All information sourced from publishers.
Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until – betrayed and brokenhearted – she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America – but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.
The Tokyo Suite, Giovana Madalosso, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato
A good nanny is hard to find. Fernanda, a busy executive whose marriage is foundering, has a room in her sprawling house redecorated in the style of a tiny luxury hotel room, the Tokyo Suite, to entice her maid Maju to stay.
Still, one morning, Maju walks out the door, slips past the army of nannies in the square, gets into a taxi, and vanishes. She also takes Fernanda’s daughter Cora with her.
Consumed by her own personal and professional crises Fernanda doesn’t realise at first that Cora is missing, and that Maju has kidnapped her, but when she does, she is violently pulled back into reality and the vagaries of her domestic life.
Meanwhile, Maju with Cora in tow, stops in cheap motels and abandoned locales as she makes her way across the Brazilian countryside, carrying out her plan, which will quickly and brutally veer out of control.
Flesh, David Szalay
Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.
As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.
Beartooth, Callan Wink
In the Montana backcountry live two brothers who run a sawmill and do a little poaching on the side. Thad is the brains of the operation. His brother Hazen has a talent for tracking and hunting and getting himself into trouble. Together they have just about made it work, but now there are mounting bills, a leaky roof and winter is closing in. When a menacing figure known as the Scot offers them a risky but potentially lucrative hunting job in Yellowstone National Park, the brothers can’t refuse, but before long the precarious nature of their lives and their bond is exposed.
Counterattacks at Thirty, Won-pyung Sohn, translated from the Korean by Sean Lin Halbert
Jihye is an ordinary woman who has never been extraordinary. In her administrative job at the Academy, she silently tolerates office politics and the absurdities of Korean bureaucracy. Forever only one misplaced email away from career catastrophe, she effectively becomes a master of the silent eye-roll and the tactical coffee run. But all her efforts to endure her superiors and the semi-hostile work environment they create are upended when a new intern, Gyuok Lee, arrives.
Gyuok recruits a trio of office allies to carry out plans for minor revenge. Together, these four “rebels” commit tiny protests against those in more powerful positions by spraying graffiti, throwing eggs, and writing anonymous exposés. But as their attacks increase, the initial joy they felt at the release becomes something more and Jihye and the others will discover the beauty of friendship and the extraordinary power of unity against adversity.
Stag Dance, Torrey Peters
Deep in the forest, a group of restless lumberjacks working an illegal logging outfit plan a winter dance that some will volunteer to attend as women; the broadest, strongest axeman finds himself caught in a rivalry with a pretty, young jack that culminates in jealousy, betrayal and an astonishing spectacle of transition. Meanwhile, in other times and places, the gender apocalypse is brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend; an illicit boarding-school romance surfaces intrigue and cruelty; and a Las Vegas party weekend turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between a thrilling mystery man or a veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.
