Book Stack: Wrap up April with these 10 new reads

SINGAPORE - In this new 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

There is a pattern to the Murakami short story. Usually, it begins with a deceptively ordinary incident, like being invited to a piano recital, or writing a jazz review for a college paper, or stopping for the night at a hot springs inn.

Then something tilts, and the world is ever so slightly aslant. The recital venue is padlocked and abandoned. The record in the review does not actually exist. The door of the hot springs bath slides open and a monkey walks in and says, "Excuse me."

First Person Singular is classic Murakami, whose very name evokes an entire aesthetic of surrealist nostalgia. His tropes have tropes.

This collection gathers eight of the Japanese author's short stories, most of which have been published individually elsewhere. They are all told in the first-person singular and could be fiction or memoir - though the author seems happy to elide such distinctions.

In a double-blind research study, information is withheld from the participants and researcher, making them less likely to skew the experiment with prior knowledge.

St Aubyn, the British author of the acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels, plays with this in his latest novel on art, science and ecology about three young people - idealistic botanist Francis; his new lover, biologist Olivia; and her best friend Lucy.

Debut author Menon traces a family saga from 1920 to the present day through the troubled relationship between Durga, a mathematics lecturer, and her difficult grandmother Mary. As the two women spend a tense Diwali together in rural Pahang, Malaysia, they untangle dark family secrets and childhood tragedy.

In Surrey, England, a bicycle breakdown on the local common brings together two boys from different social circles: Stan, a sensitive loner who is bullied at his new school, and Charlie, who works at a boxing gym. When they meet again years later as adults, they struggle to reconnect across the divide of class and privilege.

This is the debut novel of Ishiguro, a former bookseller and daughter of Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, who published her short story collection Escape Routes last year.

This is a true-crime book with a difference. Former Vice reporter Bluestone is after the con artists of the digital age: the thousands of tickets peddled by influencers for the 2017 Fyre Festival, which turned out to be an unmitigated disaster; the millions poured into a start-up based on bogus blood tests; or the restaurant that made its way to the top of London's TripAdvisor ratings despite being little more than a backyard shed.

Kepnes shot to fame with the 2014 thriller You, in which the heart-throb turns out to be a homicidal stalker. Two novels and a Netflix adaptation later, she is back with You Love Me, in which her uncannily charismatic murderer Joe Goldberg has moved to America's Pacific Northwest to seek a quiet life.

Joe is courting a new woman, librarian Mary Kay. Perhaps he can even do it without devolving into an obsessive, toxic creep. Who knows?

When 11-year-old Elise's parents die in a car crash, she decides she will continue to stay in her childhood home - even after another family moves in. She simply hides in the cracks in its walls.

Eddie is convinced that his family house is haunted by a girl who may or may not exist. When his older brother Marshall senses her too, they resort to extreme measures to get rid of her - which may bring new dangers into the house.

In the wake of her husband Rob's death, Bell struggled to flip a mattress. Throughout her marriage, she had relied on her husband to do all the heavy lifting. The next day, she went to the gym and asked for a personal trainer. "I want to get strong," she said.

Bell, a former executive editor of HuffPost United Kingdom, went on to become a competitive amateur power-lifter who can lift more than twice her body weight. In this memoir-cum-manifesto, she examines notions of women's strength, both mental and physical.

Garcia's debut novel follows five generations of women, from 19th-century Cuban cigar factories to present-day detention centres. They are connected by the figure of Jeanette, raised in Miami by a Cuban immigrant mother.

Recovering from a painkiller addiction and a bad relationship, Jeanette steps in to look after her neighbour Ana after Ana's mother, an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant, is arrested.

Online, Hana runs an anonymous podcast about what it is like to be a young South Asian Muslim woman in Toronto. In real life, she juggles a radio internship with helping out at her family's halal restaurant, Three Sisters Biryani Poutine.

When a new rival restaurant threatens their struggling business and xenophobic attacks rise in their neighbourhood, she turns to her podcast for advice.