From Peter Ho Davies’ touching novel to Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic, a powerful debut by Hafsa Zayyan and Jeff Noon’s latest, the best new fiction
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself
Peter Ho Davies Sceptre £14.99
When a scan shows that their unborn child may have defects, a nameless couple opt for an abortion. Whether they’ve made the right decision is a question that haunts them for the rest of their lives – all the more so in the light of a son who might not have existed if his sister had lived.
Davies’s novel is a touching, thoughtful portrait of parenthood, with valuable insights into America’s corrosive debate on abortion.
Anthony Gardner
We Are All Birds Of Uganda
Hafsa Zayyan Merky Books £14.99
From a winner of Stormzy’s new literary prize comes a powerful debut exploring migration, identity and racial prejudice. Sameer, a Leicester-born lawyer visits Uganda and falls in love with his heritage.
But his family didn’t choose to leave there: Idi Amin’s expelling of Uganda’s Asian minority in 1972 is recounted in Sameer’s grandfather’s letters. A tale of cultural and romantic awakening and the consequences of colonialism.
Madeleine Feeny
Asylum Road
Olivia Sudjic Bloomsbury £14.99
What begins as a highbrow take on relationships and marriage swerves into something altogether darker when Anya, the narrator of Sudjic’s second novel, takes her English fiance to meet her estranged family.
They live in Sarajevo, the city she left as a child refugee during the 1990s; the trip goes badly, and returning to London, she’s trailed by the violence of her past. Its climax paints a vivid picture of disintegration and suppressed trauma.
Hephzibah Anderson
House With No Doors
Jeff Noon Doubleday £18.99
Noon’s second crime novel is a creepy and compelling slice of English Gothic. It’s 1981 and troubled London detective Henry Hobbes is called to investigate a death in a sprawling house in leafy Richmond.
The dead man, an apparent suicide, is an elderly playwright, but why are identical bloodstained dresses scattered around the building? What emerges is a nightmarish portrait of a family possessed by the strangest of sicknesses.
John Williams