How to Paint a Dead Man, by Sarah Hall

Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career – a small group of bottles.

Not long afterwards, a blind girl tends his grave, trying to understand the world she can no longer see, and wondering whether the presence she feels nearby is the ‘Bestia’, the monstrous creature depicted in the altar of painting of her local church.

In Cumbria thirty years later, a landscape artist – who once wrote letters to the Italian recluse – finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his daughter is struggling with the sudden loss of her twin brother while trying to curate an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth-century European masters, and finds herself drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon.

Covering half a century, Sarah Hall’s fourth novel is a fierce and brilliant study of art and its place in our lives. Written with passionate understanding for both the grand artistic folly and the small-scale creative triumph, How to Paint a Dead Man is a luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power.

The Twisted Heart, by Rebecca Gowers

When Kit goes to a dance class she is hoping simply to take her mind off her studies. Soon it looks like Joe, a stranger she meets there, might do more than that. But when Kit uncovers a mystery involving the young Charles Dickens and the slaughter of a prostitute known as The Countess, she is sucked back in to the world of books, and discovers how Dickens became tangled up with this horrendous crime.

Still Alice, by Lisa Genova

Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. A Harvard professor, she has a successful husband and three grown children. When she begins to grow forgetful, she dismisses it for as long as she can, but when she gets lost in her own neighbourhood she knows that something has gone terribly wrong. She finds herself in the rapidly downward spiral of Alzheimer’s Disease. She is fifty years old.

Suddenly she has no classes to teach, no new research to conduct, no invited lectures to give. Ever again. Unable to work, read and, increasingly, take care of herself, Alice struggles to find meaning and purpose in her everyday life as her concept of self gradually slips away. But Alice is a remarkable woman, and her family, yoked by history and DNA and love, discover more about her and about each other, in their quest to keep the Alice they know for as long as possible.

Losing her yesterdays, her short-term memory hanging on by a couple of frayed threads, she is living in the moment, living for each day. But she is still Alice.

Collected Stories, by Hanif Kureishi

Over the course of the last 12 years, Hanif Kureishi has written short fiction. The stories are, by turns, provocative, erotic, tender, funny and charming as they deal with the complexities of relationships as well as the joys of children.

This collection contains his controversial story Weddings and Beheadings, as well as his prophetic My Son the Fanatic, which exposes the religious tensions within the Muslim family unit. As with his novels and screenplays, Kureishi has his finger on the pulse of the political tensions in society and how they affect people’s everyday lives.

A Day and a Night and a Day, by Glen Duncan

This is the story of Augustus Rose – half African-American, half Italian; journalist, lover, restauranteur, unlikely terrorist – and his interrogator, Harper, a Grand Inquisitor armed with twenty-first century cruelty, clarity and charisma. As Harper’s assault on his body and soul intensifies, Augustus raises the only shield he has: memory. His mind turns to the women in his life, from his outcast mother, to the vigilante who recruited him, to the last female tenderness he’s ever likely to know. Outshining them all is the memory of the stunning, wealthy and white Selina, and the love affair that began in 1960s Manhattan – an epic, taboo mix of politics and passion that would lead Augustus from Harlem to Greenwich Village, from El Salvador to Barcelona, from Morocco to a bleak Scottish island where hope or death must overcome…

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy

A flighty grandmother who returns from the dead, a trusted confidante who isn’t a friend, two hitchhikers named Bonnie and Clyde – these are just some of the unforgettable characters whose stories are told in these pages. Funny, sly and sparkling with energy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is a joyous read which confirms Maile Meloy as an ‘enthralling’ storyteller (Marie Claire).

All Names Have Been Changed, by Claire Kilroy

‘We are a nation that likes nothing better than a good story, preferably featuring one of our own, ideally the parish black sheep, and few could hold a candle to Glynn in that field.’

All Names Have Been Changed is set in Dublin in the mid-1980s – a city in the grip of recession and a heroin epidemic. Narrated by Declan, the only boy of a tight-knit writing group at Trinity College, it tells of their fascination with the formidably talented but troubled writer Glynn, and the darkly exhilarating journey this leads them on.

‘He wanted his art to be a dangerous force, alive. Well then, you might say he got what he asked for.’

Brilliantly exploring the shifting group dynamic, and offering a unique insight into the pursuit of the creative life – with all its energy and demons, its moments of artistic elation and defeat – this is a novel of considerable verve. Following earlier forays into the worlds of art restoration and classical music, it is further evidence of Claire Kilroy’s natural gift for narrative, atmosphere and character.

Pride and Promiscuity, by Arielle Eckstut

In 2002, an amateur Jane Austen scholar, while staying at a Hertfordshire estate, stumbled upon a hidden cache of manuscript pages and made an extraordinary literary discovery – lost scenes from Jane Austen’s novels that reveal an altogether different dimension to her oeuvre. Pride and Prejudice‘s Bingley sisters appear as Sapphic seductresses; Mansfield Park’s incest subtext becomes manifest; and Darcy gets more than his shirt wet. This incisive parody of academic study is sure to astonish and delight mischievous Austenites.

The Favorites, by Mary Yukari Waters

Kyoto 1978. Fourteen-year-old Sarah Rexford returns to Japan with her mother for the first time in five years, to stay with the family at her mother’s childhood home. Having begun her teenage years in America, where she is popular, confident and assured, it is a shock for Sarah to find herself ill at ease and unsure of what to say or how to say it, whilst her usually quiet, rather shy mother at once returns to her engaging, accomplished and respected former self in the company of family and old friends.

As Sarah begins to reaquaint herself with her relatives and learn more about the culture she came from, she discovers a secret that stretches across three generations, its presence looming over the family home. Personal boundaries are firmly drawn in traditional Kyoto, and actions are not always what they appear. In this carefully articulated world, where every look and gesture has meaning, Sarah must learn the rules by which her mother, aunts and grandmother live.

Luke and Jon, by Robert Williams

Luke’s mum is dead. He finds himself in a small, scruffy northern hill town, with a near silent father, who he fears might be trying to drink himself to death. Then he meets Jon.

Jon is strange. He wears 1950s clothes, has a side-parting and a twitch. The kids at school call him ‘Slackjaw’. When Luke discovers Jon’s secret, both their lives are changed for good.

The winner of the National Book Tokens’ Not-Yet-Published Prize, Luke and Jon is an arresting debut about friendship, grief and how lives can change forever in a single second. Written with great power, warmth and humour, it signals a hugely engaging and original new voice.

I’m Not Scared, by Niccolo Ammaniti

One relentlessly hot summer, six children explore the scorched wheat-fields that enclose their tiny Italian village. When the gang find a dilapidated farmhouse, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano makes a discovery so momentous he dare not tell a soul. It is a secret that will force Michele to question everything and everyone around him. An unputdownable thriller, I’m Not Scared is also a devastatingly authentic portrayal of childhood and the tension when it must join the adult world.

American Rust, by Philipp Meyer

Set in a beautiful but dying Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation that arises from its loss. It is the story of two young men bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia and the beauty around them who dream of a future beyond the factories, abandoned homes, and the polluted river.

Isaac is the smartest kid in town, left behind to care for his sick father after his mother commits suicide and his sister Lee moves away. Now Isaac wants out too. Not even his best friend, Billy Poe, can stand in his way: broad-shouldered Billy, always ready for a fight, still living in his mother’s trailer. Then, on the very day of Isaac’s leaving, something happens that changes the friends’ fates and tests the loyalties of their friendship and those of their lovers, families, and the town itself.

Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, Philipp Myer’s American Rust is an extraordinarily moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendance, and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.

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