Salt Modern Fiction – serie

William Blake is a private detective. When he is asked by an eccentric scientist to investigate the whereabouts of his amnesiac missing wife, Louise, Will finds himself entangled in layers of deceptions and disappearances that lead him inexorably back to an unsolved mystery in his own past: the loss of his young daughter Emily. The case takes Will to brothels, night clubs and amusement arcades in the Scottish seaside resort of Portobello. Identities become confused as his sexual obsession with a night club singer becomes entwined with sightings of Louise, his own torturous memories, and new visions of the lost Emily.The Existential Detective is a surreal, dreamlike story of loss, incest and what it means to remember.

Winner of The Polari First Book Prize 2016Finalist for The People’s Book Prize 2016Shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2016Chosen for City Reads 2016Shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prizeELLE Best Books of 2015The Reading Agency: Books of 2015Mickey Donnelly is smart, which isn’t a good thing in his part of town. Despite having a dog called Killer and being in love with the girl next door, everyone calls him ‘gay’. It doesn’t help that his best friend is his little sister, Wee Maggie, and that everyone knows he loves his Ma more than anything in the world. He doesn’t think much of his older brother Paddy and really doesn’t like his Da. He dreams of going to America, taking Wee Maggie and Ma with him, to get them away from Belfast and Da. Mickey realises it’s all down to him. He has to protect Ma from herself. And sometimes, you have to be a bad boy to be a good son.

‘Fleshing out the shadowy metaphysical hints of Beckett’s novels, this intellectual romp is the best debut I have read in years’ Nicholas Lezard, The GuardianMonday lunchtime: a bank is being robbed. The gunmen tell everyone to get down on the floor, but an old man refuses. Behind him in the queue is Rada Kalenkova, an investigator for the Office of Assessment, recording everything she sees. Shots are fired and a woman is killed. Or maybe two. But Rada ignores the murders and pursues the old man instead.Nothing about the robbery or the putative killings makes sense. The robbers might be police. The bank manager denies anyone was hurt, despite the blood on the walls. Every subsequent enquiry leads towards Edward Likker, a renowned fixer. But Likker is dead.The Fat of Fed Beasts is an ambitious literary mix of existential uncertainty, murder, bureaucracy, unreliable father figures and disaffected policemen. It asks why we do what we do, whether it matters, and what, if anything, our lives are worth. And it’s funny.‘Ware has an uncluttered prose style and a willingness to stretch the boundaries of fiction. His sensibility is finely tuned to those grey areas of experience where identities shift, where people forget who they really are. No other writer springs to mind as a ready comparison to Ware: already he has defined a unique thematic territory.’ Aiden O’Reilly, The Short Review

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial PrizeJustine is a painting, a doppelgänger and a woman of beguiling beauty. Set in contemporary London, Justine is a story of a man’s obsession with a woman – or is it two women? For Justine has a twin sister Juliette, and as the story unfolds, the opium-dazed narrator becomes increasingly unsure as to the identity of the woman he desires.

Christmas 2015: The top 10 debut fiction books, The IndependentMaddie and Harry: she’s an estate agent, he’s a teacher. They’ll say they live in the Black Country. They’ll say how they met Jonathan Cotard, explain how they later argued, had a car accident, thought they’d killed someone. Thought they had. And as they search for a truth, they’ll tell us their secrets, their mistakes. And we’ll judge them. We'll judge Harry's fling with a schoolgirl and Maddie's previous life. We'll judge the nature of love and violence, good and evil. The Black Country. For Maddie and Harry, it’s darker than it should be.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016Observer Best Fiction of 2016Den of Geek Top Books of 2016Timothy Buchannan buys an abandoned house on the edge of an isolated village on the coast, sight unseen. When he sees the state of it he questions the wisdom of his move, but starts to renovate the house for his wife, Lauren to join him there.When the villagers see smoke rising from the chimney of the neglected house they are disturbed and intrigued by the presence of the incomer, intrigue that begins to verge on obsession. And the longer Timothy stays, the more deeply he becomes entangled in the unsettling experience of life in the small village. Ethan, a fisherman, is particularly perturbed by Timothy’s arrival, but accedes to Timothy’s request to take him out to sea. They set out along the polluted coastline, hauling in weird fish from the contaminated sea, catches that are bought in whole and removed from the village. Timothy starts to ask questions about the previous resident of his house, Perran, questions to which he receives only oblique answers and increasing hostility. As Timothy forges on despite the villagers’ animosity and the code of silence around Perran, he starts to question what has brought him to this place and is forced to confront a painful truth. The Many is an unsettling tale that explores the impact of loss and the devastation that hits when the foundations on which we rely are swept away.

With an abandoned degree behind her and a thirtieth birthday approaching, amateur writer Bonnie Falls moves out of her parents’ home into a nearby flat. Her landlady, Sylvia Slythe, takes an interest in Bonnie, encouraging her to finish one of her stories, in which a young woman moves to the seaside, where she comes under strange influences. As summer approaches, Sylvia suggests to Bonnie that, as neither of them has anyone else to go on holiday with, they should go away together – to the seaside, perhaps.The new novel from the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse is a tense and moreish confection of semiotics, suggestibility and creative writing with real psychological depth and, in Bonnie Falls and Sylvia Slythe, two unforgettable characters.

Shortlisted for Best Novella in the 2017 British Fantasy AwardsDen of Geek Top Books of 2016Ginger Nuts of Horror Top 20 Books of 2016After ministering to fallen women in Victorian London, Evelyn has suffered a nervous breakdown and finds herself treated by the Water Doctors in the imposing Wakewater House, a hydropathy sanatorium.Years later, Wakewater House is renovated into modern apartments and Kirsten moves in, fresh from a break up and eager for the restorative calm of the Thames. But her archivist neighbour, Manon, fills her head with the river’s murky past and with those men of science and art who were obsessed with the drowned women who were washed up on its banks. As Kirsten learns more about Wakewater’s secrets, she becomes haunted by a solitary figure in the river and increasingly desperate to understand what the water wants from her.

Longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2018How to be a Kosovan Bride opens up something entirely new to the reader: the history, culture and stories of one of the newest countries in the world. It weaves together Albanian folktale, stories of Kosovan experience of the war in 1999 and a look into the lives of modern-day Kosovan women. The dark undercurrent of Albanian blood feuds underpins a story about the impact of war and the way that new life can emerge from darkness.It is characterised by striking imagery and daring form.

Holly Stanton’s grandfather was a spy. In Berlin in September 1939; in Norway when the Germans invaded. Sailed back to Orkney by a brave Norwegian, whose family was killed in retaliation. And he kept a diary.Holly has always known that. It’s the family story. But when her father finally passes on a transcript of the diary, she finds the ‘brave Norwegian’ has a name. He is real. But why was a spy writing a diary at all? Part war-time thriller, part exploration of the ethics of story-telling, Reconciliation slips between Occupied Norway and Cambridge, London and the Highlands during the Iraq War and its aftermath.Based on truth but laced with errors and lies, as each layer of the story peels away, we discover just how easily we have been misled. Stories always lie, but sometimes they are the only truth we have. Reconciliation is a clever, exciting and – ironically – honest account of its own bad faith.

Read Regional 2019 – ‘Discover brilliant Northern writers’Aidan Wilson’s misfortune is to be hard as nailsIn this darkly hilarious and seriously horrifying book Williams tells the story of Aidan, a vigilante and young offender from one of Sheffield’s roughest estates. At breakneck speed, we see Aidan’s world unravel as he goes from hero to outlaw, fighting against all-comers and the circumstances he can’t escape. But is he a victim or architect of his own demise? A brutal and breathtaking account of living with violence in the English city.There are lots of crime novels, but Nutcase is something different: a novel about crime which isn’t interested in the conventions of crime fiction. The novel is based on a specific Icelandic saga: the Saga of Grettir the Strong.Nutcase explores the lives of people who live with violence on a day-to-day basis – how it shapes and distorts their lives, and ultimately becomes part of the normality that they live with.

For childminder Bobbi, it’s all about keeping your babies safeWhen professional couple Nikki and Rob uncover their childminder Bobbi’s secret everything changes. Bobbi has a child-shaped hole in her life that her ‘silver fox’ lover can’t fill. Now she is seeking out children once more. Troubled young couple, Kim and Connor are battling with social services to keep their baby, Jade – but they needn’t worry, Bobbi soon arrives to help solve all their problems.

Shortlisted for the Collyer Bristow Prizes 2019Shortlisted for The Betty Trask Prize and AwardsLonglisted for The Desmond Elliott Prize 2019John is infinite. He can become any book, any combination of words – every thought, act and expression that has ever been, or ever will be, written. Now 800 years old, John wants to tell his story. Looking back over his life, from its beginnings with a medieval anchoress to his current lodgings beside the deathbed of a Cold War spy, John pieces together his tale: the love that held him together and, in particular, the reasons for a murder that took place in Moscow fifty years earlier, which set in train a shattering series of events.Samuel Fisher’s debut, The Chameleon is a love story about books like no other, weaving texts and lives in a family tale that leads the reader on an extraordinary historical journey, a journey of words as much as of places, and a gripping romance.

Lush Library Recommends: Anna James’ Books for 2018Variations and fugue on the theme of obsessionVesna Main disturbs our self-image as educated, reasonable and ironic people who read modernist fiction. She disturbs us because we recognise ourselves in her obsessive and bloody-minded characters as they are pushed to the extreme. But they are only too human and seek love, just like us.This is a collection of twenty short stories of different lengths and written in a variety of styles. Main writes about characters whose passion borders on obsession and who are seeking love and companionship but are doomed to remain alone, with their sense of personal failure as the only company.

A post-modern puzzle about self and identity.Alexander embarks on a remarkable experiment, the likes of which no one has attempted before, maybe that's why there is a detective watching him. With Penny, Alexander is a gadfly, mucking her about, unable to see past her beauty; but with Melanie, he has met his match. It is remarkable how quickly the mood shifts from talk of big questions (religion, God, beauty, how mirrors lie) to the perfectly ordinary nuances between a couple.

Morning Star Best of 2018: FictionEsther, a pregnant amputee, and her husband, Dan, are seeking a new life, setting up home – restoring an abandoned railway station called Rosgill, far away in the Scottish Highlands.Spanning the course of a week, Bee Lewis’s gothic fantasia follows Esther as her marriage, life and body begin to dramatically change. By day, she is isolated physically and mentally within her marriage and her new environment. By night, she explores a forbidding forest, pursued by a shadowy figure.Symbolism, dreams and violence abound in this spellbinding unsnaring of a soul.

Having moved from the Fens to the Midlands to the Scottish Borders, Jessie Noon finds herself struggling to leave the past behind.Following a family tragedy, Jessie Noon moved from the Fens to the Midlands and now lives in the Scottish Borders with a cat, a dog and – she is convinced – a ghost in the spare room. Her husband walked out almost a year ago, leaving a note written in steam on the bathroom mirror, and Jessie hasn’t seen her son for years. When Jessie meets Robert, a local outreach worker, they are drawn to one another and begin a relationship; meanwhile, Jessie has begun receiving messages telling her I’m on my way home.As a translator, Jessie worries over what seems like the terrible responsibility of choosing the right words. It isn’t exactly a matter of life and death, said her husband, but Jessie knows otherwise. This is a novel about communication and miscommunication and lives hanging in the balance (a child going missing, a boy in a coma, an unborn baby), occupying the fine line between life and death, between existing and not existing.

Big Issue in the North Summer Reading RecommendationA man boards a train, hoping to see the daughter he has heard nothing from for seven years. As he travels towards his destination, he restlessly revisits the events that blew apart their seemingly perfect world.With acute insight, sparkling imagination, and vividly arresting prose, Phil Whitaker explores the very best and worst that families can do, and asks: what are the forces that shape us; and, against powerful traumas reverberating down the generations, can true love prevail?

Tom is grieving for his girlfriend. Her powerful family, convinced he is responsible for her death, place a bounty on his head. On the run, Tom seeks refuge in the Bothy, a dilapidated moorland pub run by ageing gangster Frank. Tom tries to keep the bounty a secret, but news travels fast, even in the middle of nowhere.Trevor Mark Thomas’s first novel is a tense, violent drama involving desperate characters with little to lose apart from their lives. Amid moments of black humour and rare tenderness, buried fears and rivalries rise to the surface, creating an atmosphere of claustrophobia that builds to almost unbearable levels.

Longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize 2019Longlisted for The Desmond Elliott Prize 2019Observer: Fiction to look out for in 2019The i Paper’s 30 of the best new debut novels to read in 2019Scottish Review of Books: 2019 in ProspectAs featured on BBC Woman’s Hour, Sky Sunrise and London Live‘Filled with cerebral intensity and scintillating dialogue’ —The Desmond Elliott PrizeExploring themes of ownership and abandonment, Eleanor Anstruther’s bestselling debut is a fictionalised account of the true story of Enid Campbell (1892–1964), granddaughter of the 8th Duke of Argyll. Interweaving one significant day in 1964 with a decade during the interwar period, A Perfect Explanation gets to the heart of what it is to be bound by gender, heritage and tradition, to fight, to lose, to fight again. In a world of privilege, truth remains the same; there are no heroes and villains, only people misunderstood. Here, in the pages of this extraordinary book where the unspoken is conveyed with vivid simplicity, lies a story that will leave you reeling.

A ‘Withnail’ for the twenty-first centuryTim Vine’s satirical thriller appears to revolve around the dysfunctional lives of Norman and Peter – the latter becoming an accidental terrorist. Driven by his warped religious tendencies and mental illness, Peter is encouraged by none other than the singer Rick Astley, who instructs and leads him during the most excellent recurring dreams.Along the bizarre journey we explore a cult, infidelity, drug abuse, frustration, extremism, all tinged by a strong awareness of the weirdness of late-Capitalist society.

This is what a bad day looks like: a day when something happens.Robert Exley works for the Faculty: he spends his life making sure that nothing ever happens. In counter-terrorism, that’s your job. His wife worked there, too. She’s been dead for years, but somehow she’s never far away. Now their bookish son is leaving home. He writes an encrypted journal Exley feels obliged to decode, to read the things they cannot talk about. When Exley takes on a colleague’s case, it leads to a flat full of explosives, guns and cash. The trouble is, it’s the wrong flat. And when Exley finds a man in an orange jumpsuit shackled to the floor deep beneath the Faculty’s offices, everything he thinks he knows turns inside out. Mixing Beckett and St Augustine, prison diaries, Japanese Go and Greek tragedy, The Faculty of Indifference is a profoundly black comedy about torture, boredom, suicide and love. Trapped in the moment between an intolerable past and so much worse to come, Exley finds there’s nothing he can do but live.

‘By turns beguiling and unsettling, Flotsam examines grief and loss through the eyes of an extraordinary child’ Rachel SeiffertTrine and her mother live in a cottage on the German coast. The mudflats that surround them disappear and reappear with the North Sea tides. The family leads a lonely existence, but each person has adapted in their own way. Anna roams the beaches collecting flotsam and jetsam to make art, while Trine loves playing on a wartime shipwreck. That is, until she loses her brother.In her taut style, Meike Ziervogel tells a coming-of-age story from 1950s Germany – a place still haunted by war. A place where people pretend not to notice the ghosts.

Metro: Best Fiction of 2019Longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize 2019‘Elegant, unsparing, meticulously detailed novel in which a conscientious boy grows up with bedeviled parents. Where do men come from? They come from boys. Look again.’ —Margaret Atwood‘A small masterpiece’ —Phil Baker, The Sunday Times‘A terse, bitterly poignant novel about guilt and the art of retrospection’ —Claire Allfree, Daily Mail‘If clarity of recollection is an art, Andrew Cowan is a master.’ —Jane Graham, Big IssueSet in a 1960s English new town, Your Fault charts one boy’s childhood from first memory to first love. A year older in each chapter, Peter’s story is told to him by his future self as he attempts to recreate the optimism and futurism of the 1960s, and to reveal how that utopianism fares as it emerges into the Seventies. It’s an untold story of British working class experience, written with extraordinary precision and tenderness.

Since childhood, Sandra Peters has been fascinated by the small, private island of Lieloh, home to the reclusive silent-film star Valerie Swanson. Having dreamed of going to art college, Sandra is now in her forties and working as a receptionist, but she still harbours artistic ambitions. When she sees an advert for a two-week artists’ retreat on Lieloh, Sandra sets out on what might be a life-changing journey.

In a country house in England a precocious teenage exile from revolutionary Russia sets down his adventures on paper, beginning with his first ball in St Petersburg and how he frees a huge African elephant from a cruel circus. But a hundred years later an American academic feels the boy may have invented the elephant as the only kind and uplifting being in dark times.

A lost girl and a sprawling map of an unsettling city.Wren Lithgow has followed her concert pianist mother around the cities of Europe for almost two decades. When they arrive in the mysterious city-state of O, where Wren was conceived during a time of civil war, she resolves to find man she believes is her father.As the city closes in around her, Wren gives herself over to a place of which she understands nothing, but to which she feels a profound connection, in a story of the watchers and the watched, the ways in which we conceive of home and, finally, the possibility of living on our own terms.

Shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish 2020 Fiction PrizeOne sweltering midsummer night, two young women forge an unlikely bond. One of them is full of hope and ambition, the other devoid of it. How can they lead good lives, they wonder? What will they give to the world? By the time the sun comes up, their futures have been rewritten and their fates decided. Captivating and involving, in turns joyful and desolate, this haunting mystery is an exploration of vicariousness, virtue and privilege.

Every Seventh Wave has strong echoes of Fiona Mozley’s Elmet and Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing. Strongly lyrical, the novel also serves as a literary thriller, with a suspenseful pace that builds to its redemptive finale. People-trafficking, fraternal love and violence are the fulcrum the novel turns on, the latter rippling outwards, sparing no one. Every Seventh Wave is a literary tale of the fates we tether ourselves to, how seemingly benign encounters can provoke both hope and devastation.