Bring Up the Bodies takes up where Mantel’s 2009 Booker-winning life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, left off. With Henry becoming disaffected with Anne Boleyn, it falls to Cromwell to disburden him of his second wife. Every bit as tenebrous and convoluted as its predecessor, and with the same enigma at its heart, Bring Up the Bodies stands a chance of making Booker history as the first sequel to win the prize
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Set in Malaya in 1949 in the shadow of the second world war, Eng’s second novel tells the story of Yun Ling Teoh, a lawyer involved in the prosecution of Japanese war criminals, and herself a survivor of a Japanese war camp. She seeks solace in the mountaintop garden of the title and, despite her hatred of the Japanese, enters into an apprenticeship with its Japanese gardener, Aritomo. But Malaya’s political breakdown and the unanswered questions surrounding each of them threaten their fragile friendship
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‘I wished that this book, like some long and delicious opium-induced daydream, would go on and on’, wrote the Guardian reviewer. In his debut novel, Indian poet Thayil chronicles the way that opium dens in 1970s Mumbai gave way to heroin addiction and a brutal modernity. Thayil has spoken of his own lost decades of alcoholism and addiction: "I spent most of that time sitting in bars, getting very drunk, talking about writers and writing. And never writing. It was a colossal waste. In two years I've done more than I did in 20.” Listen to a podcast interview with Jeet Thayil
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A young woman stalks a famously brutal English poet on holiday with his family in the south of France. She makes friends with his daughter and spies on his wife who, for her own reasons, invites the young woman to stay. Set over five days in the July heatwave of 1994, Levy’s first novel in 15 years is a dangerous and moving interrogation of how the most interesting secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves
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Not just a stream of one consciousness but three, Umbrella winds together the thoughts of Audrey Death at the beginning of the 20th century, regular Self character Dr Zack Busner in the 1970s, and the older Busner in 2010. Psychiatry, modernism, war and the curious condition of encephalitis lethargica are all explored: "through the polyphonic, epoch-hopping torrent, we gradually construct a coherent and beguiling narrative," promises our reviewer.
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Moore’s debut, published by tiny independent press Salt, is about a man trying to find himself on a walking holiday in Germany, only to become more lost and adrift. ‘Melancholy and haunting”, said Margaret Drabble of this unsettling account of paths not taken.
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