This week's literary scene offers a rich selection of new fiction, from a propulsive thriller grappling with climate change to a quirky domestic comedy. We delve into three distinct and highly anticipated new releases that promise to captivate a variety of readers.
A Guardian and a Thief: A Climate-Conscious Thriller
Megha Majumdar's latest novel, A Guardian and a Thief, published by Simon and Schuster at £12.99, delivers a tense and timely narrative. Set in a famine-stricken, overheating India, the story compresses vast themes of immigration, climate crisis, and post-colonial tensions into a semi-absurdist black thriller.
The plot centres on Ma, who is on the cusp of joining her husband in America with her young daughter and elderly father. Her plans are catastrophically derailed when a thief steals her precious visas. However, the thief holds unexpected leverage: he knows Ma has been pilfering from a local housing shelter. He issues a stark ultimatum – hand over her house, and the visas will be returned.
Described as a propulsive black farce, the novel is packed with vertiginous plot twists and a persuasive, doomy atmosphere. It offers a terrific and sharp critique of the moral hypocrisy often found within the Indian middle classes. A Guardian and a Thief is available now.
One Sun Only: Turning Short Stories Upside Down
Camille Bordas challenges conventional storytelling in One Sun Only (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99). This collection is a Marmite-style read, seizing on trains of thought and humorous reactions to mundane incidents rather than relying on gripping, plot-driven scenarios.
Attempting to summarise the individual stories is somewhat futile, as Bordas deliberately avoids obvious narrative structures. Readers should instead prepare to be drawn into various offbeat predicaments. These include a father's anxiety over his young son's death-fixated drawings and a writer's futile attempts to win the lottery in a Spanish town.
While Bordas shares Alice Munro's skill for building a story from an improbable premise, her laidback use of irony may prove a little too outre for some. The collection is less 'slices of life' and more 'inside-out slashes' of experience. One Sun Only is available now.
Wreck: A Neurotic Family Comedy
Catherine Newman returns with Wreck (Doubleday, £16.99), a domestic family comedy that acts as a loose sequel to her 2024 novel Sandwich. New readers need not worry, as this story stands firmly on its own.
The novel's success hinges on the reader's tolerance for Newman's distinctive brand of kooky sentimentality, which persists no matter how bad things get for the narrator. Rocky is a neurotic mother of two grown-up children, plagued by a serious capacity for over-empathy.
The plot is set in motion by two unrelated incidents: a fatal accident on a train line involving her son's former friend, potentially linked to corporate negligence, and Rocky's own discovery of a baffling rash in the middle of the night. The life of this novel is in its telling rather than its destination, though Rocky's gushy, virtue-signalling eccentricities may be precisely the problem for some. Wreck is available now.
