Welcome to Insider Reading, where the booksellers of Mr B’s give you the lowdown on new and future releases. We are very lucky as booksellers to get to read books ahead of publication.
So here is a behind-the-scenes peek into what some of our booksellers are already raving about for the months ahead…
Keith Ridgway’s latest novel, Dooneen (out now), unfolds like a fever dream. Set largely in a near-future Dublin, the dystopian novel follows protagonist Mew, who is in the city for a literary festival. He travels from London via a portal in the woods, and finds a changed Dublin: there are no cars on the street, people travel on moving walkways, and there’s a palpable sense of unrest.
On arrival at his hotel, Mew is greeted by Charlie and Vinny, two Rosencrantz and Guildenstern -like porters who bring equal parts comedy and horror. They tell Mew that there are going to be strikes in the city, predominantly to do with the housing crisis, and that the whole city will come to a standstill.
What follows from that enticing start is a largely dreamlike sequence of events that sees Mew engulfed and swept along by the strikes. The novel takes the form of a letter to his boyfriend back in London, recounting events in the past tense. Occasionally we get snippets of the present: Mew is stranded on a cliff-side, his resources dwindling and comrades freezing.
Dooneen reminded me strongly of Anne De Marcken’s It Lasts Forever Then It’s Over and Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song; a stream of consciousness dystopia that wrestles with climate change, the housing crisis, and the refugee experience in Dublin. It’s a tricky read, which occasionally jumps in setting and understanding, but will be perfect for readers who enjoy a disjointed narrative about love and loss. – Kate
Charlotte Higgins is a classicist and journalist, and both of these perspectives, the long lens of history and the immediacy of journalism, combine in her upcoming book, Ukrainian Lessons (August 20th).
Higgins draws on years of trips to Ukraine, not to report on the conflict, but as an arts correspondent. She set out to meet with artists and writers, to try to understand how they respond to terror and destruction, and to pose the question of whether art is still worth making in the face of death. The answer she seems to draw is yes, it is. Art allows people to forge sense and meaning, to regain some form of control over their experiences. This ranges from small acts of resistance – like reclaiming Ukrainian and rejecting the Russian language, its books and the accompanying cultural colonisation – to full-blown exhibitions created from ruins.
Throughout the book, Higgins beautifully balances her classicist viewpoint, which situates Ukraine in a line of tragedy stretching back to Troy, and an artist’s eye for small, moving details: the things people choose to take with them when they flee their homes (a cat, some clothes, a notebook) and the things left behind (a beloved Grandma’s jewellery, a library built up over years). Above all, Higgins reminds us of how unacceptable war is, and how, even in the worst moments, roses are as essential as bread, and that creativity offers agency where power has been taken away from people. – Ronnie
Kol and Sully are Rustheads, treasure hunters scavenging the scrap fields of the planet Rust. Everything changes when they uncover a long-forgotten spaceship buried beneath the junk. Catapulted into deep space, they quickly realise they are not alone. A mysterious girl is waiting aboard with a mission: to free the galaxy from the ruthless Reaper Empire. Now, the fate of the galaxy rests in their hands.
A thrilling middle grade sci-fi adventure, with characters you’re genuinely rooting for, Ross Mackenzie proves once again with Rusthead (August 13th) that he’s a master of any genre! – Becky
Laura Wood has done it again! After the Theo & Cynthie series, Kiss Me Like You Mean It (August 13th) abandons these shores to set itself in a quaint close-knit small town in Maine. Ophelia ‘Lee’ Turner-Jones hasn’t followed in the steps of her famous acting family and has become an accountant instead. A job in Vegas ends up in a chance encounter with her brother Jack’s best friend, crush-from-childhood Nico, that ends in a wild night including poker, a wedding, and not talking to each other for a year. When she finds out that the wedding was legally binding she starts searching for Nico only to find him settled in Maine with a daughter and an inheritance problem that perhaps an idyllic forced proximity fake marriage might just fix. So fun, so swoony. – Laura GM
Pre-order a signed and dedicated copy here
When Barbara abandons her young daughters at a truck stop, she is resolutely out of her mind. Cast separately into the care system, the girls are perfect survivors. Matilda now works in an award-winning Sydney restaurant and is secretly in love with her boss. She knows all about hunger and how to control it. Meanwhile her half-sister, Lara, is a successful fashion model constantly in demand and surrounded by the pressure to be thin. Abandonment has formed them each into an island on opposite sides of the country. Until Lara arrives back in town and chaos ensues as family secrets are revealed that threaten Matilda’s carefully constructed life.
With themes of dysfunctional parenting, loneliness and disordered eating, Jacqueline Maley’s Lonely Mouth (out now) could have been just another ‘misery- memoir’ type novel but instead the author writes with a light wit and great tenderness to produce a tale of love, sisterhood and ultimately one of redemption. – Sue
A long-forgotten human colony on a distant planet is rediscovered by a Spanish archaeologist. Through his field notes, personal diaries, and oral histories of its residents spanning 150 years after Earth’s supply ships mysteriously stopped arriving, we watch a civilisation reinvent itself. Language splinters, myths harden into religion, communities evolve, and history becomes something negotiated rather than remembered.
Equal parts witty, coarse and quietly profound, the novel explores translation, storytelling, faith (including prayers to Dog), sex, and the wonderfully messy ways cultures transform over time. It’s an inventive meditation on what survives when the past is lost.
Fans of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Calvino (whose work features in the text!) Borges or Ursula K. Le Guin will find plenty to admire in Munir Hachemi’s The Mulai (out now), an ambitious, deeply thoughtful novel.
The latest novel from the much-loved Spanish novelist, Andrés Barba, is every bit as strange and haunting as you’d expect. Last Day of a Prior Life (out now), follows an unnamed woman preparing an empty house to show to potential buyers, when she suddenly encounters a young boy, unblinking, looking right at her. The women can’t get the image of the boy out of her mind. When she returns and encounters him once again she senses the need to help him. But the presence of the boy in her life, and the games they begin to play with each other, start disrupting her own behaviour and sense of self.
It’s a novel that has all the makings of a classic ghost story, but you soon realise there’s something else at play here, which of course I won’t spoil for you! Andrés Barba is a master at creating the most nail-bitingly tense sentences, with the most exquisite metaphors to get under your skin. Plus extra points for being one of my favourite book titles of the year! A perfect little read for fans of Shirley Jackson and Mariana Enriquez.
Thanks for reading!
Emma