That’s right, a whole extra day this month to fit in more fiction — and do we have quite the list for you. From steamy romance to thoughtful short stories and beyond, here’s everything you need to watch out for this month.
Assimilation by Sophie Buchaillard
Honno Welsh Women’s Press, 9781912905966, PB, £9.99, 29/2/2024
A multi-generational historical drama, full of mystery and deeply-wrought circumstances.
One family’s story set against the backdrop of some of the biggest political and humanitarian events of the century. A tale of unravelling family secrets, belonging, betrayal and inherited trauma. A book that transports you in time and place through one family’s history and struggle with its colonial roots. Marianne: a mother with a colourful past, keeping a terrible secret, tries her best to conform to French middle class expectations. Charlotte: young and fiercely independent, desperately needs to escape dreadful trauma and a country she does not feels she belongs to. She leaves France and arrives in Wales, hoping to find peace and somewhere to rebuild her life. This book explores the challenges of identity, belonging and womanhood, and the stories we tell in order to fit in. Assimilation is a fascinating snapshot of contemporary political and humanitarian events — the pandemic, 9/11 and Brexit — and a brilliant portrayal of women travellers, womanhood and how women’s lives have changed in the 20th and 21st centuries.
This Disaster Loves You by Richard Roper
Putnam, 9780593540701, PB, £12.99, 13/2/2024
From the author of Something to Live For, This Disaster Loves You is a poignant and funny story.
Brian’s wife, Lily, disappeared from his life without a trace six years, eleven months, one week, and two days ago, but Brian never lost hope. Since her disappearance, their once beloved English pub — and Brian’s livelihood — has been crumbling piece by piece. As the anniversary of her absence approaches, Brian desperately needs a sign. One doom-scroll on his business’s reviews later, he finds it: an active TripAdvisor account for PinkMoonLily1972 that he knows in his heart is his Lily. Interspliced with Brian’s journey to find Lily is the story of their love — how it started, and the twists and turns that brought them to this moment. As Brian jumps from one destination to the next to find Lily, and the truth behind their story comes into focus, Brian comes back to life with the help of Tess, a sarcastic, kind, and surprising traveling companion. But in order to move forward he’ll need to decide — stay in the past or take a chance on something unexpected.
Bird Spotting In A Small Town by Sophie Morton-Thomas
Verve Books, 9780857308535, PB, £9.99, 29/2/2024
Bird Spotting in a Small Town is an chilling literary suspense story of strange occurrences and buried secrets, perfectly evoking the eerie isolation of life in a small community when nothing feels quite right.
In a tiny town on the North Norfolk coast, Fran’s life is unravelling. As she fills her days cleaning the caravan park she owns, she is preoccupied by worry — about the behaviour of her son, the absences of her husband and her strained relationship with her sister’s family. Her one source of relief: early in the mornings, before the responsibilities and uncertainties take over, she slips out to the beach to watch the birds. Small-town tension simmers all around her when a new teacher starts at the local school and a Romany community settle in the field adjoining her caravan park. Not to mention the beheaded birds that have started appearing across the town. Then the schoolteacher and Fran’s brother-in-law both go missing on the same night. But all Fran can seem to care about is the birds. Meanwhile, Tad, a seventy-year-old Romany man, watches the townspeople from the distance of his caravan – and sees everything clearly. An unsettling story of strange occurrences and buried secrets, this is perfect for fans of Paula Hawkins, Gillian Flynn, Broadchurch and Hollington Drive.
Credence by Penelope Douglas
Berkley – US, 9780593641972, PB, £16.99, 13/2/2024
Three of them, one of her, and a remote cabin in the woods. Let the hot, winter nights ensue in this steamy dark romance from bestselling author Penelope Douglas, now with bonus material.
Tiernan de Haas doesn’t care about anything anymore. The only child of a film producer and his starlet wife, she’s grown up with wealth and privilege but not love or guidance. And when her parents suddenly pass away, she knows she should be devastated. But she’s always been alone, hasn’t she? Jake Van der Berg, her father’s stepbrother and her only living relative, assumes guardianship of Tiernan. Sent to live in the mountains of Colorado with Jake and his two sons, Noah and Kaleb, Tiernan quickly learns that these men now have a say in what she chooses to care and not care about anymore. As the men take Tiernan under their wing, she slowly finds her place among them. Because lines blur and rules become easy to break when no one else is watching. One of them has her. The other one wants her. But he’s going to keep her.
Sinking Bell by Bojan Louis
Dead Ink, 9781915368546, PB, £9.99, 22/2/2024
An ex-con hired to fix up a school bus for a couple living off the grid in the desert finds himself in the middle of their tattered relationship.
An electrician’s plan to take his young nephew on a hike in the mountains, as a break from the motel room where they live, goes awry thanks to an untrustworthy new coworker. A night custodian makes the mistake of revealing too much about his work at a medical research facility to a girl who shares his passion for death metal. A relapsing addict struggles to square his desire for a White woman he meets in a writing class with family expectations and traditions. Set in and around Flagstaff, the stories in Sinking Bell depict violent collisions of love, cultures, and racism. In his gritty and searching fiction debut, Bojan Louis draws empathetic portraits of day laborers, metalheads, motel managers, aspiring writers and musicians, construction workers, people passing through with the hope of something better somewhere else. His characters strain to temper predatory or self-destructive impulses; they raise families, choose families, and abandon families; they endeavor to end cycles of abuse and remake themselves anew.
Smoke Kings by Jahmal Mayfield
Melville House Publishing, 9781685891114, PB, £17.99, 8/2/2024
In the vein of Get Out and Razorblade Tears, Smoke Kings is a feast of noir fiction and probing social commentary that asks us to consider what would happen if reparations were finally charged and exacted.
Nate Evers, a young black political activist, struggles with rage as his people are still being killed in the streets 62 years after Emmett Till. When his little cousin is murdered, Nate shuns the graffiti murals, candlelight vigils, and Twitter hashtags that are commonplace after these senseless deaths. Instead, he leads 3 grief-stricken friends on a mission of retribution, kidnapping the descendants of long-ago perpetrators of hate crimes, confronting the targets with their racist lineages, and forcing them to pay reparations to a community fund. For 3 of the group members, the results mean justice; for Nate — pure revenge. Not all targets go quietly into the night, though, and Nate and his friends’ world spirals out of control when they confront the wrong man. Now the leader of a white supremacist group is hot on their tail as is a jaded lawman with some disturbingly racist views of his own. As the four vigilantes fight to thwart their ruthless pursuers, they are forced to accept an age-old truth: ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’ Smoke Kings is a powerful and propulsive novel with a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters. Like Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, it explores decades of racial tensions through a fictional landscape where the goal of the oppressed is no longer equality but rather vengeance.
