From Ericka Waller’s warm, affecting debut to Harvest by Georgina Harding, a passionate story by Imbolo Mbue and Paul Vidich’s latest, this week’s best new fiction
Dog Days
Ericka Waller Doubleday £14.99
A must for dog-lovers, this deftly drawn portrait of a Sussex village interweaves three lives at a crossroads: George, newly bereaved, lost without his wife; Lizzie, living in a women’s shelter, ravaged by scars; and Dan, a self-neglecting counsellor with OCD and a crush on a new patient.
Each walks a dog along the coast, each gradually finds a way to overcome the past. A warm, affecting debut about loss, healing and new connections.
Madeleine Feeny
Harvest
Georgina Harding Bloomsbury £16.99
It’s the 1970s and when Kumiko travels from Japan to visit her English boyfriend Jonny, a photographer, she finds the air on his family’s Norfolk farm thick with unresolved tensions.
In particular, there’s the sibling rivalry between Jonny and his brother, fuelled by the long-ago death of their father. Taut and unsettling, this powerful fine meditation on war’s long reach follows on from Land Of The Living but more than satisfies as a standalone.
Hephzibah Anderson
How Beautiful We Were
Imbolo Mbue Canongate £14.99
Mbue’s second novel pitches a US oil company against the hapless inhabitants of a poor village in Africa. No prizes for guessing who the villains are. If the didactic storyline grates, the characterisation is rather better.
In a large, bustling cast, the stand-out figure is young Thula, a kind of African Greta Thunberg, not just passionate about the environment but very, very angry. There is real pathos in the story of her short, doomed life.
Max Davidson
The Mercenary
Paul Vidich No Exit £9.99
Vidich’s excellent series of espionage novels are taking the form back to its cold war roots – all shadows and moral ambiguity. The Mercenary is set in the last years before the fall of the Soviet Union, as freelance operative Alek Garin is employed to bring a double agent out of Moscow.
Garin is the perfectly inscrutable man for the job, right up until he falls for a former ballet dancer. This deserves to rank with vintage Le Carré.
John Williams