In: A Graphic Novel

Product Information

Medusa’s Ankles by AS Byatt (Knopf) – The first of the short story collections on our list (and also the first of depressingly many examples of hideous American cover design, alas) is this powerful collection by the author of Possession and The Children’s Book, here emphasizing her surprising ability to craft subversive fantasy. Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus (Liveright) – The second short story collection on our list (continuing the time-honored publishing tradition of using a product description as a book title) amply showcases the genius and sharp humor of this author. Starts as a charming romantic comedy and turns into something tender and affecting about our need to connect. I loved this one. * David Nicholls *

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies (Houghton Mifflin) – The joys and unexpected traumas of family life (as well as, one suspects, heaping helpings of autofiction) (and an idiotic title, hardly a rarity on this list - see #s 9, 7, & 2)(capped off with a truly eye-scratchingly hideous cover design) fill this touching and eloquent novel. In is most autobiographical in its humour, says McPhail, teasing his own “woke boy” tendencies and patronage of trendy cafes across Edinburgh. (His custom rivals JK Rowling’s, he claims: “If my book is anywhere near not a flop, I better get some plaques around this place.”) But In did spring from his own experience of breakthroughs in connection, the “conversations that feel kind of transcendent in their intimacy”, he says.

Special offers and product promotions

This is a miraculous book. Very funny, very sad and very beautiful - all at the same time, somehow. * Joe Dunthorne *

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (Harper) – If readers are willing to overlook yet another hideous American cover, they’ll find in Louise Erdrich’s latest novel - set in and around a small bookstore as it goes through the cursed year 2020 - as eloquent and at times stunningly accurate an example of so-called “COVID fiction” as they’re ever likely to read. The Trees by Percival Everett (Graywolf Press) – Underneath its unprepossessing exterior (Graywolf avoided giving it a hideous cover by giving it not cover at all, just the book’s title on a piece of blank paper, like a manufacturer’s label stamped on a crate of pomegranates), this is a weirdly wry novel about race and perception that took me a couple of reads to appreciate - which is much appreciated in this era of tweets-as-manuscripts. A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam (Hogarth) – The shadow of the Sri Lankan civil war stretches over this bluntly moving character study of half a dozen different kinds of displacement, but there’s also a deeply felt love story here.Starts as a charming romantic comedy and turns into something tender and affecting about our need for connection. I loved this one. ' David Nicholls He hadn’t. “I knew exactly where it was, the whole time,” says McPhail now, from his Edinburgh flat. “I just wanted to join in. And then I said,” he winces: “‘That’d be 10 quid these days!’ These days! Like I know anything about coffee prices through the ages!” A curious, funny and deeply human story about growing up in adulthood. Asks all the questions, and makes a case for real connection in a world full of podcasts and plant-based milk. * Emmy the Great * I’ve always been fascinated by how combinations of letters and words can change the mechanics of a conversation, and turn it from one completely different thing into another. When that’s happened to me, on the rare occasions, and I’ve been transported into this other person’s world … the book was an attempt to describe that feeling.” This is a daunting bar for an interviewer, so I am quietly relieved when McPhail is not only so approachable as to be wearing pyjamas at 3.30pm, but seems to respond to my sweeping questions – about relationships under capitalism, the dehumanising effect of tech; the impediments to intimacy in (as In’s blurb puts it) “our isolated times” – with good-natured alarm.