{"id":330517,"date":"2025-08-09T12:19:38","date_gmt":"2025-08-09T12:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/330517\/"},"modified":"2025-08-09T12:19:38","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T12:19:38","slug":"best-new-books-your-august-reading-list-just-got-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/330517\/","title":{"rendered":"Best New Books: Your August Reading List Just Got Wild"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following on from our bumper summer books <\/a>reading list, we\u2019re at that period of summer that used to be called the \u2018silly season\u2019, and while the novels featured in this month\u2019s handpicked crop are anything but silly, it\u2019s fair to say many of their writers are getting playfully inventive. Just for starters, we have a novel narrated by the Helm Wind, a mail-order bride kidnapping caper-turned deeply personal reflection on the war in Ukraine and a journey into a Dante-esque underworld to bring a Cambridge professor back from the dead, and a puma on the loose in settler-era Australia.<\/p>\n

With the longlist just announced, it\u2019s also the beginning of Booker Prize season, and a couple of our new releases come freshly minted off that. There\u2019s also more than one star-crossed romance, a mind-bending supernatural mystery-thriller, a heartbreakingly funny divorce novel, some breathtaking short fiction and lots, lots more.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So lay out your blanket or pull up your beach chair \u2013 with this lot to keep you company, you ain\u2019t going anywhere.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Compound, Aisling Rawle<\/p>\n

Lily wakes from a drugged sleep to find herself on the set of a long-running reality TV show in which women and men have to couple up \u2013 and stay coupled up \u2013 to remain in the game. They are watched on a continuous live feed and given prizes for a variety of group and personal tasks, the value of which increases the longer they stay in the game (or, more tellingly, the higher the personal stakes might be). There is an underlying sense of threat from the outset \u2013 and not only because the desert location is both desolate and dangerous; they have to play for even basic resources to secure the property and even fresh drinking water. As the game continues, we begin to understand that the world outside is not quite as we know it, with continuous war and the imminent threat of all-out climate catastrophe. Added to the sense of menace inside the compound and it becomes a game that\u2019s less Love Island and more survival of fittest Lord of the Flies-style, adding an unsettling edge to this clever spin on the locked-room premise.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Catch, Yrsa Daley-Ward<\/p>\n

Estranged sisters Clara and Dempsey are reunited after Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother, Serene, who has been missing, presumed dead, since last being seen on the banks of the Thames decades before. But while Clara is convinced this woman \u2013 who hasn\u2019t aged a day \u2013 is their mother back from the dead, Dempsey is equally convinced this Serene is a con artist, out for all she can get. If that sounds like a straightforward enough premise for a thriller, The Catch is anything but. Clara is a best-selling writer whose latest work appears to be a word-for-word take on original Serene\u2019s own unpublished writings before she disappeared and Daley-Ward has a lot of fun playing with the surreal, supernatural fantasticness of this against the practical realities Clara is determined to prove to be true. Even beyond this pretty mind-bending premise there\u2019s plenty more going on \u2013 not the least of which are the sisters own sibling rivalry and differences after growing up in two very different homes in the wake of their mother\u2019s disappearance. Don\u2019t overthink it. This knotty exploration of everything from adoption and addiction to fame and sexual control \u2013 with a heavy sprinkling of metaphysical magic thrown in for good measure \u2013 is a fascinating debut. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"SlantingEDITOR’S PICK<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Slanting Towards the Sea, Lidija Hilje\n<\/p>\n

Ivona is 38 years old. Childless, divorced and living with her sick, widowed father in the post-war Croatian town where she grew up, she is still deeply in love with her ex, Vlaho, and emotionally entrenched in the life he shares with his new partner and children. So far so typical of one of any of a number of disillusioned and disenfranchised female protagonists in recent fiction. Yet there is much more to Ivona \u2013 and to Hilje\u2019s debut novel \u2013 than the tropes of sad-girl literature, and Hilje unveils them with skill. There\u2019s that deep, complicated bond she and Vlaho still share, for one (her world, \u2018softly tipping into his direction, as if he himself were the sea\u2019 since their first kiss as students a decade earlier). And there is Croatia itself \u2013 struggling in its emergence from a brutal conflict, its citizens are continuously blindsided by bureaucracy and trapped in a kind of half-and-half existence as they wait to join the EU \u2013 frustrations that reflect Ivona\u2019s own thwarted ambitions and trapping within a fist of toxic relationships. As she struggles to save her father\u2019s family home and olive farm from foreclosure, she is forced to confront the limitations of her life, test what she is willing to do to move past them, and reckon with what remains. It all adds up to deeply compassionate account of a women attempting to come to terms with her relationships, history and herself. Just beautiful.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Flashlight\"<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

What came first \u2013 the short story or the seed of the idea for the longer book? The opening chapter of Choi\u2019s sixth, Booker-longlisted novel first came to public light as a short story of the same name, in which we met 10-year-old Louise in the office of the psychiatrist she\u2019s been referred to for acting out and petty theft not long after her father, Serk, slipped and went missing \u2013 presumably drowned \u2013 on a beach in Japan. From there, the story quickly opens out into a thematically and geographically wide-ranging work covering four generations of absence, exile and estrangement. But personal loss and tragedy are just the start of it. Choi is interested in much broader political themes, and as the novel plays out these are revealed gradually at first, then show-stoppingly. No spoilers on that (you\u2019ll thank us for it, promise) \u2013 just read it and discover its full impact for yourself.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"NightEDITOR’S PICK<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty<\/p>\n

We fell hard for Talty\u2019s debut novel<\/a> last year, and lucky us because now his first full-length work \u2013 published to great acclaim in the US in 2022 \u2013 is now also getting a UK release. Night of\u2026 is a series of interconnected short stories that by the very nature of its set-up, is a slower burn than Fire Exit \u2013 its standalone-story set-up means that it takes time for the various threads that weave the collection together to reveal their full impact. It\u2019s well worth the wait, wending its way back and forth across several decades in the life of David, a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation who lives on the reservation (the \u2018rez\u2019 of the title) where the stories are set, en route. <\/p>\n

Talty\u2019s mastery of his craft is evident on every page. This is a community at once tightly interconnected and rudderless: unemployment, addiction and petty crime are part and parcel of everyday life on the rez and that staggering, back-and-forth timeline is no accident, serving to slowly reveal the lives of and backstories of his characters and inviting us, as readers, to better understand what drives them without expectation or judgement. <\/p>\n

\u2018I wonder if How\u2019d we get here? is the wrong question,\u2019 a teenage David asks himself at one point. \u2018Maybe the right question is How do we get out of here? Maybe that\u2019s the only question that matters.\u2019 In Talty\u2019s hands, all the questions matter and if few come readymade with easy answers, each and every one is handled with the writer\u2019s trademark empathy and compassion. To which all we can say is \u2013\u00a0bring on book three…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Helm,<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

There are very few writers who could pull off a novel in which the main character is not a person or anything else commonly considered \u2018living\u2019, but a weather phenomenon. The Helm Wind is the UK\u2019s only named wind (think la Mistral relocated to Cumbria), and Hall draws on its characteristics \u2013 playful, mischievous, ever-present \u2013 to create an eons-long narrative with Helm at its core, narrating and overseeing all the other players. We are there at the very beginning, as Helm is formed along with the earth itself, and then through early human habitation right up to the present day, ticking off major periods, events and timelines in human history \u2013 Neolithic, Medieval, Industrial \u2013 right up to the climate-challenged present day with a cast of characters from shaman to medieval wizard to meteorologist and many, many more. Hall\u2019s prose is inventive, puckish, fun and sometimes downright puerile (\u2018Helm\u2019 we learn \u2018loves a fart joke\u2019), using Helm to pull all the disparate threads of human existence together in a wide-ranging narrative filled with hope and awe.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Endling:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

A tale of two very distinct halves \u2013 for two very distinct reasons \u2013 Reva\u2019s Booker longlisted debut novel opens in Ukraine in 2022 and centres of Yeva, a scientist committed to breeding rare snails, some of which are endlings (the last known living member of a species). To fund her work, she joins so-called \u2018romance tours\u2019 as a fake potential match for would-be Western men looking for mail-order Ukrainian brides \u2013 and it\u2019s on one of these that she meets two sisters with a plan to disrupt what they see as the anti-feminist evils of the marriage industry by kidnapping a vanload of bachelors and holding them hostage. So far, so fun and so funny. But then midway through, the real-life Russian invasion happens and the entire novel comes to an abrupt halt \u2013 complete with acknowledgements and a Note About the Author \u2013 before being restarted with the war very much front and centre. It\u2019s a brilliant illustration of the disruption the war enacted upon Reva\u2019s writing process, directly addressing her concerns for her Kherson-based grandfather who is refusing to leave his frontline home. Funny, clever, heartbreaking \u2013 Endling has it all.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Maggie:EDITOR’S PICK<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Maggie; or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar, Katie Yee<\/p>\n

Brooklyn-based writer Yee\u2019s short, pithy debut is a tale of two Maggies \u2013 the first, the woman her husband is leaving her for; the second, the name she gives to the lump she finds in her breast shortly afterwards, when she is subsequently diagnosed with cancer. So this is a divorce novel and a cancer novel, but \u2013 as both that set up and its punchline-to-come title suggest \u2013 it is anything but a typical representation of either genre. Covering the months that follow both discoveries, it eschews chapters for anecdote-length passages that are both funny-sad and ha-ha as she struggles to make sense of both while keeping her focus firmly and lovingly on her two young children. In-between there are knock-knock jokes and bedtime retellings of tales of Chinese folklore gifted to her from her late mother and the beginnings of The Guide to My Husband: A User\u2019s Manual as she tries to make sense of her own personal and wider family history. Beautiful and heartfelt, it doesn\u2019t shy away from any of the realities of either situation but nor does it wallow or dwell. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Dusk:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Itinerant twins Iris and Floyd \u2013 the outcast children of \u2018killer thieves\u2019 who scrape a living picking up odd jobs on sheep farms and the like \u2013 are in somewhere resembling rural Tasmania looking for work when they hear about a large bounty placed on an escaped puma. The setting is Australia at an unfixed point after the first generations of colonial settlers have been there long enough to have established themselves to have become the dominant citizens of the country, and to upset the delicate balance of the land \u2013 by introducing deer, then pumas to kill the deer \u2013 with disastrous consequences. The big cat in question, Dusk, is the last of its kind in the area \u2013 and the most deadly. But the bounty is too big for the twins to not try to succeed where a steadily increasing number of others have failed. As the twins set about tracking Dusk, we learn more of their childhood on the run and the deep, loving connection the siblings share with each other and the land around them. Arnott\u2019s prose is expansive and beautifully rendered, bringing the harshness and beauty of the landscape to life, both of which are given an almost dreamlike heightening by the mystery of the time and setting. A lush, immersive read. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"EveryEDITOR’S PICK<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

This phenomenally good debut by the mysterious Northern Irish writer (Liadan N\u00ed Chuinn is a pseudonym; the jacket only reveals the year of their birth \u2013 1998, the same year the Good Friday agreement was signed) bristles with pain, compassion and controlled fury. While each of the six stories in the collection present self-contained worlds in which their characters are driven by their own lives and problems (a medical student struggling with the reality of his first anatomy classes; a young teenage girl who reveals she is pregnant to her brother\u2019s girlfriend; the emotional fallout triggered by the reveal of a fake fertility clinic), it is the history of Northern Ireland itself and the long, lingering legacy of the Troubles that provides the emotional fuel throughout. Something that\u2019s made devastingly clear in the story \u2013 and the notes that follows \u2013 that brings this brilliant collection to an end. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Moderation,<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Moderation, Elaine Castillo<\/p>\n

When social media moderator Girlie is offered a new job at the VR site the company she works for has acquired, the numbers are too big for her not to say yes. But like any offer that\u2019s too good to refuse, there is more to Playground than meets the (virtual) eye. Playground is built from technology that was originally intended to be used as a therapeutic tool, but after its creator died in mysterious circumstances it is left to psychologist and the best friend of that founder, William, to try and steer its course through its new market. Meanwhile Girlie \u2013\u00a0a Filipina-American with a large, dysfunctional family with a penchant for high-end consumer goods \u2013 has spent her life trying to moderate her feelings and her past, and that includes no falling in love. Her resolve on every level is tested by Playground and by William himself. As the truth about the company\u2019s plans for the new technology is gradually revealed the pair are put to the test in more ways than one.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Havoc:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The I\u2019m Sorry You Feel That Way author is back with painfully funny new novel set in a remote girls\u2019 boarding school in southern England that becomes plagued with a mysterious illness. From the outset, 16-year-old Ida \u2013 who finds herself there after fleeing a hinted-at family disgrace in Scotland \u2013 is determined to remain stoically unfazed by the school\u2019s peculiarities (a head teach obsessed with the Cold War and threat of the bomb; a roommate with a reputation for arson \u2013 just how bad were things at home\u2026?). But as the number of girls falling prey to the symptoms of the illness \u2013 jerking limbs and all \u2013 increases only one question matters: are the schoolgirls in the grip of a mass hysteria or are they being poisoned? Irreverent and funny throughout, Wait has a lot of fun with both her set-up and characters \u2013 a great book-club read.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"I<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I Want Everything, Dominic Amerena<\/p>\n

The I\u2019m Sorry You Feel That Way author is back with painfully funny new novel set in a remote girls\u2019 boarding school in southern England that becomes plagued with a mysterious illness. From the outset, 16-year-old Ida \u2013 who finds herself there after fleeing a hinted-at family disgrace in Scotland \u2013 is determined to remain stoically unfazed by the school\u2019s peculiarities (a head teach obsessed with the Cold War and threat of the bomb; a roommate with a reputation for arson \u2013 just how bad were things at home\u2026?). But as the number of girls falling prey to the symptoms of the illness \u2013 jerking limbs and all \u2013 increases only one question matters: are the schoolgirls in the grip of a mass hysteria or are they being poisoned? Irreverent and funny throughout, Wait has a lot of fun with both her set-up and characters \u2013 a great book-club read.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Necessary<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Necessary Fiction, Eloghosa Osunde<\/p>\n

A novel in name, if not entirely in structure \u2013 while the chapters and (huge cast of) characters do interconnect, but the work can arguably also be approached more as a series of stories \u2013 Osunde\u2019s follow-up to their acclaimed debut Vagabonds follows an intergenerational array of queer characters in Nigeria. Osunde\u2019s writing and descriptions are both beautiful and, at times, visceral; family in all its guises \u2013 not least those created by personal circumstance and choice \u2013 is a running theme. However you do choose to read it, go slowly and enjoy \u2013 this is prose worth spending time with and it rewards either way. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Pan:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Acclaimed non-fiction writer Clune\u2019s debut novel is a strange elliptical read that presents itself as one thing \u2013 a coming-of-age tale; a glimpse into mental illness; a parable of first love \u2013 then shifts deftly into something else, never quite allowing itself to be pinned down. We meet Nicholas shortly after he\u2019s been sent to live with his divorced father and just before her starts having panic attacks that, in time, blow into an all-out panic disorder. Nicholas, his best friend Ty, and high-school crush, Sarah, start hanging out in a barn with some of the cool kids from school and the neighbourhood, losing themselves in a haze of drugs and teenage musings on the meaning of life (and Boston\u2019s 1970\u2019s classic More than A Feeling). And it\u2019s here that things get decidedly weird, with cultish rituals and metaphysical discussions that lead to dead mice and house arrests, among other things. This is not a novel you come to for plot, however, it\u2019s one mood, for vibes \u2013 and on that level it very much succeeds.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Katabasis,<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

What else is a wannabe magician to do after accidentally killing her Cambridge professor, but go to hell and bring him back from the dead to enable her to graduate and gain tenure at a great magic university exactly as she\u2019s been working towards all these years? Kuang\u2019s latest is a sprawling, erudite tale of magic set in a Dante\u2019s Inferno-esque underworld, teeming with intelligence, ideas and humour (\u2018Meteorologically,\u2019 Alice observes on first entering the underworld, \u2018Hell didn\u2019t seem much worse than an English spring.\u2019) The author has form in the world of dark academia \u2013 her 2022 historical, speculative fantasy Babel was set in the hallowed halls of Oxford. Which isn\u2019t to say there isn\u2019t a certain amount of whiplash to be had in finding yourself in a world of potions and spells after her hit publishing satire, Yellowface but it doesn\u2019t last long. Because if there\u2019s one thing Kuang knows how to do in whatever genre she\u2019s working in, it\u2019s storytelling \u2013 and Katabasis is quite the ride.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"One<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

One Yellow Eye, Leigh Radford<\/p>\n

Medical researcher Kesta was devasted to witness her husband, Tim, become infected by a zombie virus that closed London off to the rest of the UK and the world \u2013 and while the city is recently reopened, she\u2019s not ready to let him go. For Tim is not dead, as widely assumed, but being kept chained up under lock and key \u2013 and heavy sedation \u2013 in the couple\u2019s east London flat as Kesta searches desperately for a cure. When she\u2019s invited to join a secret lab that\u2019s determined to win the race to discover a vaccination for the virus, she stumbles onto the real secret of patient zero, endangering both her life and those of the entire city and \u2013 potentially \u2013 the world. If the zombie-virus as stand-in for the pandemic isn\u2019t exactly lightly-handled, Radford tells her story with humour and heart, and will have you rooting for her \u2013 and zombie-Tim \u2013 till the end.<\/p>\n

Celebrity news, beauty, fashion advice, and fascinating features, delivered straight to your inbox!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Following on from our bumper summer books reading list, we\u2019re at that period of summer that used to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-330517","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114998776916860169","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}