Archives de catégorie : London 2021 Fiction

SUPERDOOM: Selected Poems de Melissa Broder

Featuring a new introduction from the author, SUPERDOOM brings together the best of Broder’s three cult out-of-print poetry collections―When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother, Meat Heart, and Scarecrone―as well as the best of her fourth collection, Last Sext.

SUPERDOOM: Selected Poems
by Melissa Broder
Tin House Books, August 2021

Embracing the sacred and the profane, often simultaneously, Broder gazes into the abyss and at the human body, with humor and heartbreak, lust and terror. Broder’s language is entirely her own, marked both by brutal strangeness and raw intimacy. At turns essayistic and surreal, bouncing between the grotesque and the transcendent, SUPERDOOM is a must-have for longtime fans and the perfect introduction to one of our most brilliant and original poets.

Melissa Broder is the author of the novel The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Guernica, and she is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry. She has written for The New York Times, Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia, and New York Magazine’s The Cut. She lives in Los Angeles.

CIRCA de Devi S. Laskar

Told through a series of precise, charged vignettes, CIRCA tells the story of Heera Sanyal, the daughter of Bengali immigrants, as she negotiates the complicated, strange proximity of love and grief and struggles with the divide between her parents’ and society’s expectations, and her own vision for the future.

CIRCA
by Devi S. Laskar
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Spring 2022

On the cusp of her eighteenth birthday, Heera and her best friends, siblings Marie and Marco, are rebelliously teasing what fun can be had out of life in Raleigh, North Carolina. But no matter how much Heera defies her strict upbringing, from pickpocketing to vandalism, she’s always avoided any real danger—until Marie is killed in an accident in front of her and Marco. Then everything changes. Marco begins calling himself Crash and over the years to come, spends his days womanizing and burning through a string of jobs. Heera’s dream of college in New York is upended by a family illness. She soon finds herself trapped in a loveless arranged marriage to a wealthy man and in-laws who become fearful of the devastating force of community gossip.
Over the years, Heera and Crash’s paths cross and re-cross, on a journey of dreams, desires, jealousies, betrayals—all in the name of love. Heart-wrenching and wry, CIRCA is a story of a young woman torn between familial duty and her own survival. Laskar penetratingly explores within these pages what it means to have an identity fractured by different cultures; issues of emotional inheritance, belonging, grief, and romance; and the many ways that people can disappear, both from themselves and others. Heera’s journey, from North Carolina to New York, and from girlhood to womanhood, reveals the beauty and darkness and revelation inherent in the paths of all those who not only want to survive, but to grow. The novel is also compulsively readable; a true one-sitting read.

Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, which was named a Washington Post “Best Book of the Year” and “A Book All Georgians Should Read” by The Georgia Center for the Book. The novel was the winner of the 2019–2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Adult Fiction and the 2020 Crook’s Corner Book Prize. It was also short-listed for the Northern California Book Awards and long-listed for the 2019 Northern California Golden Poppy Book Award in Fiction and for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. A native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Laskar holds an MFA from Columbia University and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been hailed by Marie Claire as “devastatingly potent,” by Booklist as “sharply relevant and tragically timeless,” by Jean Kwok as “searing, powerful, and beautifully written,” and by Kiese Laymon as “narratively beautiful as it is brutal…Laskar has changed how we will all write about state-sanctioned terror in this nation,” to name just a few highlights of praise. She is an alumna of The OpEd Project and VONA.

DIARY OF A MAGPIE de Marie-Claire Amuah

A reading group coming-of-age novel about a young British-Ghanaian woman born into the chaos of domestic violence, who realises even as an adult that you can’t escape the way your childhood shapes you.

DIARY OF A MAGPIE
by Marie-Claire Amuah
Oneworld UK, Summer 2022

DIARY OF A MAGPIE tells the story of Stella, a child of Ghanaian parents, born and raised in South West London. Stella is born into the chaos of domestic violence and struggles to make sense of the world around her. She touches wood so that bad things won’t happen to her or her family – until she learns a poem about Magpies, ‘one for sorrow…’ Stella excels academically and achieves professional fulfilment and success once she leaves home. However, she is unable to make evidence-based conclusions about events that unfold around her. Stella continues to rely on superstition to provide meaning to her life; to control the otherwise uncontrollable. She feels her greatest personal happiness when she falls in love but learns that magpies alone can’t protect her from heartbreak, and that the impact of her childhood is something she will have to face – one way or another.

Marie-Claire Amuah is a British-Ghanaian barrister, based in London. She works in private prosecutions and specialises in white-collar crime. When she isn’t writing, or practising law, she can be found walking her dog, practising yoga, or spending time with friends.

GURU de Louise O’Neill

GURU
by Louise O’Neill
Transworld UK, August 2022

Samantha Johnson is a forty-year-old, American influencer who runs a wellness empire – Shakti. With an Oscar-winning adaptation of her NYT-bestselling memoir under her belt, a powerful brand as a nononsense motivational speaker, and a booming business which she is about to sell in a multi-milliondollar deal, she has the world at her feet. She’s also launching a new book, CHASTE, in which she talks about her relationship with her sexuality. After writing a viral essay about her teenaged sexual awakening with her (female) best friend, she comes off stage after a sell-out event to some shocking news from her manager. That female best friend, Lisa, is demanding the magazine retract the essay – she never consented to this experience being shared, and what Samantha sees as a powerful erotic moment she sees very differently. She sees it as abuse. Samantha decides to return to the small town she grew up in, to confront Lisa, and convince her to drop the allegations. Once she’s back home, however, Samantha finds herself immediately wrongfooted by Lisa, now married to her high-school sweetheart, and the perfect suburban mom. Forced to confront the past she has whitewashed for years, she finds herself questioning her own memories. For both women have very different versions of how their relationship ended – so whose ‘truth’ is really a lie?

Louise O’Neill grew up in Clonakilty, a small town in West Cork, Ireland. Her first novel, Only Ever Yours, was released in 2014. Her latest novel, After the Silence, was a bestseller in Ireland.

10 SKELTON PLACE de Claire Douglas

An inherited cottage. A body buried in the garden. And a secret spanning three generations.

10 SKELTON PLACE
by Claire Douglas
Penguin UK, August 2021

When Saffy’s beloved grandmother, Rose, goes into a care home Saffy learns that she has inherited her Cotswolds cottage. But as work begins on much-needed renovations, the body of a young woman is uncovered in the garden. Who is she? During Rose’s more lucid moments, she reveals snippets of information that Saffy pieces together. And then another body is discovered. As she delves into Rose’s past, Saffy uncovers dark secrets, calling into question everything she thought she knew about her family.

Claire Douglas has worked as a journalist for fifteen years writing features for women’s magazines and national newspapers, but she’s dreamed of being a novelist since the age of seven. She finally got her wish after winning the Marie Claire Debut Novel Award, with her first novel, The Sisters, which was followed by Local Girl Missing, Last Seen Alive and Do Not Disturb, all Sunday Times bestsellers. She has been a German bestseller twice, with Local Girl Missing spending three months on the Spiegel Bestseller list. She lives in Bath with her husband and two children.