Archives de catégorie : Fiction

ELAINE de Will Self

From the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella, a brilliant portrait of motherhood, sublimated desire, and the reverberations of the Cold War in a novel that investigates and reimagines the life of the author’s mother.

ELAINE
by Will Self
Grove Press, September 2024

Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language, dubbed “the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation” (Guardian). His work has been shortlisted for awards including the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award for Novel of the Year, and selected for best of the year lists, including those of the Times, Guardian, Independent and Financial Times. He also earns rapturous reviews, with his last novel, Phone, hailed as “one of the most significant literary works of our century” (New Statesman). Following a blistering personal account of addiction in his memoir Will, Self turns his forensic eye to the life of his own equally troubled mother, Elaine, in this brilliantly conceived new novel.

Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member, inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life.

Based on the intimate diaries Self’s mother kept for over forty years, ELAINE is a writer’s attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent’s interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, ELAINE shows Will Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London.

ESPERANCE d’Adam Oyebanji

A whip-smart thriller in the vein of Blake Crouch, Andy Weir, and Neal Stephenson, ESPERANCE plumbs the depths of a seemingly impossible crime rooted in racism, intergenerational trauma, and an inhuman concept of justice.

ESPERANCE
by Adam Oyebanji
DAW US; Quercus UK, May 2025
(via JABberwocky)

Detective Ethan Krol is on the twentieth floor of a Chicago apartment building. A father and son have been found dead—their lungs full of sea water hundreds of miles from the ocean.

Abidemi Eniola has arrived in Bristol, England. She claims to be Nigerian, but her accent is wrong and she can do remarkable things with technology, things that Abi’s new friend, Hollie Rogers, has never seen before. Abi is in possession of a number of heirlooms that need to be returned to their rightful owners and Hollie is more than happy to go along for the ride.

But neither Abidemi Eniola nor her heirlooms are quite what they seem. Abidemi is a target of Ethan Krol’s investigations and Hollie’s life is about to become far more uncomfortable than she bargained for. In a clash of cultures, and histories and different ideas about right and wrong, Hollie’s safety is very much at risk. Someone’s justice will have to give way, and the consequences will be deadly.

Of Scottish and Nigerian descent, Adam Oyebanji is an escapee from Birmingham University and Harvard Law School. He currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA with a wife, child, and two embarrassingly large dogs. When he’s not out among the stars, Adam works in the field of counter-terrorist financing: helping banks choke off the money supply that builds weapons of mass destruction, narcotics empires, and human trafficking networks.

TINY THREADS de Lilliam Rivera

Black Swan meets The Devil Wears Prada in this creepy horror about fashion, about sexuality as a commodity, and the power wielded by men trying to harness it.

TINY THREADS
by Lilliam Rivera
Del Rey, March 2023
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

After the death of her grandmother, Samara Martín leaves her overbearing Cuban family behind in New Jersey for a job at a once-edgy fashion brand in Vernon, California. Touted as up-and-coming, Vernon turns out to be eerily desolate, made worse by the foul-smelling slaughterhouse near the office.
Trying to navigate office politics by appeasing her volatile boss, Samara throws all her focus into an upcoming runway show. But there are other forces at play; she finds names stitched into garments in the archive that disappear the next day, she starts having visions of a young girl that grow increasingly disturbing—and there’s Brandon Hernandez Murphy, a charming tech investor keen on reinventing Vernon who Samara finds herself drawn to.
Samara starts to hide her increasing instability by drinking more, casting aside her family’s warnings, but when the runway show is a success, the guardrails come off entirely. The afterparty is extreme in all senses: beauty, drugs, and sex—and Samara succumbs to every vice. But her visions aren’t through with her yet. They lead her to a disturbing discovery and a violent confrontation with consequences for both Samara’s world, and the world of the supernatural.

Lilliam Rivera draws upon her experiences as a founding editor of Latina magazine to examine the dark side of glamour and deliver a haunting story. She is also an award-winning writer and author of numerous young adult novels, including The Education of Margot Sanchez, We Light Up the Sky, Never Look Back, and Dealing In Dreams. She is also author of the middle grade Goldie Vance books. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Elle, to name a few. Lilliam lives in Los Angeles.

IN OUR STARS de Jack Campbell

A new science fiction duology from New York Times bestselling author Jack Campbell that blends time travel and space opera in a thrilling adventure.

IN OUR STARS
(The Doomed Earth Duology, #1)
by Jack Campbell
Ace, May 2024
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

Earth, 2180.

Genetically engineered with partly alien DNA, Lieutenant Selene Genji is different from ordinary humans. And they hate her for it. Still, she’s spent her life trying to overcome society’s prejudice by serving in the Unified Fleet while Earth’s international order collapses into war.

Genji is stationed on a ship in orbit when humanity’s factional extremism on the planet reaches a boiling point, and she witnesses the utter annihilation of Earth. When the massive forces unleashed by Earth’s death warp space and time to hurl her forty years into the past, Genji is given a chance to try to change the future and save Earth—starting with the alien first contact only she knows will soon occur.

Earth, 2140.

Lieutenant Kayl Owen’s ship is on a routine patrol when a piece of spacecraft wreckage appears out of nowhere. To his shock, there is a survivor on board: Selene Genji. Once her strange heritage is discovered, though, it becomes clear that Genji is a problem Earth Guard command wants to dispose of—quietly. After learning the horrifying truth, Owen helps her escape and joins her mission.

Together, they have a chance to change the fate of an Earth doomed to die in 2180. But altering history could put Genji’s very existence in danger, and Owen wonders if a world without her is one worth saving…

“Jack Campbell” is the pen name of John G. Hemry, a retired naval officer who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis before serving with the surface fleet and in a variety of other assignments. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Fleet series and The Lost Stars series, as well as the Stark’s War, Paul Sinclair, and Pillars of Reality series. He lives with his indomitable wife and three children in Maryland.

ESCAPE VELOCITY de Victor Manibo

A dual timeline science fiction mystery about four friends attending their 25th high school reunion aboard a luxury space station, where everyone has hidden agendas and an unsolved murder from their past comes back to haunt them.

ESCAPE VELOCITY
by Victor Manibo
Erewhon, April 2024
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

Space Habitat Altaire is the premier luxury resort in low Earth orbit, playground of the privileged and the perfect location to host reunions for the Rochford Institute. Rochford boasts only the best: the wealthiest, most promising students with the most impressive pedigrees. Complete with space walks, these lavish reunions are a prime opportunity for alumni to jockey for power with old friends and rivals—and crucially, to advance their applications to live in an exclusive Mars settlement. Earth is dying, and only the best deserve to save themselves.

Aboard the Altaire for their 25th reunion, finance magnate Ava pursues the truth about her brother’s murder during their senior year, which cast a dark shadow over their time at Rochford. Laz, ambassador and political scion, hopes to finally win Ava’s heart. Sloane, collecting secrets to conceal his family’s decline, angles for a key client. And Henry, heir to a healthcare empire, creates an unorthodox opportunity to get to Mars in a last-ditch effort to outrun a childhood secret.

While these erstwhile friends settle scores and rack up points, they fail to notice that other agendas are afoot at the Space Habitat Altaire, and their own futures aren’t the only ones at stake—“the best” will soon regret underestimating those they would leave behind on Earth.

Victor Manibo is a Filipino speculative fiction writer living in New York. A 2022 Lambda Literary Emerging Voices Fellow, he is the author of the science fiction noir novel The Sleepless. His next novel, ESCAPE VELOCITY, comes out in Spring 2024 from Erewhon Books.