In this monthly feature, The Sunday Times picks out 10 books from around the world that have just hit shelves to add to next month's reading pile.
Top Of The Stack
1. Fiction
CHINA ROOM
By Sunjeev Sahota
Harvill Secker/ Paperback/ 242 pages/ $30.94/ Available here
4 out of 5
Fifteen-year-old Mehar is part of a trio of brides who have married three brothers on the same day. The problem is that she does not know which one.
It is 1929 in rural Punjab and she spends most of her life veiled, except in the china room, an outhouse which she shares with her sisters-in-law and a set of willow-pattern plates, away from the eyes of men.
The girls are sent to their husbands at night on a roster decided by their terrifying mother-in-law, Mai, the chief arbiter of their marriages.
These visitations take place in the dark - thus Mehar's conundrum. She tries to guess her man and guesses wrong, a mistake that will doom her.
British novelist Sahota made the Booker Prize shortlist for his blazing, harrowing 2015 novel The Year Of The Runaways, about the precarious lives of Indian migrants in Britain.
China Room - his third novel drawn from his own family history - is a quiet exercise in interiority. The space afforded to Mehar is tightly trammelled by tradition, full of endless farm chores and Mai's tyranny.
"Are you certain I send the same son to you each time?" she quips to a horrified Mehar.
2. Fiction
SECOND PLACE
By Rachel Cusk
Faber & Faber/ Paperback/ 207 pages/ $27.82/ Available here
Cusk, the award-winning Canadian author of the Outline trilogy (2014 to 2018), explores property and gender in this slender novel, in which a woman invites a renowned artist, L, to stay at the guesthouse of her remote marshland home.
L, however, brings a young female companion, Brett, and their presence disrupts the calm of the narrator's household as the summer unfolds.
3. Non-fiction
THE BOMBER MAFIA
By Malcolm Gladwell
Allen Lane/ Paperback/ 256 pages/ $32.10/ Available here
Gladwell, known for his bestselling pop science books like Talking To Strangers (2019) and his podcast Revisionist History, turns his attention to the Air Force bombers of World War II.
The Bomber Mafia of the title are a group of American military officer who argued that bombing could be made so accurate that wars could be fought entirely from the air with minimum casualties - and then tried to put this to the test in the aerial bombardment of Japan.
4. Fiction
LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR
By Mizuki Tsujimura, translated by Philip Gabriel
Doubleday/ Paperback/ 368 pages/ $29.96/ Available here
Kokoro is skipping school because of bullying when she discovers that her bedroom mirror is shining.
Touching it pulls her into a castle, where she and six other children are tasked by a masked girl called the Wolf Queen to find a key. But they must leave the castle before 5pm or face a terrible penalty.
This 2017 Japanese fantasy novel, which sold over a million copies, has now been translated into English.
5. Fiction
MALIBU RISING
By Taylor Jenkins Reid
Hutchinson/ Paperback/ 384 pages/ $34.14/ Available here
Reid, a former casting assistant, has plumbed the glamour of celebrity and its consequences in her two earlier bestsellers - The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo (2017) and Daisy Jones And The Six (2019).
This time, she paints a glittering portrait of one fateful night in the lives of the Riva siblings, children of the legendary singer Mick Riva and each famous in their own right.
The siblings gather in 1983 Malibu for the fabled end-of-summer party of their eldest sister, surfer and supermodel Nina Riva. By morning, however, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames.
6. Fiction
HOW BEAUTIFUL WE WERE
By Imbolo Mbue
Random House/ Paperback/ 367 pages/ $29.43/ Available here
Mbue, who was born in Cameroon and lives in New York, follows her New York Times bestselling debut Behold The Dreamers (2016) with this tale of climate revolution.
In an unnamed African country, the village of Kosawa suffers severe environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Their farmlands are rendered infertile and their children die from water toxicity.
After nearly losing her brother to the sickness, a girl named Thula grows up to head a protest against the oil company, sparking a multi-generational revolution.
7. Fiction
GREAT CIRCLE
By Maggie Shipstead
Doubleday/ Paperback/ 591 pages/ $29.96/ Available here
"I was born to be a wanderer," writes the aviatrix Marian Graves in her logbook. "I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave. Some birds fly until they die."
In 1914, Marian and her twin brother are rescued from a shipwreck. She grows up dreaming of circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.
Her dream takes flight in 1950, only for her to crash-land in Antarctica without enough fuel to complete the circle.
In 2014, scandal-laden Hollywood starlet Hadley Baxter scores the role of Marian in a biopic and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the story of the lost pilot.
8. Fiction
THE DICTIONARY OF LOST WORDS
By Pip Williams
Chatto & Windus/ Paperback/ 419 pages/ $29.95/ Available here
Esme grows up in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary.
Having lost her mother at a young age, she plays under the table where the words are sorted on slips of paper. When a word - "bondmaid" - falls off the table and thus out of the official dictionary, she pockets it, starting her own collection of lost words.
9. Non-fiction
SPOOKED
By Barry Meier
Sceptre/ Paperback/ 323 pages/ $32.95/ Available here
Meier, a former New York Times journalist, examines the secret world of private espionage - from the dossier on former United States president Donald Trump compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, to Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein's hiring of the mysterious firm Black Cube to go after his accusers.
10. Fiction
COMRADE AEON'S FIELD GUIDE TO BANGKOK
By Emma Larkin
Granta/ Paperback/ 374 pages/ $32.95/ Available here
Larkin, who was born and raised in Thailand, sets her debut novel in a patch of jungle at the heart of contemporary Bangkok.
The unassuming plot of land is the nexus for the stories of many - including Comrade Aeon, a homeless insurgent who fled a military crackdown on student protesters in 1976; Ida Barnes, an expatriate wife who suspects her husband of adultery; and savvy property developer Witty and his wife Wongduan, a retired film star who now writes successful soap operas.
