Although it seems impossible, we are now dangerously close to the halfway point of 2023. I know! How did this happen! It feels like the 205th day of January! But finally the sun is out and finally we have stuff to look forward to. Namely, lying in the sun, taking a moment’s respite from the small, medium and large screens that dictate our lives and reading a good book. While most ‘what to read this year’ lists tend to stack themselves towards releases that come out at the beginning of the year, when we’re all too starved of vitamin D and stimuli to even consider enriching our lives with literature, we’re here to fill the gap – and your kindles, and your suitcases, and your capacious Uniqlo crossbody bags – to bring you the best new writing to come out the second half of 2023.
Lazy City, Rachel Connolly
Rachel Connolly’s debut novel, a “tender hymn” on the chaos of love and loss, opens on a young woman dealing with the death of her friend, but for a book ostensibly about grief it’s one full of life in all its messy, uncertain, drunken, hungover, nihilistic glory. A portrait of a city that’s sluggishly transforming itself simultaneously to its protagonist, Lazy City sees grad school drop out Erin return to her native Belfast, overwhelmed and unmoored by the messy aftermath of her best friend’s death. Back home in a place that does and doesn’t feel like home anymore, Erin runs herself in circles, literally and figuratively, wandering through the city like a millennial flaneur, drifting between men and bars and friends and parties, searching for comfort and refuge and distraction against the as she tries to avoid looking at the simple thing in front of her: she loved someone once, and now they’re not there anymore.
Bellies, Nicola Dinan
Another wistful meditation on love from another first time author, Bellies takes the typical ‘boy meets girl’ story and turns it on its head. The novel tells the story of Tom and Ming, who meet at a drag night at university and quickly fall deeply in love. A while later, after the couple move to London and into their own place, in the midst of an argument Ming announces she’s transgender. From there, the love story becomes a place to explore the uncertainty of your early 20s, the way graduate life is focused on defining your identity over and over again, and trying to navigate what parts of yourself – and maybe what people – you lose in the process of becoming.
Silver Nitrate, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Who says horror is just for cold weather? Hot weather is horrifying in its own way (wasps! Group chat holiday organising! Chafe!). So Silver Nitrate, from New York Times bestselling author Silvia Moreno-Garcia – who wrote The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic – is the perfect summer goth read. The dark thriller tells the story of a legendary, unfinished, probably a bit cursed, lost movie and the talented albeit overlooked sound editor who uncovers the magic embedded within its silver nitrate (the traditional process for creating film). The sound editor teams up with a fading soap opera actor she’s been secretly in love with for years to uncover the mystery behind the film. Naturally, dark forces ensue in the form of ominous ghostly shadows and dead ex-girlfriends. There’s Mexican horror movies and industry bullying and unrequited love and Nazi occultism. A light beach read?
The Vegan, Andrew Lipstein
Greed is good, they told us in the 80s. But now everything is priced like a luxury item and nobody’s quite sure that’s true anymore. Andrew Lipstein’s new novel The Vegan challenges our notions of greed and guilt and virtue, asking us how far we’ll go – and how low we’ll stoop – to be perceived as virtuous. It does this, naturally, with a protagonist who’s a hedge fund manager with offices in Soho, a hot wife and a chic townhouse where he hosts dinner parties. It’s at one of those dinner parties where a prank goes horrifically awry and suddenly the carefully constructed, highly controlled world of hedge fund svengali Herschel Caine begins to unravel. And his sense of reality unravels with it. What follows is a trippy tailspin journey on the nature of good and evil, right and wrong, guilt and innocence, remorse and indifference, and of course, asset and liability. Dogs are involved.
The Glow, Jessie Gaynor
Self care is a scam. We finally know it, and in Jessie Gaynor’s new novel, The Glow, a desperate young publicist becomes the avatar of all that’s wrong with the Goopification of our lives. Jane Dorner lies about her age and ignores her debt whilst selling “feminist vibrators” and “bereavement subscription boxes” to desperate idiots. In an attempt to keep selling more crap to consumers, and pay off some of that medical debt, she sets out to create a new self-care brand – definitely not a cult – out of a ramshackle wellness retreat and Cass, the charismatic owner who she can model in Gwyneth’s own Gooplike image. A welcome dose of satire for anyone who’s been duped by yoni eggs, vagina scented candles, or those TikTok tarot readers that keep saying the man ignoring your texts is actually in love with you (me, by all three).
Open Throat, Henry Hoke
If like many people you are sick of human protagonists that are often nihilistic, self-destructive, fundamentally lonely people, then perhaps you would prefer Open Throat, which is narrated by a similarly lonely mountain lion who lives in the Hollywood Hills. Bear with: His surroundings have been devastated by drought and he’s fascinated by the foibles of humans who keep wandering across his path, from the homeless to hikers. When the humans eventually encroach on his territory enough to set it on fire, the lion has to descend into the city, where he can view the inequalities of LA up close and personal. As personal as you can get, if you are a mountain lion. He’s also queer, and very hungry. His Odyssey through LA is motivated by that hunger (physical and emotional) and fascination with the human condition. Does he want to eat the humans, or does he want to be with the humans?