FICTION
The Kellerby Code
Jonny Sweet, Faber, £9.99, February 27
Here’s today’s question. Is it just the English who are hot for posh? Or are the rest of us too? How you answer that may have some bearing on how much you enjoy Jonny Sweet’s very moreish debut thriller now also coming out in paperback. Think Tom Ripley inserted into the English class system and you’re halfway there. Our Ripley impersonator in this case is Edward, who is always ready to help out his best friends theatre director Rupert and Stanza, daughter of landed gentry. How far will he go for them? Pretty far, it turns out in Sweet’s drama that mixes up the odd bit of designer name-dropping with the odd act of sociopathy. The result is enjoyably Saltburny. With added horses and PG Wodehouse. I found it really rather satisfying. Which I guess answers the question at the top of the paragraph.
Fiona Scarlett, Faber, £16.99, February 13
It’s a good month for Irish fiction. But then most months are good for Irish fiction. Fiona Scarlett has followed up her debut Boys Don’t Cry with this novel that’s both a teenage love story and a lament for chances not taken. It’s a restless novel, told in snapshots, that jumps between past and present in a way that captures the electricity of youth and the weight of age. NB, the last page will break your heart.
The Lamb
Lucy Rose, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99, out now
“On my fourth birthday, I plucked six severed fingers from the shower drain.” Lucy Rose’s debut novel sets it’s gruesome stall out in its first line. Set in a wooded corner of Cumbria, it is the story of a mother and a daughter and it is a story of hunger, one that raises the question: can a novel about, yes, cannibalism be beautiful? Lamb’s book proves it can. The horror of the situation is not avoided, but it’s never indulged in either. The result is a nightmare fable about maternal love (or maybe the lack of it) and about the darkness inside us. A troubling fever dream of a book that nevertheless compels you to follow it into the shadows.
Chris McQueer, Wildfire, £18.99, February 27
It’s quite a moment for debut novelists. Alongside Garrett Carr and Lucy Rose, Scottish author Chris McQueer publishes his first in Hermit, which - the headlines will say - is an investigation of incel culture. It is, but it’s more than that too. It’s also a novel about mothers and sons, about connection and the lack of it, about contemporary culture’s propensity for building grievances and how love can misfire and become invisible. As compelling as doom scrolling.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
The Boy From the Sea
Garrett Carr, Picador, £16.99, out now
The thing I miss most from my childhood is the sea. So one of the joys of reading Irish author Garrett Carr’s debut adult novel in my landlocked bit of Scotland was its strong tidal pull. Set in Donegal Bay in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s a family saga told by the chorus of locals watching what happens to the Bonnar family. Fisherman Ambrose, wife Christine and son Declan have their lives transformed when a boy is found abandoned on the beach. Ambrose informally adopts the boy, a decision that will affect all of them. Carr’s story is both expansive and intimate, funny and warm, while also psychologically acute. And it carries a cargo hold full of feeling beneath decks. The result is immersive in the best way. You can just smell the salt and sadness.
MEMOIR
The Harder I Fight The More I Love You
Neko Case, Headline, £25, out now
It’s only February but it’s hard to believe there will be a better music memoir published this year. Alt country singer Neko Case’s memoir is a portrait of a hardscrabble childhood that is marked by neglect. At one point she is told her mum is dead. Some 18 months later, her mother turns up again. This is a book full of trauma and full of rage, but also one that sings the beauty of the natural world and the joy of music. The result is remarkable.
Base Notes: The Scents of a Life
Adelle Stripe, White Rabbit, £20, February 13
This is English author Adelle Stripe’s account of her early years in the north of England - the dead-end jobs, the daytime drinking and the smell of vintage perfume. Working-class life pinned to the page.
CRIME
Imran Mahmood, Raven Books, £8.99
Imran Mahmood’s compelling domestic thriller arrives in paperback in February with an Ian Rankin front cover endorsement. It starts in media res. A teenage daughter is missing and her parents Harry and Zara are frantically trying to find her before they fall apart. The narrative crosscuts between the two of them as they struggle through their fear and anguish whilst trying to work out what happened. Their suspicions increasingly fall on a local neighbour. Mahmood, a criminal defence barrister by day, made a name for himself with his debut novel You Don’t Know Me, later turned into a BBC drama. Finding Sophie is an emotionally astute, smartly plotted thriller that also doubles as a powerful depiction of loss. There’s a measure of tricksiness and authorial sleight-of-hand in the last quarter of the book that some might not warm to, but you do keep turning the pages.
GRAPHIC NOVEL
Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes, Dark Horse Comics, £26.99, February 25
One of the more arresting short-run comic series of 2024 makes it into hardcover with this gather-up of the entire six-issue run of Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s gorgeous fantasy series. It’s the story of teenager Helen Cole, whose father C.K. Cole wrote for the pulps. When he dies she is taken to her grandfather’s grand home Wynhorn House where she discovers that her father’s pulp visions may not have been entirely imaginary. Trailing echoes of Robert E Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories (and Howard’s own story too), and with even a whiff of Robert Holdstock’s great fantasy novel Mythago Wood, it’s a cleverly constructed story by former CIA counterterrorism officer turned comic book writer Tom King. But it’s Evely’s fine-lined art - exquisitely coloured by Lopes - that you will find your eye lingering over.
SHORT STORIES
The Collected Stories
Stefan Zweig, Pushkin Press Classics, £14.99, February 13
Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna in 1881, the author Stefan Zweig’s fictions have the perfume of another age; rich, heady stories full of soldiers and lovers and aristocrats and prostitutes and exiles. And full of longing and desire and fear too. The most famous of them might be Letter From an Unknown Woman in which a famous novelist is sent a letter by an old acquaintance he has quite forgotten. She, however, has not forgotten him. And you will not forget her when you’ve read Zweig’s story.
