Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU d’Erin Jones

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU explores themes of climate change, wealth inequality, queer lives, and immortality, combining the ensemble storytelling of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, the speculative nature of Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark and C. Pam Zhang’s Land Of Milk and Honey, with the humor and heart of Glass Onion.

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU
by Erin Jones
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, publication 2026-2027
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

In a not-too-distant future, the world’s last glacier has been downgraded to the world’s last iceberg. While society mourns another natural wonder lost to climate change, the billionaire—a former tech mogul turned restaurateur—becomes obsessed with obtaining a piece of the ice to serve at his restaurant. The iceberg has been deemed a protected entity by the United Nations, but that doesn’t worry the billionaire. He needs the ice.  

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU is a speculative, propulsive literary novel-in-stories following the waning days of the world as we know it, and the nine people who find their fates intertwined with the iceberg and one another across space, time, and class. There’s the helicopter pilot who aids and abets the billionaire’s heist despite physical and emotional scars from what she saw while working in search and rescue amid environmental catastrophes wrought by global warming; the billionaire’s wife, who reserved her place in a future Mars colony by allowing her consciousness to be contained in a box as the world burned; a pair of twins who have only ever lived at sea and now lead scuba tours of communities drowned by rising waters; and finally, the security guard who will do whatever it takes to provide protection (and air conditioning) for his young family, and becomes embroiled in a plot to reclaim the little of the iceberg that remains in containment before it’s gone forever.

Erin Jones is the author of the YA novel Tinfoil Crowns (Flux Books, 2019), a 2020 Moonbeam Awards Silver Medalist, and one of Barnes & Noble’s most anticipated YA books of the year. Jones graduated with her MFA in fiction from Emerson College where she is now affiliated faculty and a writing consultant for ELL students. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

THE TWELVE de Liz Hyder

From the award-winning author of Bearmouth, comes this hauntingly magical new novel, hailed by readers as a modern classic.

THE TWELVE
by Liz Hyder
Pushkin Children’s Books, October 2024

WINNER OF THE NERO PRIZE FOR CHILDREN’S FICTION

One midwinter’s night, and by the light of a full moon, Kit and her young sister set out for the mysterious white clock tower. There, as legend has it, if you look into the pool below at the stroke of midnight you will see the future. Kit is more than sceptical but can’t discourage Libby so decides to accompany her. But when the clock begins to strike, time suddenly changes in this sleepy village on the Welsh coast – contemporary events and ancient magical history collide with terrible results.

Kit’s sister has totally disappeared, as if through a tear in the fabric of time, and not even her mother seems to remember her existence. There are strange sightings of wolf-like animals on the beach and untimely comets shoot through the sky, harbingers of disaster. But they should never be there! What has happened and is Kit the only one who knows she had a sister, has a sister?

When Kit meets Story, a young boy who has slipped through society’s net and is living alone, learning to survive communing with nature and the stars, she finds a kindred spirit and they begin to try and make sense of the mystery that is unfolding. They explore the stone circles and uncover ancient myths and legends as well as powerful curses which resonate over the millennia and which might possibly bring them closer to finding Libby.

As the unnatural phenomena become more frequent and terrifying and the threat to the natural order of the world becomes more imminent it is clear that time is not on their side…

Channelling the dark menace of classic British fantasy writers such as Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, this is a beguiling tale of ancient magic, good and evil, deeply rooted in the Welsh landscape. Haunting illustrations by Tom de Freston add to the eerie atmosphere.’ The Guardian

The ancient past is rendered vividly in this book that is ideal for tweens and teens who love beachcombing for fossils’ The Times Children’s Book of the Week

Liz Hyder has been making up stories ever since she can remember. She has a BA in drama from the University of Bristol and, in early 2018, won the Bridge Award/Moniack Mhor’s Emerging Writer Award. Her first novel, Bearmouth, won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize for Older Readers, the Branford Boase Award, and was The Times‘s Children’s Book of The Year.

Tom De Freston is an artist based in Oxford with his wife, Kiran Millwood Hargrave. His practice is dedicated to the construction of multimedia worlds, combining paintings, film and performance into immersive visceral narratives.

THE SUN AND THE STARMAKER de Rachel Griffin

From the New York Times bestselling author of Bring Me Your Midnight, The Nature of Witches and Wild Is the Witch comes a lush romantic fantasy about love, immortality, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

THE SUN AND THE STARMAKER
by Rachel Griffin
Sourcebooks, Fall 2025
(via Park, Fine & Brower)

Deep in the mountains of the Lost Range, the small village of Reverie is beyond the reach of the sun. Every morning, the Starmaker—the village’s protector and only sorcerer—trudges across a vast glacier and pulls in sunlight over the peaks, providing Reverie with the light it needs to survive.

Aurora Finch has always loved the stories of the mysterious Starmaker, but on the day of her wedding, a chance encounter with him in the frostbitten woods changes everything. He immediately detects magic inside her, and Aurora is forced to move to his ice-covered castle far up the mountain’s peak.

The Starmaker is cold and reserved, leaving Aurora to wander his enchanted castle with only an immortal rabbit for company. But as Aurora discovers more about the power inside her, she suspects that the Starmaker is hiding something, and as her magic strengthens and her attraction to the Starmaker grows, she must uncover his secrets before they destroy them both.

Rachel Griffin is the New York Times bestselling author of The Nature of Witches, Wild is the Witch, and Bring Me Your Midnight. When she isn’t writing, you can find her wandering the Pacific Northwest, reading by the fire, or drinking copious amounts of coffee and tea. She lives in the Seattle area with her husband, dog, and growing collection of houseplants.

BIRD BRAIN d’Andreas Nieder

A future classic about the science of the natural world that illuminates the brilliance of crows and their kin, by one of the world’s foremost experts on corvid intelligence, and Professor of Animal Physiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

BIRD BRAIN:
The Incredible Intelligence of Crows, and What it Means to Have a Mind
by Prof. Andreas Nieder
currently on submission
(via Randle Editorial & Literary Consultancy)

Crows, magpies, jays and ravens are among the planet’s most intelligent creatures, rivalling even our closest primate relatives. Yet, they couldn’t be more different from us. Cloaked in sleek dark feathers, wielding sharp beaks instead of hands, and soaring effortlessly on the wind, they seem like emissaries from another world—alien minds hidden in plain sight. But we don’t need to search the cosmos to find extraordinary intelligence. It’s right here, perched on power lines, gliding through our city parks, and watching us silently from the heights of ancient trees. These extraordinary birds are masterful toolmakers and astute problem-solvers. They communicate through complex vocalizations, exchanging detailed information and warnings. Their intricate social structures rival the dynamics of a bustling human town. Crows have been seen solving multi-step puzzles, grasping abstract concepts, and even planning for the future—cognitive abilities we don’t typically associate with creatures whose brains are no larger than a walnut.

The more scientists study them, the more crows upend our understanding of cognition, memory, and what it means to have a “mind.” Each discovery shatters preconceived limits of intelligence, proving that evolution has shaped brilliance in astonishingly varied forms—sometimes cloaked in feathers, observing us from the treetops. When we call crows and their corvid kin intelligent, we do so as one thinking mind reflecting on another. But our perception of them is never purely observational—it’s steeped in projection. As humans, we can’t help but filter their behaviours through the prism of our own emotions, assigning them motives, feelings, even inner lives that may not exist. Like the narrator in Poe’s ‘The Raven’, we see in corvids not just what they are, but what we imagine them to be—creatures imbued with meanings that align with our own thoughts and biases, as shown in corvid strewn folklore all around the world, from European myths to Asian symbolism to omens in Ancient Greece.

This impulse to assign meaning—to ascribe to other beings, or even inanimate objects, purpose and emotion—is fundamental to how we relate to the world. When we observe crows, we aren’t just studying them—we’re also revealing how our minds build narratives to make sense of the unknown. In exploring their intelligence, we uncover not only the brilliance of these birds but also the human tendency to see reflections of ourselves in the natural world—and how that
shapes the stories that we tell about life itself.

BIRD BRAIN invites readers on a captivating journey into the fascinating world of the corvid mind. Drawing on Nieder’s personal experiences in hand-raising crows, alongside his unparalleled academic expertise, it promises to not only showcase the astonishing cognitive abilities of crows and their kin, but also to reflect upon the nature of intelligence itself, sitting naturally alongside international bestsellers and classics explorations of animal (and human) intelligence, such as Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds, or The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montogomery. In challenging the reader to see the natural world in a new light, it also brings to mind The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben or Ed Yong’s An Immense World.  Furthermore, as the book is cleverly scaffolded and animated by following the journey of Edgar, a single representative crow raised and nurtured to adulthood, BIRD BRAIN provides a narrative that will also resonate with a secondary audience, readers who appreciated the intimate human-animal bond in Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton or Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour.  

Professor Andreas Nieder is a biologist and Professor of Animal Physiology and Director of the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen, one of Germany’s renowned “Elite Universities.” With more than 15 years of dedicated work studying crows he has become a preeminent authority in the field of corvid cognition, and animal cognition more widely. A member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina – one of the highest honours for a researcher in Germany – his groundbreaking research has redefined our understanding of animal intelligence. He has published nearly 50 peer-reviewed studies on crows in some of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, including a Science cover feature. Nieder is also widely recognized in the media for his groundbreaking research in crow cognition. He has appeared on NPR and BBC Radio 4, and his research has been highlighted in leading science outlets including New Scientist and Quanta. In 2019, his academic book A Brain for Numbers – The Biology of the Number Instinct was published by MIT Press (with no other translation editions). He lives in Tübingen, Germany, with his wife and their three children.

LESSER RUINS de Mark Haber

From the author of Reinhardt’s Garden and Saint Sebastian’s Abyss comes a breathless new novel of delirious obsession.

LESSER RUINS
by Mark Haber
Publisher, October 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life’s work—a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way—from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son’s relentless desire to make an electronic dance album.

As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists’ colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor’s memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves.

Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, LESSER RUINS is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity’s ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art.

Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Washington Post Notable Book of 2024
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2024
Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2024
An Electric Literature Best Book of Fall 2024, According to Indie Booksellers
Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2024

« LESSER RUINS mounts decisive proof that Haber is one of the most rigorous and serious—and anachronistic—novelists working today. » —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

« Haber’s novel is fluent and compelling, often rhapsodic, with a cumulative power to its repetitions. » —Hal Jensen, Times Literary Supplement

Mark Haber was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Florida. His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden (2019, Coffee House Press), was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His second novel, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss (2022, Coffee House Press), was named a best book of 2022 by the New York Public Library, Literary Hub, and Publishers Weekly. Mark’s fiction has appeared in Guernica, Southwest Review, and Air/Light, among others. He lives in Minneapolis.