Looking for something new to read? Browse our fiction picks for March! Includes books by Colm Toibin, Asako Yuzuki, Jill Dawson and more.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
The News From Dublin
Colm Tóibín
This collection of short stories from bestselling author Colm Tóibín delves into the days and nights of those living far from home: lives of great longing, at a great distance from past lives and past selves.
A woman in Galway hears of the death of her son in the First World War. An Irishman seeks anonymity in Barcelona, haunted by crimes he has committed. A man goes to Dublin from Enniscorthy to implore the Minister for Health for a special favour. A young woman is pregnant during the Spanish Civil War. An undocumented worker finds himself living an illegal life and must leave San Francisco, and his child, after thirty years in America. Three sisters who have been living in Argentina decide to return to Catalonia.
Hooked
Asako Yuzuki
Eriko’s life appears perfect – devoted parents, spotless apartment and a job in the seafood division of one of Japan’s largest trading companies. Her latest project, to reintroduce the controversial Nile perch fish into the Japanese market, is characteristically ambitious. But beneath her flawless surface she is wracked by loneliness.
Eriko becomes fascinated with a popular blog written by a housewife, Shoko. Shoko’s posts about eating convenience store food and her untidy home are the opposite of the typical Japanese housewife’s manicured lifestyle. When Eriko tracks Shoko down at her favourite restaurant and befriends her, Shoko is at first charmed by her new companion. But as Eriko’s obsession with Shoko deepens, her increasingly possessive behaviour starts to raise suspicion.
As Eriko’s carefully laid plans begin to unravel, how far will she go to hold on to the best friend that she’s ever had?
A Far-Flung Life
M.L. Stedman
Western Australia, 1958. A truck rumbles along a lonely outback road. A moment’s inattention, and in a few muddled seconds the lives of the MacBride family are shattered.
Instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.
Look What You Made Me Do
John Lanchester
Kate, thirty years into her marriage, has a seemingly idyllic metropolitan, North London life.
Phoebe, a young screenwriter, is the creator of the year’s hit TV show, Cheating.
When Kate’s world takes a darker turn, she thinks she sees details and intimacies in the show that only she and her husband Jack could possibly have known. But who has betrayed who? Who gets to tell whose story?
Pixie
Jill Dawson
It’s the turn of the 20th century and Pamela ‘Pixie’ Colman Smith is a young woman of stark contradictions: plucky yet naïve, artistically gifted despite lacking classical training, fascinated by the esoteric but sceptical of the world around her.
After the deaths of her parents, Pixie finds herself in the complex, political world of fin-de-siècle art, trying to get her work seen and to make a name for herself.
Across Jamaica, Devon, London and Brooklyn, Pixie is a novel of epic proportions, a tale of the twists and turns, séances and secrets, successes and devastation, of one young woman’s talent, grit and determination.
Love Lane
Patrick Gale
When veteran Canadian wheat farmer, Harry Cane is obliged to sell up and sail home to an England transformed by two world wars, his arrival triggers unwelcome self-examination for the family he abandoned, and for whom he has never been more than a distant myth.
His daughter feels duty bound to take him in but is riven with doubt and ambushed by a long buried anger she has never before expressed. Harry’s effect on the next generation is less predictable, and enables his granddaughter to deal with an unspeakable trauma, while her gentle husband feels seen for who he truly is.
Can Harry stay and make a new life before it’s too late, or will he find himself cast out again, punished for having witnessed and understood too much?
Celestial Lights
Cecile Pin
January 28, 1986: moments after launch, the Challenger shuttle falls from the sky. At the same time, in a small English village, Oliver Ines is born.
Ollie spends his childhood in a bedroom covered in glow-in-the-dark wallpaper, bearing the planets and stars. Decades later, he has become one of the most renowned astronauts of his time. When an enterprising billionaire approaches him to lead a landmark, ten-year mission to the distant moon, Europa, Ollie can’t resist the call of history.
As the mission advances deeper into unchartered territory, Ollie finds himself retreating into the past: his school days and years in the navy, relationships found and lost, becoming a husband and father. But will the world he remembers still be waiting for him, ten years later, when he returns? A breath-taking story of fate, love, and sacrifice, that questions what we owe ourselves and our loved ones, when our ambitions and loyalties collide.
It’s Not What You Think
Clare Mackintosh
Nadeeka is certain Jamie is having an affair. She knows the tell-tale signs. She’s been here before.
When Jamie claims to be at work late, she knows he’s lying. He’s with another woman, and she’s determined to catch him in the act. But when Nadeeka arrives home to confront him, Jamie can’t explain himself.
The house has become a crime scene. Jamie is dead.
Dandelion is Dead
Rosie Storey
Jake has fallen head over heels for Dandelion. The only problem? Dandelion is dead.
Seven months after Dandelion’s death, Poppy resurrects her sister’s phone and finds a message from a man on a dating app. Jake.
Dandelion delighted in bad behaviour. She pushed Poppy to be daring. So, on what would have been her 40th birthday, Poppy decides to do something her sister would love, and – for one night only – she goes on a date as Dandelion.
Only when Poppy meets Jake, they have unexpected chemistry. Thrillingly hot, confusing chemistry. They become tangled in deceit while discovering something shockingly real. What happens when you fall in love with a lie?
The Daffodil Days
Helen Bain
In the early 1960s, in a small town near Dartmoor, the church bells ring.
There’s the local GP, who knows more about his patients than he would sometimes prefer. There’s the young shop assistant at Kestrels, who understands that the ladies who come there for a new outfit sometimes hope to find a new self. There’s the tenant farm labourer who rings the tower bells at the church three times a week, the notes – harmonious and clashing – rippling out across the rooftops of the town.
Amid all these lives, a young couple move into focus. New to the town with their small daughter, they have escaped London for a quieter existence in the thatched house beside the church, Court Green. The life they intend to build here – out of fresh lino tiles, second-hand furniture painted with hearts and flowers, and expertly-cooked suppers for weekend guests – will be a good and happy one.