Its cold, its frosty, its dark — none of us bookworms want to be outside in this chilly January weather. Now we’re deep in mid-winter, there is no better way to brighten the gloomy evenings than with these glorious fiction titles! Our wonderful publishers have started 2024 off with a bang with these outstanding releases that are sure to enthrall and ensnare your imaginations all throughout the month!
Contact your local sales rep or check your local bookstore to get these on your shelves.
The Lover of No Fixed Abode by Carlo Fruttero & Franco Lucentini
Translated by Gregory Dowling
Bitter Lemon Press | 9781913394905 | PB | £9.99 | 25th January 2024
It begins with a troubling encounter on a flight to Venice. She is a Roman aristocrat and art dealer on the search for undervalued paintings and he a mysterious tour guide. She is invited to cosmopolitan parties by Venetian social and art glitterati. Mr. Silvera, a guide whose erudition and distinction are in sharp contrast with his beat-up suitcase and stain-spotted raincoat, drags his shabby tourists from monument to monument. Their passion will last three days, long enough to be exposed to unscrupulous art dealers and other scammers, passing off worthless paintings as part of a famous collection. Silvera seems to know every language and all secrets. But who is he really? Around them, the canals and lagoons of Venice, a city which becomes a character in the novel in its own right.
The Ukraine by Artem Chapeye
Translated by Zenia Tompkins
Seven Stories Press UK | 9781838415983 | PB | £12.99 | 25th January 2024
The Ukraine is a collection of twenty-six pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications. In the title story, Chapeye facetiously plays with the English misuse of the article ‘the’ in reference to Ukraine, capturing a country as perceived from the outside, by foreigners. That pseudo-kitsch, often historically shallow, and not-quite-real Ukraine resonates because of its highly engaging and brutally candid snapshots of ordinary lives and typical places. In ‘One Soul per Home’ an elderly woman laments that the men are dying and the young are leaving for the cities, changing the face of her small town; in ‘The Unscrupulous Spirit of the provinces,’ a couple of unspecified gender get stoned and go to church; and in ‘False Premises,’ a man romanticises his younger years working for a Soviet fishing fleet only to reconstruct his nostalgia in the face of Putin’s Russia.
Walter Benjamin Stares At The Sea by C. D. Rose
Melville House | 9781685890841 | HB | £17.99 | 25th January 2024
Welcome to the fictional universe of C. D. Rose, whose stories seem to be set in some unidentifiable but vaguely Mitteleuropean nation, and likewise have an uncanny sense of timelessness — the time could be some cobblestoned Victorian past era, or the present, or even the future. In these 15 dreamlike tales, you’ll meet a forgotten composer who enters a nostalgic dream-world while marking time in a decaying Romanian seaport; two Russian brothers, one blind and one deaf, building an intricate model town during an interminable train ride across the steppe; a journalist whose interview with an artist turns into a dizzying roundelay of memory and image. Ghosts of the past mingle with the quiddities of modernity in a bewitching stew where lost masterpieces surface with translations in an invisible language; where image and photograph become mystically entwined, and where the very nature of reality takes on a shimmering sense of possibility and illusion.
The Child of Hameln by Max Turner
Knight Errant Press | 9781999671396 | PB | £10 | 4th January 2024
Elk Pass is a town cloaked in darkness and plagued by an unknown evil, where twenty years earlier all but one of the town’s children were stolen. That remaining child, now the deputy sheriff, is left to unravel corruption and cover up when his mentor, the town sheriff, dies unexpectedly. The mystery unfolds as a snow storm blows in, threatening to isolate the town, leaving Deputy Bobby Taylor to deal with a plague of rats and the monsters, both human and fae, that follow.
Naples Noir: La Strada degli Americani by Giuseppe Miale di Mauro
Translated by Thomas Fazi
Dedalus | 9781912868971 | PB | £9.99 | 26th January 2024
The events which take place on the Naples Ring Road, called by the locals La Strada degli Americani (The American Road) have a profound effect on the novel’s protagonists, changing their lives forever. A novel set in the dark heart of Naples where the camorra, made rich by the drug trade, terrorise a city which they govern by violence. Giuseppe Miale di Mauro gives us a work of fiction based on true events which is as unforgettable and powerful as Roberto Savinio’s Gomorrah. Naples Noir: La Strada degli Americani is a book which will stay with you long after you have finished reading it.
Last Seen in Lapaz by Kwei Quarterley
Soho Crime | 9781641295314 | PB | £9.99 | 9th January 2024
Just as things at work are slowing down for PI Emma Djan, an old friend of her boss’s asks for help locating his missing daughter. According to her father, Ngozi had a bright future ahead of her when she became secretive and withdrawn. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was be with her handsome new beau, Femi, instead of attending law school in the fall. So when she disappears from her parents’ house in Nigeria the middle of a summer night, they immediately suspect Femi was behind it and have reason to believe the pair has fled to Accra. During Emma’s first week on the case, Femi is found murdered at his opulent residence in Accra. There are no signs of Ngozi at the scene, and fearing the worst, Emma digs further, discovering that Femi was part of a network of sex traffickers across West Africa. Emma must figure out which of Femi’s many enemies killed him, but more urgently, she must find Ngozi before she, too, is murdered in cold blood.
Goldenseal by Maria Hummel
Counterpoint | 9781640096066 | HB | £25 | 9th January 2024
Downtown Los Angeles, 1990. Alone in her luxury hotel suite, the reclusive Lacey Crane receives a message: Edith is waiting for her in the lobby. Former best friends, Lacey and Edith haven’t spoken to one another in over four decades. As young adults meeting at summer camp in Maine, and later making their way in the glitzy spotlight of post-war Hollywood, Edith and Lacey share a deep-rooted bond that once saved them from isolation and despair, providing comfort from the public and private traumas that they had each endured and which a newly optimistic world was eager to forget. Told through a continuous, twisting conversation that unfolds over the course of a single evening, in which each woman tells her story and reveals long-hidden secrets, the narratives of Edith and Lacey burn with atmosphere, mystery, resentment, and regret. Set against the vivid landscapes of Los Angeles and unfolding with the evanescence of a dream or a memory, Goldenseal peels away the layers of an intimate female friendship to reveal a stirring and haunting story about the search for connection and the lingering echoes of lost love.
Radiant Heat by Sarah-Jane Collins
Berkley | 9780593550342 | HB | £24.99 | 23rd January 2024
Alison is alive. She rode out the fire on the damp tiles of her bathroom, her entire body swaddled in a wet woollen blanket. The flames crackled around her, the bitter char of eucalyptus settling in the back of her throat. The wildfire devastated the Victoria countryside she calls home, and when Alison creeps out of her hiding place, she spots a soot-covered cherry red car in her driveway, and in it, a woman. She finds the woman’s bag. An ID: Simone Arnold. A piece of paper: Alison’s full name and address. But why? As Alison searches for answers across Australia’s harsh landscape, she soon learns that the fire isn’t the only threat she’s facing…
