Margaret Atwood, The Testaments
After Donald Trump’s election as US President, Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale topped best-seller lists. The global phenomenon was reinforced by the Emmy award-winning television series starring Elisabeth Moss as Offred, and the handmaidens’ scarlet robes became a symbol of the patriarchy in political protests worldwide. Its sequel The Testaments is set in totalitarian Gilead 15 years after the conclusion of The Handmaid’s Tale; featuring three female narrators, it has already been longlisted for the Booker Prize. “You write a book like that hoping that it will not come true,” Atwood has said. “Here is a possible future. You are possibly heading towards it. Is that where you want to live? I thought it would diminish, that it would become less true. Instead it became more true.” (Credit: Vintage/ Penguin)
Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone
As she celebrates her 16th birthday at her grandparents’ Brooklyn brownstone in 2001, Melody realises she is “part of a long line of almost erased stories”. Woodson interweaves Melody’s touching narrative brilliantly with generational stories from her mother Iris, who was pregnant with Melody at the age of 16; her father Aubrey, still remembering the first flush of love; her grandmother Sabe, whose own grandmother survived the historic 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre in which “white folks tried to kill every living brown body”, and her grandfather Po’Boy, who is wasting away from cancer. Their memories and loving glimpses of Melody create a family portrait that transcends the bounds of time. Woodson, a National Book Award winner, writes with fluidity, grace and finesse, pulling the plot tight in the final word. (Credit: Riverhead Books)
Ann Patchett, The Dutch House
Patchett, winner of the Orange Prize, spans three decades of family ties, love, treachery and greed, in her eighth novel. Danny, the narrator, is eight and his older sister Maeve is 15 when their father moves them into a three-storey landmark known as the Dutch House, after the Van Hoebeek family who commissioned it. Their mother leaves, distressed by its lavishness, and shortly after Maeve starts her first year at university, their father remarries. Andrea, their aspirational stepmother, brings her two young daughters into the Dutch House, moving one of them into Maeve’s room. When Danny is 15, his father dies and Andrea, who gained ownership along the way, removes the siblings from the house and their father’s estate. A marvellous mosaic, filled with unexpected twists and moments of forgiveness. (Credit: Harper)
Benjamin Moser, Sontag
For his biography of Susan Sontag, “America’s last great literary star”, Moser draws upon previously restricted journals and hundreds of interviews, including with her son David Rieff and her long-time partner Annie Leibovitz. He embeds her complicated story in a cultural history of the 20th Century, which Sontag chronicled in fiction and essays about “the grimmest realities, those of sickness, death and war”. He makes the case that Sontag, as a University of Chicago prodigy, co-authored her husband Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. After they split, her pioneering analysis of cultural trends high and low kept her at the centre of an international literary scene for decades. Privately, she was plagued by insecurities and experienced a tortured relationship with her body and her bisexuality. A fascinating portrait. (Credit: Ecco)
Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey
A melancholy mood and poetic language distinguish Smith’s third memoir, set during the Chinese year of the monkey, the year when she moves from age 69 to 70. She begins on New Year’s Day, 2016, the morning after finishing a three-night run at the Fillmore in San Francisco and sitting at the deathbed of a long-time friend, Sandy Pearlman, who introduced her to City Lights, Caffe Trieste and the Grateful Dead. She chronicles cafés, hitchhiking trips, strange motels in Santa Cruz and vivid dreams. With great tenderness, she describes visiting Sam Shepard in the final months of his life and helping him get his last book completed. Hovering throughout the final chapters is “the hyperreality of a polarising pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.” (Credit: Knopf)
Etgar Keret, Fly Already
Israeli writer Keret’s new collection of 22 inventive stories showcases his razor-sharp, satiric wit and genre-shifting style. In the title story, a father and his five-year-old son spot a man about to jump from the rooftop of his apartment building. “Come on, fly already,” the child calls out, assuming the stranger is a superhero, while the father tries to stop the suicide. Working with these contradictory impulses, Keret builds toward a strangely comic conclusion. Other stories involve a goldfish who climbs out of his bowl at night to watch TV, a young man who shares a joint with a stressed-out corporate lawyer nearly twice his age, and a cafeteria worker whose apartment’s centrepiece is a crushed 1968 red Mustang convertible that once belonged to his father. The collection is translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, Nathan Englander, Jessica Cohen, Miriam Schlesinger and Yardenne Greenspan. (Credit: Riverhead Books)
Monique Truong, The Sweetest Fruits
Truong transforms author Lafcadio Hearn’s biography into a revelatory mystery by giving voice to three women who shaped him. His mother Rosa was living in his birthplace, the Greek island of Lefkada, when she married his Anglo-Irish father. Her letter explains why she leaves him behind in Dublin in 1852, at the age of two. Alethea, born enslaved, is working in a Cincinnati boarding house in 1871 when she meets Hearn. The two marry but eventually divorce, and his second wife Setsu, descended from samurai, spends 14 years with Hearn, having four children (the “sweetest fruits of a grafted tree”). His books interpreted his adoptive country to the world; Setsu, uncredited, interpreted the country to Hearn. Her own “reminiscences” remind him why he became Koizumi Yakumo, his Japanese name. (Credit: Viking)
Eric Foner, The Second Founding
The Civil War destroyed the institution of slavery, but it took the 13th, 14th and 15th constitutional amendments, passed during Reconstruction (1865 to 1877), to set the stage for equal protection under the law and the right to vote. Foner, a Pulitzer-prize-winning historian, outlines the key debates after Lincoln was assassinated and replaced by the white-supremacist Southerner Andrew Johnson. He details the narrow historic narrative developed by William A Dunning, which “provided an intellectual foundation” for the Jim Crow segregated racial system in the South (and Supreme Court decisions) until the 1960s, and the work of others to sustain the original intent of Reconstruction. His book is a timely reminder that these amendments could be transformative if used in broader ways in legal and Supreme Court decisions. (Credit: WW Norton)
Meg Waite Clayton, The Last Train to London
Clayton’s riveting historical novel is based on the true story of Dutch Resistance leader Truus Wijsmuller. Tante Truus [Auntie Truus] was a leader of the Kindertransport effort, which saved thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis in the years before World War Two. Clayton makes vivid Truus’s courage and resourcefulness in the face of growing danger as borders close throughout Europe. By late 1938, when the UK opens its doors to child refugees, Truus travels to Vienna to negotiate with Adolf Eichmann to take hundreds of children to safety in the UK. Among them: budding playwright Stephan Neuman, still in his teens, and his Christian girlfriend Žofie-Helene. Their youthful perceptions bear witness to the seeping horror as Hitler’s Final Solution takes shape – and to Truus’s extraordinary heroism. (Credit: Harper)
Anne Boyer, The Undying
At 41, poet Boyer, a single mother with a teaching job, was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. In this illuminating memoir she describes what cancer takes away, and the challenges of her journey, beginning with her first chemotherapy treatment – a combination of Adriamycin, known as the “red devil”, with the medicalised form of the chemical-weapon mustard gas. (It did not shrink her tumour.) “When I got sick, I warned my friends: Don't try to make me stop thinking about death,” she writes. Boyer’s musings and investigations offer fresh perspectives on the cancer industry, with its uncertainties and increasingly high costs. She also reminds us that since ancient times – when cancer patients like Aristides sought out temples of healing – living with this disease means grappling with the limits of mortality. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)