Its almost the end of spring already?! With summer is only just round the corner, what better way to slow down time than to sit comfortably with some superb fiction coming out this merry month of May. Take a cheeky preview below at these outstanding titles that are sure to jump to the top of your toppling TBR pile!
Any Human Power by Manda Scott
September Publishing | 9781914613562 | HB | £18.99 | 30th May 2024
From acclaimed author Manda Scott comes a visionary thriller of a lifetime. As Lan lies dying, she makes a promise that binds her long into the Beyond. A decade later her teenage granddaughter is caught up in an international storm of online outrage that unleashes the rage of a whole, failed generation. For one shining fragment of time, the world is with her. But then the backlash begins, and soon she and her family are besieged by the press, facing the all-powerful wrath of the old establishment whose only understanding is power-over, not power-with. Watching over the growing chaos is Lan, who taught them all to think independently, approach power sceptically and dream with clear intent. She knows that more than one generation’s hopes are on the line. Weaving together myth, technology and radical compassion, this visionary novel breaks apart all we know of life, death and the routes to hope, asking us all to dream deeply and act boldly.
A Person Is A Prayer by Ammar Kalia
Oldcastle Books | 9780857305855 | HB | £18.99 | 30th May 2024
Bedi and Sushma’s marriage is arranged. When they first meet, they stumble through a faltering conversation about happiness and hope and agree to go in search of these things together. But even after their children Selena, Tara and Rohan are grown up and have their own families, Bedi and Sushma are still searching. Years later, the siblings attempt to navigate life without their parents. As they travel to the Ganges to unite their father’s ashes with the opaque water, it becomes clear that each of them has inherited the same desire to understand what makes a life happy, the same confusion about this question and the same enduring hope. A Person is a Prayer plumbs the depths of the spaces between family members and the silence that rushes in like a flood when communication deteriorates. It is about how short a life is and how the choices we make can ripple down generations.
Sun Seekers by Rachel McRady
VERVE Books | 9780857308634 | PB | £9.99 | 28th May 2024
Six-year-old Gracie Lynn is perpetually curious and bighearted. Convinced she knows how to save her beloved grandfather John from the ‘worm’ that is eating his brain — a metaphor her mother once used to explain John’s dementia and sundown syndrome — Gracie helps him break out of his nursing home, and the two disappear together on a quest to chase the sun. But what’s an adventure for Gracie is a nightmare scenario for her estranged parents, LeeAnn and Dan. There’s no way to predict where John might have taken their young daughter, or if he’s capable of keeping her safe. An emotionally resonant novel, Sun Seekers artfully explores the truths of parenthood, the ways in which we sometimes hurt those we love most and the universal experience of deep loss — even when the person is still here.
Lost in the Garden by Adam S. Leslie
Dead Ink Books | 9781915368485 | PB | £10.99 | 16th May 2024
Heather, Rachel and Antonia are going to Almanby. Heather needs to find her boyfriend who, like so many, went and never came back. Rachel has a mysterious package to deliver, and her life depends on it. And Antonia — poor, lovestruck Antonia just wants the chance to spend the day with Heather. So off they set through the idyllic yet perilous English countryside, in which nature thrives in abundance and summer lasts forever. And as they travel through evershifting geography and encounter strange voices in the fizz of shortwave radio, the harder it becomes to tell friend from foe. Creepy, dreamlike, unsettling and unforgettable — you are about to join the privileged few who come to understand exactly why we don’t go to Almanby.
Cinnamon Girl by Daniel Weizmann
Melville House Publishing | 9781685891152 | PB | £17.99 | 30th May 2024
Adam Zantz is still driving Lyft for a living, struggling to make ends meet while training to get his PI license, but he’s falling behind in his studies. When his beloved former piano teacher confides that he has only months to live and calls in a favour — to look into a long-cold murder case and retroactively prove his son’s innocence — Adam is compelled to honour the dying man’s request. He soon stumbles on a test pressing of a never-released LPs and uncovers the shadowy story of a high school garage band lost to the tides of the early ‘80s music scene in Los Angeles, aka the Paisley Underground. As Adam tracks down the former band members, one of them is slain before his eyes, taking with him the band’s dangerous secrets. Now Adam must act fast to catch the killer, tracing the band’s journey from the garage to the precipice of fame — a twisted tale marked by ambitious hucksters, crooked DJs, a wealthy patron with his own Hollywood aspirations, and the woman who held the key to the band’s triumph and ruin. Cinnamon Girl is a suspenseful, moving tale of musical camaraderie, hunger for stardom, greed, lust, betrayal, and the hidden price of teenage yearning.
The Venus of Salò by Ben Pastor
Bitter Lemon Press | 9781916725065 | PB | £9.99 | 23rd May 2024
October 1944, in the so-called Republic of Salò, the last fascist stronghold in Italy. After months of ferocious fighting on the Gothic Line, Colonel Martin Bora of the Wehrmacht must investigate the theft of a precious painting of Venus by Titian, stolen with uncanny ease from a local residence. While Bora’s inquiry proceeds among many difficulties, the discovery of three dead bodies throws an even more sinister light on the scene. The victims are female, very beautiful, apparently dead by their own hand but in fact elegantly murdered. The latest in the Martin Bora series, this is a spellbinding multi-layered crime novel set in the fascist Republic of Salò on Lake Garda just months before the end of WWII.
The Lost District by Joel Lane
Influx Press | 9781910312186 | PB | £9.99 | 9th May 2024
Set in a post-industrial landscape of the present, the near future, and the imagined, Joel Lane’s seminal collection The Lost District explores human encounters with the unknown: sexual discovery, drug-inspired visions, the lonely paths of madness, and the shadow realms on the other side of death. A neighbourhood fades into corrupt echoes of itself; a porn actor’s scars reveal the forces controlling his life; a musician is haunted by the madness of a deceased singer; and a man literally follows his ex-lover to the end of the world. Ranging from grim urban horror to strange erotic fantasies to bitter allegories of loss and exploitation, the stories in The Lost District link the hidden places in the urban and small-town landscapes to the secret spaces inside all of us. First published in the USA in 2006, and long out-of-print, The Lost District has never been published in the UK until now, further enforcing Joel Lane’s reputation as one of the most significant and distinctive British writers of the weird.
