Edel Coffey selects twelve gripping books to curl up with this autumn …
This time of year is the high point of the publishing calendar. Autumn brings big-name novelists and eyecatching non-fiction in an attempt to capitalise on that oh-so important marketing period otherwise known as … Christmas (sorry!). The schedule which includes new books from Michael Connelly, Sally Rooney, Roddy Doyle, Louise Erdich, Donal Ryan, Elizabeth Strout, Elif Shafak and Lee Child, among others.
Such is the frenzy around any new Sally Rooney publication now that no review of her latest and fourth novel, INTERMEZZO (Faber, €21.99), can be published until later in September, when the book will be released. All I can tell you until then is that Intermezzo tells the story of two brothers, Peter, a Dublin lawyer in his 30s, and Ivan, a 22-year-old competitive chess player, both of whom are mourning the death of their father. Peter is in two relationships, one with a young college student and the other with his first love, while Ivan, who has always been a loner, is involved with an older woman. It sounds like exactly the kind of emotionally complicated chess game that we’ve come to love from the Co Mayo writer.
Christine Dwyer Hickey’s OUR LONDON LIVES (Atlantic, €15.99), her ninth novel, is a big heart-rending story about two brilliant characters, Millie and Pip, told over four decades. Millie first meets Pip when she is working in a bar in London in the late 1970s, running away from problems in her own life. Pip is a boxer and already experiencing some of the problems that will later tear his life apart. They quickly fall for each other but life gets complicated. Their friendship abides and through Dwyer Hickey’s impressionistic writing and skilful time-mapping we get not only the story of their lives but also the story of the Irish in London over the decades.
Roddy Doyle’s THE WOMEN BEHIND THE DOOR (Jonathan Cape, €16.99) is a sequel to Doyle’s books The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996) and Paula Spencer (2006). Now Paula is 66 and a grandmother. She is widowed and has a boyfriend and a job that she likes, but when her daughter Nicola turns up at her door with a crisis, this book becomes a meditation on women and their relationships, particularly the mother-daughter one. Doyle’s writing about women is always sensitive and insightful but it is his inquiry into the human mind and heart which is most compelling of all.
Donal Ryan’s HEART, BE AT PEACE (Jonathan Cape, €16.99) is the sequel to Ryan’s debut The Spinning Heart but can absolutely be read as a standalone novel. The Spinning Heart was discovered in the slush pile at Lilliput Press, and told a contemporary story about the effects of the Celtic Tiger and economic crash on a rural Irish town. Heart, Be At Peace moves the action on ten years and the characters are now on the other side of the crash and rebuilding their lives. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to fear. I love how Ryan makes his characters come alive so completely.
In TELL ME EVERYTHING, (Viking, €17.99) American writer Elizabeth Strout brings together two of her best-loved characters, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. Strout’s writing is always elegant and spare and her characters feel completely real. In Tell Me Everything, Bob, the town lawyer, is defending a man accused of killing his mother. The book is told through conversations between Bob and his friend Lucy, and those between Lucy and Olive, who is now living in a retirement home. As always with Strout, the reader is given a masterclass in life’s important lessons – the importance of friendship, companionship, community and conversation.
Elif Shafak is a writer and intellectual at the top of her game. Her latest novel THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY (Viking, €23.15) is a big, ambitious, multi-layered story moving across continents and centuries. In Turkey in 2014, Marin and her grandmother are forced to travel across war-torn lands. In London in 2018, Zaleekhah is escaping her marriage. In the ancient city of Mesopotamia and in Victorian London, other forces are forming the story. This is a book that sweeps you away.
They say don’t judge a book by its cover but I found it very hard to resist a book with the title DEAR DICKHEAD (Macmillan, €23.75) emblazoned brightly across its cover. This latest novel from French writer Virginie Despentes (she of Baise Moi fame) is being called an “ultra-contemporary Dangerous Liaisons” that deals with sex, ageing, gender, privilege, feminism and addiction. The story is about ageing actress Rebecca Latté, and author Oscar Jyack, who is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. When Oscar and Rebecca get into an Instagram spat, their mutual dislike burgeons into unlikely friendship as Paris gets locked down during Covid.
Dublin-based writer Sarah Moss’s memoir MY GOOD BRIGHT WOLF (Macmillan, €21.75) is a shocking and riveting personal account of her childhood at the hands of unkind parents, as well as a comprehensive investigation into her own disordered eating, the female experience, literature and how historical context influences the people we become. Moss is the author of books including The Fell, Summerwater, and Ghost Wall, and teaches on UCD’s creative writing MA programme.
ASK NOT (Mudlark, €18.99) by investigative journalist Maureen Callahan is a book about the long list of women whose lives were upended by the Kennedy political dynasty. A sentence from the book’s opening paragraph tells you everything you need to know about this book, and makes it impossible not to read on. “Kennedy men have been valorised and lionised for nearly a century, but the women they’ve broken, tormented, raped, murdered, or left for dead have never really been part of their legacy.” Callahan tells their story.
The late Rebecca Godfrey (author of Under The Bridge) was working on a novel about Peggy Guggenheim before she died in 2022. Her friend, the writer Leslie Jamison, finished the book and PEGGY (Penguin Random House, €25.95) is the result. Guggenheim dedicated her life to art; the book follows her through New York and Europe, and through love and romance.
Irish crime writer Amanda Cassidy was nominated for a CWA Dagger award for her debut novel Breaking and she is back with her third novel, THE PERFECT PLACE (Canelo, €12.99) about an interiors influencer with a dark secret. When she gets an opportunity to buy a rundown old château in France, she jumps at the chance … but there are conditions attached. How far will Elle go to protect her brand, and her past?
If you’re a Lee Child fan, you’ll enjoy his new collection of short stories, SAFE ENOUGH (Bantam, €23.20), which includes 20 fast-paced stories about CIA agents, gangsters, cops, hitmen, bodyguards and soldiers. All non-Jack Reacher stories, they are published together for the first time in this collection.
To mark the centenary of his birth this year, Penguin is reissuing James Baldwin’s NO NAME IN THE STREET (Penguin, €14.50). First published in 1972, this book opens with a personal account of Baldwin’s childhood in Harlem, where he grew up with a violent stepfather and eight younger siblings. But the book quickly moves to a meditation on the consequences of the deaths of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and the rise of fascism in Spain. Baldwin’s voice is so individual, that mix of linguistic formality and humour, and his subject matter so vividly described, that when you do eventually lift your head from this brilliant book, it feels as if you have awoken from a bleak dream of the past. And then you realise his work is as much a bleak dream of the future and is as relevant now as it has ever been.
