The Last Sane Woman, Hannah Regel
Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art. There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman – a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola – to a friend living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As Nicola reads on, an acute sense of affinity turns into obsession.
She abandons one job after another to make time for the archive. The litany of coincidences in the letters becomes uncanny, and Nicola’s feeling of ownership begets a growing dread: should she be afraid of where these letters are leading?
Clean, Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes
Clean begins with an inescapable fact: a girl has died. Told by Estela, a maid to a wealthy, middle-class family who speaks to us from a locked room, we hear of her plight and the circumstances that led to this moment. As we enter into her account of her daily existence, we see how her apparently simple life begins to sour, but would that drive her to the unthinkable?
Beautiful Days: Stories, Zach Williams
A young family is trapped in a time loop in an idyllic holiday cabin. A middle-aged man becomes convinced that his disappointing son is an impostor. Two brothers take a midnight ride in a golf cart and run into trouble. The elderly tour guide at an alien contact site loses control of his guests. Meanwhile, all around them, America is dissolving, fragmenting, distorting beyond recognition.
The antiheroes of Beautiful Days are chronic underachievers: men lost in their own lives and plagued by loneliness, self-doubt, suppressed rage. When the worst happens, they take to the road – crossing the wilderness in stolen cars, riding trains to the end of the line, or cruising along ruined monorails as the skyline burns.
Anyone’s Ghost, August Thompson
The lonely life of 15-year-old Theron David Alden is transformed when he meets Jake. Older, cooler, more confident and startlingly beautiful, Jake likes the same bands, the same drugs, and has the same drive to oblivion.
Over the course of two decades, Theron and Jake get high, drift apart, and are brought hurtling back together, until a final collision tears them apart forever.
Theron wants Jake, and he wants to be Jake. But is Jake brave enough to want him back?
Hey, Zoey, Sarah Crossan
43-year-old Dolores O’Shea is logical, organised, and prepared to handle whatever comes her way. She keeps up with her job and housework, takes care of her mentally declining mother, and remains close with her old friends and her younger sister who’s moved to New York. Though her marriage with David, an anaesthesiologist, isn’t what it used to be, nothing can quite prepare her for Zoey, the $8,000 AI sex doll that David has secretly purchased and stuffed away in the garage. At first, Zoey sparks an uncharacteristically strong violence in Dolores, whose entire life is suddenly cast in doubt.
But then, Dolores and Zoey start to talk…and what surfaces runs deeper than Dolores could have ever expected, with consequences for all of the relationships in her life, especially her relationship with herself.
Pink Slime, Fernanda Trías, translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary
In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford – a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbours feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows – even if staying means being left behind.
