Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2023 Adult Fiction

BEARTOOTH de Callan Wink

BEARTOOTH is a profoundly moving portrait of the bonds of brotherhood.

BEARTOOTH
by Callan Wink
Granta, publication date TBD
(via The Gernert Company)

BEARTOOTH is the story of Thad and Hazen, two brothers from Yellowstone country. Fatherless, abandoned by their mother, and tired of eking out a livelihood poaching bears and chopping firewood, they reluctantly agree to help a mysterious, kilt-wearing Scotsman smuggle elk antlers out of the national park; it turns out rich folks building ski houses want them for chandeliers.

Callan Wink is the author of the story collection DOG RUN MOON (Random House, 2011), which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and received a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention, and AUGUST (Random House, 2020), a novel. He has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays appear widely, including in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Playboy, Men’s Journal and The Best American Short Stories. In the warm months he lives in Livingston, Montana where he is a fly fishing guide on the Yellowstone River. In the winter he surfs in Santa Cruz, California.

LANDSCAPES de Christine Lai

An entrancing and prismatic debut novel, set in a near future fraught with ecological collapse, LANDSCAPES brilliantly explores memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal.

LANDSCAPES
by Christine Lai
Two Dollar Radio, September 2023
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

In the English countryside—decimated by heat and drought—Penelope archives what remains of an estate’s once notable art collection. The crumbling country house has been her home for two decades and a refuge for those who have been displaced by disasters, but it is scheduled for demolition in a few months’ time. With this pressing deadline comes the impending return of Aidan’s brother, Julian, at whose hands Penelope suffered during a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before. As Julian’s visit looms, Penelope finds herself unable to suppress the past, and she clings to art as a means of understanding, of survival, and of reckoning.

Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, LANDSCAPES is an elegiac and spellbinding blend of narrative, essay, and diary that reinvents the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.

Christine Lai holds a PhD in English Literature from University College London and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.

This is an extraordinary work.” —Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts and The Light Room

A transcendent, achingly beautiful debut.” —Omar El Akkad, Giller Prize-winning author of What Strange Paradise and American War

GREAT EXPECTATIONS de Vinson Cunningham

A historic presidential campaign changes the trajectory of a young Black man’s life in the highly anticipated debut novel from one of The New Yorker’s rising stars.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS
by Vinson Cunningham
Hogarth, March 2024
(via Sterling Lord Lieristic)

I’d seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his, but the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency.”

When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator’s idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he’ll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States’s first Black president.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS is about David’s eighteen months working for the Senator’s presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions—questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood, all of which force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.

Meditating on politics and politicians, religion and preachers, fathers and family, GREAT EXPECTATIONS is both an emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and a rich novel of ideas, and marks the arrival of a major new writer.

The aptly-titled GREAT EXPECTATIONS announces Vinson Cunningham as a novelist of singular style, wit and ambition. Focused on one young man’s experience working on a historic presidential campaign, the novel is both a coming-of-age story for its narrator and—just as powerfully—a coming-of-age tale for the nation writ large. Cunningham has an uncanny ability to access the thoughts undergirding our thoughts, and his narrator is one that readers will wish they could keep by their sides to make sense of the world after the book’s final pages. Read GREAT EXPECTATIONS and see our recent past, our present, and even our future anew.” —Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House, finalist for the National Book Award

Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, FADER, Vulture, The Awl, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. A former staffer on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and in his White House, Cunningham has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Art, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in New York City. GREAT EXPECTATIONS is his first novel.

ALWAYS ON MY MIND de Carys Green

A high-concept thriller that centres on a couple trying to reconnect after 10 years of marriage by getting the latest tech – an implant that allows you and your partner to share thoughts 24/7. What could go wrong? Everything.

ALWAYS ON MY MIND
by Carys Green
Harvill Secker, 2025
(via Mushens Entertainment)

When Elijah suggests going to OneMind to celebrate their ten year anniversary, Anna is dubious and also relieved. She had been anticipating the request for a threesome in an attempt to spice things up between them, but instead Elijah wants to bond them in the most intimate of ways. Anna has seen the adverts, everyone has, the city is saturated with them –

Never again wonder if they are cheating.

Never again argue over what to have for dinner.

Know your partner intimately.

OneMind. For the ultimate closeness.

Anna is touched that Elijah would want this. A chance to share their conscious thoughts via a new, revolutionary technology. And at first things are great. Idyllic. Anna knows everything her husband is thinking. His every waking thought. But then she develops a strange side effect. Dreams that aren’t dreams. Dreams that are memories. Memories that aren’t hers. And if Anna is now experiencing Elijah’s memories, does that mean he can access hers? Does that mean he’s now aware of her darkest secret?

Suddenly Anna’s mind is a prison, where she has to repeat nursery rhymes to stop her thoughts betraying her. Everything has to be spoken. And soon she is trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse.

Carys Green is an author living in Shropshire where she lives with her husband, daughter, and dog. When she’s not writing she can often be found indulging two of her greatest passions – either walking round the local woodland or catching up on all things Disney related.

DER GROSSE WUNSCH de Sherko Fatah

A daughter disappears. A father in despair sets off for a dangerous journey to Syria.

DER GROSSE WUNSCH
(What You Wish For)
by Sherko Fatah
Luchterhand Literaturverlag/PRH Germany, August 2023

A daughter has disappeared. She has travelled to Syria to marry a jihadist she met online. Her father Murad blames himself. If he had only told Naima more about his old homeland, which he has left behind mentally, as well as physically; if only he had paid more attention to her feelings of alienation – perhaps then she wouldn’t have gone to a strange country in the name of religion. Murad knows he must find Naima. He contacts human traffickers and travels to the Kurdish territory on the Turkish-Syrian border, where he comes face to face with his past. When the traffickers play him an audio diary recorded by a woman in Raqqa – probably Naima – Murad sets out on a perilous journey into ISIS territory…

Sensitive and insightful, this is a heartbreaking story set against the backdrop of the conflict in the Middle East.

Sherko Fatah was born in 1964 as the son of an Iraqi Kurd and a German mother. He grew up in East Germany and, in 1975, moved to West Berlin with his family via Vienna. He studied philosophy and history of art. Fatah has received numerous awards for his narrative work, most recently the Großer Kunstpreis Berlin of the Akademie der Künste, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize 2015, as well as the Aspekte-Literaturpreis for Borderland. His novels have been translated into several languages.