two young people: Keely and Finn, who don’t meet until the third and final section of the book. The first section of the novel, “Seacoaler”, delineates Keely’s childhood living in a caravan on a campsite with her father, a seacoaler — someone who makes their living by collecting and selling coal washed up on the beach. He becomes emotionally absent — and eventually, literally absent — after the death by drowning of Keely’s brother Welty.
Table for Two by Amor Towles
Amor Towles was a Wall Street banker before he published his first novel, Rules of Civility, in 2011, at the age of 46. Since then, his books have sold six million copies, and the second, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), has been made into a Paramount + series starring Ewan McGregor.
Towles’s success in banking and publishing has perhaps given him a particular insight into the American Dream. The six stories and one novella that make up his stylish and confident new collection, Table for Two, all feature characters in pursuit of an ambition that puts them in varying degrees of peril – protagonists tasked with missions of differing seriousness. There is the Russian peasant who must tell his communist wife that he has accidentally bought them tickets to New York; a forger of famous authors’ signatures; the daughter who follows her stepfather incognito to find out where he goes on Saturday afternoons; and the stranger who promises to keep an alcoholic out of a bar and get him on a plane.
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
Claire Messud’s fourth novel, The Woman Upstairs (2013), was notable for having a genuine twist – a reminder of how rare that is in literary fiction. Messud has nonetheless produced such a rarity again in This Strange Eventful History.
For her seventh novel, the saga of the Cassar clan, Messud has turned to her own family history. The novel reaches from Algeria, where her paternal grandparents were raised, to Connecticut, where Messud herself was born, and from 1927 to 2010. The Cassar family go to war, move continents, develop dementia and alcoholism, and marry or fail to: this is not a milieu in which remaining single is viewed as a dignified choice.
This Strange Eventful History is told in the third person: Gaston is the Cassar patriarch, and while he and his wife Lucienne consider their marriage to be “the masterpiece” of their lives, it contains a troubling secret.
Lionel Shriver interview: Me and my Money
Lionel Shriver is the author of 16 novels, including the international bestseller We Need To Talk About Kevin (2003).
It was made into a film of the same name for which Tilda Swinton was nominated for a Best Actress Bafta Award and a Best Actress Golden Globe Award in 2011. Her books have been translated into 28 languages.
Now 66, she lives outside Lisbon with her husband, jazz musician Jeff Williams.
What did your parents teach you about money?
Not to spend it! They were very frugal. In the latter part of my life, what has been difficult for me is learning to spend money. The problem with the saving mentality is that it is fundamentally based on a misconception of immortality, especially as I don't have any children and at a certain point, you have to realise that it's merely a means to an end. When you're a saver, that's hard to understand.
Roxy Dunn interview
Video interview with Roxy Dunn, first time author of novel As Young As This, published by Penguin on 6th April 2023.
Elliot. Joe. Tommy. Nathanael. Wren. Oliver. Malik. Zach. Frank. Patrick. Noah.
These are the men Margot has loved, liked, lusted over. Since she was seventeen, she's pictured them like stepping stones - each one bringing her closer to finding someone to share her life with and, eventually, father the children she's always imagined in her future. From her first sexual encounter, to her first love, from grown-up dilemmas to spontaneous thrills, she's soaked up every experience available to her, discovering friendship, joy and despair.
As Young as This is a debut aimed at fans of Dolly Alderton, Meg Mason and Monica Heisey. Roxy is joined in conversation by literary journalist Alex Peake-Tomkinson as they delve into the ways that people shape us, the plans we make for our lives, and what it means to let go.
“A young woman’s life, told through the men she has dated. With glorious attention to detail and emotional fluency, Dunn charts the ways in which we are built and broken by love.” Pandora Sykes
“Raw, funny and beautiful…a really gorgeously observed novel about youth and womanhood.” Daisy Buchanan
Clear by Carys Davies
Carys Davies grew up in Newport, south Wales but her novels have been set in 19th- century Pennsylvania (West, 2018), contemporary Ooty in India (The Mission House, 2020) and now a small island off the north coast of Scotland in 1843. Her short stories have been set variously in the Australian outback and Siberia. She has said that when creating a fictional world, ‘I seem to require a certain kind of distance from my own life’.
On an island ‘between Shetland and Norway’, a man called Ivar lives in isolation, talking only to Pegi the horse, whom he calls ‘old cabbage and a silly, odd-looking person’. One day he finds a man naked and unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. Even after the man regains consciousness, he and Ivar do not share a common language, so communication between them is halting. The newcomer is John Ferguson, a church minister who has been sent to evict Ivar so that the land can be used solely by grazing sheep.
