Looking for something new to read? Browse our fiction picks for June! Includes titles by Maggie O’Farrell, Ann Patchett and Lex Croucher.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
Land
Maggie O’Farrell
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland.
The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.
The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father.
What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?
Whistler
Ann Patchett
When Daphne notices an older gentleman following her around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, she doesn’t expect it to be Eddie – her former stepfather.
Married to her mother for a short time when Daphne was nine, she hasn’t seen Eddie for many years; not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again now, Daphne and Eddie feel that time has fallen away. Their earlier relationship was brief but had a profound impact on both of them.
Together, they consider not only their past, but the joys of the present and their commitment to face the future together.
The Final Six
Akinari Asakura
Shogo Hatano has beaten thousands of applicants to become one of six final candidates in the running for a graduate position at Japan’s most exclusive tech company. But Spiralinks will only make an offer to one of them, decided by a group vote in their last interview.
As deliberations begin at the glossy high-rise office in Tokyo, Hatano finds six envelopes addressed to them all. Each contains a shocking revelation about one candidate: six secrets so terrible that they could ruin more than just careers. They could destroy lives.
With the clock ticking, Hatano must figure out who planted the damning evidence and convince the others that he deserves the job of all their dreams.
Little Wild
Laura Evans
Suffolk, 1937. During a sweltering heatwave, preparations for a party are in full swing at Snare House. The Winthers’ only daughter, Joanie, is returning from a summer abroad before starting university. Only Margaret, ward of the family and Joanie’s closest friend, knows the truth: Joanie and Margaret are in love and plan to run away together.
But when Joanie’s father discovers their secret, Margaret’s world is turned upside down. Exiled to a tumbledown lodge in the woods with her estranged father and his colony of magpies, she finds herself becoming wild.
As the heatwave refuses to break, Margaret must decide whether to give in to her new, dark impulses in a bid to get what she most desires.
Tata
Valerie Perrin and Hildegarde Serle
When Agnes hears from the local police her Aunt Colette has died, she can’t believe her ears. Her father’s sister Colette, her Tatá, died three years ago and has been resting in peace in the cemetery of Gueugnon.
Agnes is called to identify the body: there is no doubt, it’s Aunt Colette. But then, who rests under the stone engraved with Colette’s name? And why did she fake her own death?
So begins an investigation back in time, as Agnes pieces together the multitude of stories that lie behind her aunt’s second death.
Orange and the Bread Knife
Cheong Ye and Slin Jung
Youngah is a warm-hearted schoolteacher – always smiling, always yielding. She bends her life to everyone else’s rules. But deep inside, this endless restraint is killing her.
An unending sense of despair festers. Desperate for relief, she turns to a cutting-edge, four-week emotion regulation programme, which promises to sculpt her into a better version of herself. The procedure works a little too well.
Unburdened at last, Youngah embraces her raw, unfiltered self, dismantling the weight of the exhausting expectations and ideals imposed upon her.
Rottenheart
Kat Dunn
Odette and Cecilia are young women, living between their grand homes in Hampstead and the imposing, ancient Herne House in Suffolk. Though Odette’s artist mother Lydia keeps a tight grasp on her, she and her beloved Cecilia are mostly left free to roam, to learn and to love.
But when Lydia inexplicably sickens and dies, a dark veil falls. As the funeral rites are performed, Odette’s aunt, the cold and implacable Claudine, increasingly takes charge of the household, while her father retreats to his study. Odette, lost in grief, disappears into the shadows.
But as Claudine is announced as Odette’s new stepmother, a sinister presence in the house makes itself known. To her horror, Odette realises that despite her death, Lydia never really left. And now she wants revenge.
The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones
Lex Croucher
Briar always dreamed of attending the Temple School of Thaumaturgy, the elite boarding school that’s produced the most CEOs and Prime Ministers in history, long rumoured to be magical. Briar’s best friend, Sebastian, just wanted them to stay together forever.
When Sebastian gets an acceptance letter and Briar doesn’t, their relationship is shattered – until, at eighteen, Briar secures a temp job sorting through the magical junk in Temple’s attic, and discovers that quiet, sensitive Sebastian, the boy they once loved more than anything else in the world, has become the villain.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep
Paul Tremblay
Meet Julia Flang, a twenty-something former professional gamer, living with her retired uncle, and working two jobs she doesn’t like. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, a CFO for one of the world’s largest tech companies, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can’t refuse.
One sham interview later, she’s offered the job: to chaperone a man in a vegetative state from California to the East Coast. But he’s not dead dead: he has an AI mind implanted in his head.
Meet a middle-aged man who wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. Worse than the fluid, morphing reality in which he’s trapped, he has no memory of who he is. He certainly doesn’t remember getting the rabbit tattoo on his arm. He only knows that he must find a certain person. Who? He can’t remember.
The Unicorn Hunters
Katherine Arden
Anne of Brittany was a child when her land was invaded, her castle besieged, and her royal father driven to his death. Now Brittany is occupied by her enemies, her treasury empty, and only one thing is lacking to complete her realm’s subjugation: she is required, on pain of the sword, to marry the King of France.
But Anne cannot. She has promised her dead father that Brittany would never be conquered. Defiantly, she betroths herself in secret to France’s greatest enemy. But in a world where courts may spy on each other by magic, there is only one way to solemnize this illicit union. Under the guise of a hunting party, Anne takes her court deep into a deep forest, and lies and tells them she’d gone to hunt unicorns.
Against all expectations, a unicorn does appear. Anne is plunged into a world of enchantment where a doomed sovereign might find the power to change the destiny of her nation – or be lost in the mist for ever.