Archives de catégorie : London 2024 Fiction

MONA ACTS OUT de Mischa Berlinski

Both beguilingly approachable and intricately constructed, at once funny and sad and wise, MONA ACTS OUT is a novel about acting and telling the truth; about how we play roles to get through our days; and how the great roles teach us how to live.

MONA ACTS OUT
by Mischa Berlinski
Norton Liveright, Winter 2025
(via Writers House)

Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of a household of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she’s still fighting with her husband, who has not forgotten what happened last night; and in just a few weeks she is supposed to step into the rehearsal room as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. It’s the hardest role in theatre—and the first role Mona has ever attempted without her sister, who died just over a year ago, by her side. When her father-in-law starts fighting with her niece about Donald Trump, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow (“I forgot the parsley!”) to find the only person she doesn’t have to act for: her estranged longtime mentor, Milton Katz, who may or may not be dying and who was recently forced out of the legendary theatre company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona’s trek turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face to face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has loved and still loves.

A brilliant, highly-anticipated return of a writer of almost magical descriptive and imaginative powers.

Mischa Berlinski is the author of Fieldwork, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Peacekeeping. He has written for the New York Review of Books about Haitian politics, has tried to buy a zombie for Men’s Journal, and investigated a woman who married a snake for Harper’s Magazine. His writing has appeared in the Best American Essays and the Best American Travel Writing. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Addison M. Metcalf Award.

I AM EMILIA DEL VALLE d’Isabel Allende

I AM EMILIA DEL VALLE is a classic tale of love and war, of discovery and redemption, told by a valiant young woman who confronts monumental challenges, survives and reinvents herself.

I AM EMILIA DEL VALLE
by Isabel Allende
TBD
(via Writers House)

San Francisco, 1866. Emilia del Valle Walsh is born. Her mother, Molly Walsh, is an Irish nun who was seduced by a Chilean aristocrat. Pregnant and abandoned, Molly marries her friend, teacher Francisco Claro. Emilia grows up in the heart of a humble Mexican neighborhood, guided by the support of her stepfather, becoming a bright and independent young woman who challenges social norms to pursue her passion for writing.

At just sixteen, Emilia begins her career writing adventure novels under the pseudonym Brandon J. Price. After a few years, she secures a position as a columnist at the San Francisco Examiner, where she meets Eric Whelan, a respected journalist who becomes her mentor, despite competing for news coverage. Soon to expand her career, Emilia travels from California to New York City. There she meets Owen, Eric’s brother, who becomes her first lover. Summoned back to San Francisco and heartbroken, Emilia convinces her editor to send her to Chile to cover a civil war in which the United States has economic and political interests. Eric Whelan joins her in Chile as a correspondent.

Santiago, 1891. Emilia finds herself in a nation on the brink of an abyss. While covering the battle between President Balmaceda and the oppositional congress, she seizes the opportunity to explore her relationship with the del Valle family and meet her father, who is ruined and very ill.

Emilia’s reporting places her at the heart of the war, enduring situations of terrible violence on the battlefield, in the

hospital, and in prison, where she is on the verge of death. When she reunites with Eric, love blossoms between them. Meanwhile, her father passes away, leaving her an inheritance of land in the deep south of Chile, surrounded by forests, lakes, and volcanoes. The horrors of war do not reach her there, and soon she discovers that she belongs in that country, in that landscape.

Isabel Allende won worldwide acclaim in 1982 with the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Since then, she has authored a number of bestselling and critically acclaimed books including Violeta, A Long Petal of the Sea, Eva Luna and Paula. Her books have been translated into more than fifty-two languages and have sold more than seventy-seven million copies worldwide. In addition to her work as a writer, Allende devotes much of her time to human rights causes. In 1996, following the death of her daughter Paula Frias, she established a charitable foundation in her honor, which has awarded grants to more than one hundred nonprofits worldwide on behalf of women and girls. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded Allende the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and in 2018 she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. She has also received PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

WORK NIGHTS d’Erica Peplin

A wry, warm, and irresistible debut following a young queer woman who finds herself in a love triangle with an unobtainable intern and a quick-tempered musician, set between the sterile office of a newspaper and the intoxicating night scene of New York City, and pitched as Sally Rooney meets The Devil Wears Prada.

WORK NIGHTS
by Erica Peplin
Gallery, June 2025
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

It’s 2015 and Jane Grabowski, a self-described “dumpy dyke,” is living in Bushwick and working in advertising at the nation’s most storied newspaper. By day, she is reluctantly dragged into a glamorous, precarious, and changing industry, and into the lives of a motley crew of office workers, who alternately horrify and delight her. By night, she goes out with the cool and flighty Madeline Navarro, an ostensibly straight, staggeringly pretty Guatemalan intern with an expensive lifestyle. Despite many signs to the contrary, it feels like Madeline might be the one—except her visa is about to run out.

Also, Jane keeps running into Addy, a temperamental, deeply moral, slightly uncool singer-songwriter. Something shifts, and Jane finds herself spiraling, terrifyingly, towards love. But Madeline’s feelings are shifting too, and it feels truly impossible—and maybe unnecessary—to choose. As small betrayals pile up, alongside the soulless dramas of work, Jane finds herself stuck and desperately unhappy. She’s determined to grow up, quit her job, and change her life. But the comforts of the known, and the thrill of the chase, keep pulling her back, until all her unmade decisions collide.

Wry, tender, and acutely attuned to the spiky intimacies of love, work, and friendship, Work Nights delves deep into the existential conundrums of finding your way in a cold, capitalist world—a world that is also occasionally alight with beauty and strangeness. It joins the small but growing cannon of novels examining the casualties of modern offices, from Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End to Halle Butler’s The New Me and Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could Be Different, and writers like Kristen Arnett, Rachel Khong, Elif Batuman, and Sally Rooney, whose smart, offbeat protagonists are alert to the delusions of the world around them, though not always to their own.

Erica Peplin is a writer from Detroit, Michigan, now based in Brooklyn. Her short stories and essays have appeared in n+1, Joyland, The Millions, McSweeney’s, Autostraddle, The Brooklyn Rail, The Village Voice, Cosmonauts Avenue, Another Gaze, and Hobart. From 2015-16, she worked in the advertising department of the New York Times. Since then, she’s worked as a shipping clerk, a high school custodian, and a restaurant server.

END OF AUGUST de Paige Dinneny

Aurora Taylor has never had so much to lose.

END OF AUGUST
by Paige Dinneny
Alcove Press, February 2025

It’s almost summer in 1979, and 15-year-old Aurora Taylor is a week shy of finishing her first full year at the same school. She’s desperate to see it through, because every end to her single mother’s chaotic romantic relationships results in a disruptive and sudden move. So many moves that Aurora needs more than two hands to count all the towns she’s lived in and the friendships she never got a chance to make.

So when her mother Laine shows up at school with the car loaded, Aurora thinks her latest fling finally put a nail in this town’s coffin. Instead, it’s her grandpa Jay’s death calling them back to the town Laine’s been running from since Aurora’s conception, when Laine was just fifteen and Aurora’s Gran was the town drunk.

Between her mother and Gran’s explosive relationship, and the whiskey Gran’s returned to to drown her sorrows, Aurora gives their visit to the little blue house in Monroe, Illinois a week, tops. But when Laine begins an intense affair with the married mailman, everything changes. For the first time in her 15 years, Aurora has time to fall in love too—but this time with the town. It’s not unlike most of the small towns in Indiana Aurora has lived in, suffocating summer heat included, but this one has streets and people and places she is given a chance to know and love. It has a girl Aurora can call her best friend. A Gran who loves Aurora even as she fights for control over her own worst nature for the third time in her life. And a picture-perfect pastor’s son who sees Aurora as more than “Laine’s daughter.” It’s everything Aurora never thought she would have to lose. It’s everything she would never let herself dream about.

But each time the illicit lovebirds slip into the back bedroom, Aurora sees her chances at happiness slipping away. Laine won’t just burn a bridge this time, she’ll light the town on fire, burning Gran’s hope, Aurora’s future, and her own chance at redemption to the ground with it.

Paige Dinneny earned her MFA from Cal State Long Beach and writes primarily about the relationships between mothers and daughters. She was born and raised in Southern California, but now resides in Franklin, Tennessee with her sister and two cats. She briefly taught academically, but much prefers interacting with people as a retail store manager.

NOTES ON A DROWNING d’Anna Sharpe

A novel that goes to the heart of a political scandal involving misogyny, international corruption, and abuse of power.

NOTES ON A DROWNING
by Anna Sharpe
Orion, TBC 2024
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Alex is a solicitor trying to keep afloat in a struggling London legal aid practice. When she takes on a new case for a Moldovan woman whose younger sister’s body was found in the Thames, Alex assumes Natalia’s story will be the usual sadly predictable tale of addiction and poverty.

On the other side of the river, Kat has secured her dream job: special adviser to the charismatic new Home Secretary, introducing her to a seductive new world of power, elitism and influence.

But when the girl’s inquest is speedily shut down, and Kat begins to query why immigration cases have been quashed, both Alex and Kat suspect that they have stumbled upon high level corruption. Might it link to the disappearance of Alex’s sister twelve years before?

Anna Sharpe is the pseudonym of Anna Mazzola. She’s the award-winning author of three historical thrillers plus one ghost novel. Her debut novel, The Unseeing, won an Edgar Allan Poe award in the US. Her third novel, The Clockwork Girl, set in 18th century Paris, reached number 11 in the Sunday Times Chart.