Anna Badkhen, Walking with Abel
Badkhen has reported on conflicts in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq and Somalia. Here she uses her fine journalistic skills to chronicle her journey with a family of Fulani nomads in their cyclical migrations across the “bone-white” savannahs in Mali. She gains permission to travel (and a Fulani name) from a griot in Djenné. Soon she has joined the “nomads chasing rain in the oceanic tracks of the Sahel”. Hovering over her narrative is the ethical question that haunts her as she anticipates her return to covering conflict: “I have written about violence up close because I believed its obscenity had to be exposed and examined… But there was a risk that instead I… was helping it flourish.” With extraordinarily poetic language, Badkhen captures the Fulani pace that dates back thousands of years: “a sound of sorrow and hope and loss and desire: the sound of walking.” (Credit: Riverhead)
Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles
Johnson has a rare combination of inventiveness, intellectual pyrotechnics and emotional sophistication – all on display in his second collection. It’s his first book since he won the Pulitzer for The Orphan Master’s Son. In the title story, Johnson follows two North Korean defectors struggling to adjust to Seoul’s “bewildering nature”. As DJ wonders at the sights around him – little dogs wearing dresses! – Sun-ho dreams of sailing back to the claustrophobic but familiar North. The story Nirvana is narrated by a Silicon Valley engineer whose wife is temporarily paralysed. While she gets stoned and listens to Nirvana, he talks to the iProjector hologram he’s created of an assassinated president. Johnson spins other densely textured tales about a UPS driver in a post-Katrina landscape “swamped with FEMA campers” and a former Stasi torturer taking his own medicine. These stories are treasures. (Credit: Random House)
Patrick Modiano, Pedigree
Modiano won the Nobel Prize for literature last year for works that “center around subjects like memory, oblivion, identity, and guilt”. His memoir, translated by Mark Polizzotti, illuminates the origins of these themes. Modiano was the son of a Jewish father and a Flemish woman who had met in Paris during the Occupation. He “never felt like a legitimate son”, and always questioned his pedigree. His displacement comes in part because his mother, an actress with a “heart of stone”, was always on the road, and his father, who was immersed in the black-market underworld, kept him in boarding schools. The sudden death of his younger brother passes with no discussion from either. This intimate look at the artist as a young man adrift offers major clues for Modiano’s readers as well as rare insights into life during the Occupation period. (Credit: Yale University Press)
Dinty Moore, Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy
Moore is known for his memoir Between Panic and Desire and his online journal Brevity (not to mention his distinguished career as a teacher of writing). His witty and disarming new book is framed as an advice column for accomplished writers. His collaborators include Cheryl Strayed (on her passion for the em-dash), Phillip Lopate, Diane Ackerman, Lia Purpera and Steve Almond. Moore makes no bones about his inspiration: Montaigne, “father of the essay form”, who “broke new literary ground by writing mainly of the self.” He is fun to read (don’t miss Mr Plimpton’s Revenge: A Google Maps Essay, in Which George Plimpton Delivers My Belated and Well-Deserved Comeuppance). And he sneaks in answers so we are left with a touch of wisdom as well as laughter. (Credit: Ten Speed Press)
Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen
Moshfegh’s first novel has roots in New England Gothic (think Shirley Jackson, Stephen King). Eileen is a self-loathing 24-year-old. In late December 1961, she is working at a boys’ prison in X-ville, the “brutal cold town” in which she was raised. Her mother is dead, her father, a former policeman, in the grip of gin-induced paranoia. She hates herself and her life: “I was very unhappy and angry all the time.” But something happens. Eileen narrates her story from 50 years in the future. She describes meeting an alluringly sophisticated woman who draws her into a bizarre crime. Moshfegh introduces this mystery in her first chapter, and teases us along, not revealing it for more than 200 pages. In this masterful feat of suspense writing, she captures the distortions and complicities that poison families. (Credit: Penguin Press)
Abigail Santamaria, Joy
Joy Davidman’s marriage to CS Lewis was “one of the 20th Century’s greatest literary love stories,” writes Santamaria, but Davidman was more than just a secondary character in another writer’s life. Santamaria follows Davidman from childhood dreams of “the door leading out of time and space and into Somewhere Else” to a “romance with the Communist Party”, early literary success (her first book won the 1938 Yale Younger Poets Award), a “miserable marriage”, a conversion to Christianity and finally to Lewis. The two met in 1952. Davidman moved to England with her two sons, and their romance flourished. But shortly after they were married in 1956 she was diagnosed with incurable bone cancer, and they began to mourn the loss of their future. Joy captures the toughness, the dreams, the hypocrisy, of a complex and controversial woman. (Credit: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Vu Tran, Dragonfish
The fall of Saigon and its desperate aftermath provide a distinctive backstory to this noir novel. Robert Ruen, an Oakland police officer, is still despondent two years after his Vietnamese-born wife Hong (American name Suzy) leaves him. When he learns she’s in Las Vegas, and married now to Sonny, an underground figure who is physically abusive, he sets out to track her down. But she is missing. Sonny’s son Junior blackmails Robert into finding her. And he shows Robert the illegal Asian Arowana fish (known as a dragonfish) in his father’s underground aquarium. It’s there to “bring good luck, keep evil away, and bring the family together.” Tran’s flashbacks to the Malaysian refugee camp where Hong, Sonny and Junior first met, and Hong’s journal, bring a haunting tragic dimension to this fast-moving Las Vegas crime thriller. (Credit: WW Norton)
Jane Urquhart, The Night Stages
Tam, raised a tomboy, is a risk taker. She flies 47 different kinds of planes during World War Two, marries at 17, then moves to Kerry with an Irish lover, only to lose him to drowning. For years she finds brief “awakenings to pleasure” with Niall, a married Kerryman whose specialty is weather. Now she’s stranded at Gander airport in Newfoundland (“There is no argument with fog”), immersed in reminiscence and musing about an airport mural of children gathered at a shoreline. She focuses on Niall and his grief for his brother Kieran, who “vanished into the night”. The narrative of Canadian author Urquhart’s atmospheric ninth novel darts here and there in time, with scenes suffused in “humiliating, helpless sorrow”. With radiant language and vivid scenes, she captures the end of an affair. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Naomi J Williams, Landfalls
Williams’ audacious, refractive first novel chronicles the adventures of the 1785-88 La Pérouse naval expedition to the South Seas – an ill-fated voyage that influenced the path of the Nautilus in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Each of Williams’s immersive chapters reveals a new perspective and location. She takes us to London, where the expedition’s naval engineer scouts anti-scurvy medications, Tenerife, Concepcion, Lituya Bay, Alaska (where a young Tlingit girl describes a wave drowning two canoes full of the outsiders she dubs “Snow Men”), Monterey, Macao and Petropavlovsk. There the Russian translator begins a harrowing year-long land trip to St Petersburg to deliver records of the expedition to the French ambassador. For most of the original 200 crew members, the years-long voyage ends in “an uncharted cove in Samoa.” A marvel of inventive storytelling. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Christopher Yates, Black Chalk
Six Oxford students compete in a complex truth or dare game in this sardonic psychological thriller, which has been optioned for film by Ron Howard. The narrator, Jolyon, is a damaged loner who rarely leaves his New York apartment and who functions through mnemonic devices he leaves around his apartment. He is guilt-ridden over a fatal turn in the cutthroat game he and his American friend Chad created in 1990 as Oxford freshmen. Three mysterious upperclassmen administer the rules and hold the pot for the ultimate winner. Fourteen years later, Chad contacts Jolyon for a visit. Is he setting up the final round? Who is playing whom? Yates, a crossword puzzle maker himself, sets clues firmly in place, moves back and forth in time and throws in surprises at every turn. Black Chalk is an engrossing literary guessing game. (Credit: Picador)