Our choice
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Picador £8.99
The first 150 pages of this Man Booker-shortlisted novel are compelling. We are introduced to four friends, all in their twenties, all living in New York. Willem is a would-be actor; Malcolm is an architect; JB is an up-and-coming artist; and the mysterious Jude is a clever, hard-working lawyer. They go to parties and gallery openings and restaurants. They turn 30. Success begins: JB has his first solo show, Willem lands a part in a film. Then Jude’s backstory kicks in and you find yourself reading a totally different book.
The hook is child abuse. A Little Life is reminiscent of that 1990s trend for child-abuse memoirs: competitive revelations, designed to titillate. Yanagihara takes full advantage of this crude yet effective formula, the drip-feed of devastating disclosure. And the prose? Yanagihara reportedly wrote the novel in a “fevered” 18 months, evenings and weekends only, and it feels like a classic case of “I didn’t have time to write a short letter”. There is a lot of overwriting, a lot of gush. But if you enjoy being deafened by the melodramatic wail of negative feedback, this may be one for you.
Claire Lowdon
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Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard
Vintage £8.99
The charismatic leader of a cult has been killed in the Middle East, and one by one his former associates are being murdered. Cassius Marcellus Gallio, a counterinsurgency specialist, is on the case, but it is a difficult one. To make things worse, the original body has gone missing. It is the aftermath of the Easter story, but recast here into a world of aeroplanes, takeaways and CCTV. The disciples’ various martyrdoms were horrible enough to begin with, but they are even more grotesque when considered as crimes in Beard’s police procedural. A few years ago people would have trumpeted this as postmodern: labels aside, it is a darkly funny, virtuoso performance, so cleverly done it almost winks at the reader.
Phil Baker
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The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink
Fourth Estate £7.99
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This novel has received rave reviews in America. And it deserves every one of them. It is extraordinary. At first, it could be mistaken for just a melancholy, Sylvia Plath-like evocation of a relationship in its asphyxiating last stages. The narrator, Tiffany, is living in Switzerland with her husband Stephen, an obsessive twitcher, and a bit of a man-child still hung up on club music and drugs. He falls in love with a beautiful ecological campaigner and starts harbouring plans to blow up hydroelectric dams. Tiffany begins her own affairs with a string of preening men, studying her male lovers like a bird weighing up potential mates. Zink’s delivery is crude, precise, funny, sarcastic, all side by side; and as the themes of nature, ecology and sexual drive swoop in and out of the narrative, so she keeps an exhilarating array of stylistic crosswinds blowing through the prose.
Robert Collins
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Judas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle by Peter Stanford
Hodder £9.99
Judas Iscariot is one of those figures in the New Testament about whom not that much is really known and yet he has bulked large in the imagination of Christendom, taking on the roles of Archetypal Jew, Merchant Banker, Evil Redhead, and sometimes of a pitiful Everyman, a universal sinner seeking forgiveness, and very much one of us. Stanford, the eminent Catholic writer, can glean no more about the historical Judas than anyone else from the bare facts of the Bible. It is Judas’s afterlife in the western imagination that occupies much of his book, a cultural overview of Judas the mythical figure.
Christopher Hart
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The Kindness by Polly Samson
Bloomsbury £8.99
Samson’s novel is cumulatively addictive: intriguing, cleverly structured, lyrical and engrossing. At its centre is an emotional mystery: what destroyed the love between Julian and Julia? First we see the past from Julian’s perspective. He becomes a successful writer while Julia sets up a gardening business. The latter part of the novel is seen through her eyes. And this is where things become interesting. Secrets, around which we have been circling, come slowly into focus. We see the same events from Julia’s perspective, filling in some crucial details until, slowly, it all makes sense.
Lucy Atkins
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Also out
Winter Is Coming by Garry Kasparov Atlantic
Critique of modern Russia
Words Without Music by Philip Glass Faber
Composer’s memoir
The Old Boys by David Turner Yale
The history of Britain’s public schools
Children’s book of the week
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Perijee & Me by Ross Montgomery
Faber £6.99, Age 8-11
Ross Montgomery’s imagination is wilder than most. This is the story of 11-year-old Caitlin, an only child who lives with her inattentive parents on an island, and is an outcast at school. She finds a friend at last in Perijee, an indefinable, child-like, shape-shifting creature on a beach who seems to have fallen from the sky and imitates and learns from Caitlin.
In the middle the book turns into a bizarre adventure in which the world is threatened and mad cults blow things up. Yet however untrammelled and improbable the plot becomes, Montgomery engages us with a wonderful elliptical humour — the laughter is in the connections the reader makes — and with high drama, hurtling towards a heart-warming resolution.
Nicolette Jones
Buy for £6.59, including p&p, from the Sunday Times Bookshop