New and Coming Soon

There’s a sense of being spoilt rotten for February’s upcoming highlights. Hannah Kent’s The Good People has to be one of the pack leaders, her first novel since her blazing debut Burial Rites; this time around, the hardships of northern Iceland are swapped for the fears and suspicions of rural Ireland as a potential changeling child is brought into a community’s midst. From the first line – ‘Nora’s first thought when they brought the body was that it could not be her husband’s’– you will be held absolutely still by the power of her prose.

Also gaining traction (and headlines) on the fiction front is Edouard Louis’ The End of Eddy, a clearly semi-autobiographical novel of a stark and utterly unforgiving upbringing in northern France. It has been a sensation across the Channel – it’s rare these days for a book to be properly controversial, but this is it – and there is some chance that success will be mirrored here.

There’s masses of non-fiction to choose from, of course – the posthumous collection of A.A. Gill’s best journalism, Lines in the Sand; Harriet Harman’s revealing account of a lifetime in politics, A Woman’s Work; a gorgeous new edition of Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong’s evolutionary classic The Ancestor’s Tale; and heart surgeon Stephen Westaby’s unparalleled account of life and death on the operating table, Fragile Lives.