Jonathan Lee's first novel, Who is Mr Satoshi?, was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Prize and shortlisted for an MJA Open Book Award in 2011. His second novel, Joy, published in 2013, was shortlisted for the Encore Award. The BBC's Culture Show programme recently featured him as being one of Britain's best new novelists. He lives in New York.
The House of Doors (2023) Tan Twan Eng "An amazingly transporting novel about love, desire and duty. The House of Doors does what the very best stories do - it draws us intomany fascinating worlds at once: the British Empire's incursions into South-East Asia; the secret life of one of England's finest writers; a forgotten murder trial playing out in the Kuala Lumpur courts a century ago. Weaving all this together with great skill and power, bringing the reader a surfeit of pleasure, Tan Twan Eng also teaches us a crucial lesson: never trust a writer."
A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (2023) Jai Chakrabarti "With a poet's sense of compression and a wonderful feel for the catastrophic gaps that can open up between countries, people, and behaviors, Jai Chakrabarthi's A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness is essential reading for its title story alone. It is a moving, immersive, timely collection about what we hear and don't hear when we try to talk to one another."
An Honest Living (2022) Dwyer Murphy "An Honest Living is a superb debut novel by a supremely gifted writer. It's as if Roberto Bolano and Lawrence Osborne got together to reimagine Chinatown. I was as gripped by the mystery at the heart of this book as I was by Dwyer Murphy's perfect prose."
The Long Corner (2022) Alexander Maksik "The Long Corner is such a pleasurable novel that you almost don't notice how unsettling it is. It is a wonderfully written, probing book about power, passions, legacies and ways of seeing...Page by page The Long Corner asks us--with the deep resonance of all unfettered art--what one of Maksik's brilliant characters calls the 'most popular question in New York City' What do you do?"
Nobody Gets Out Alive (2022) Leigh Newman "I have never been to Alaska, but it came alive for me from many wonderful angles in Leigh Newman's irresistible fiction debut. I didn't want Nobody Gets Out Alive to end - to have to leave behind its warmth and soul and glittering writing, its honesty and its laughter in the dark. The stories in these pages are, as one memorable character in this book observes of another's tall tales, 'funny and self-lacerating and so horrifically precise about our love and fury for each other.' You feel you're in the company of a writer who has embraced unpredictability and breathes deeply while seeing far."
Booth (2022) Karen Joy Fowler "With each book, Karen Joy Fowler masterfully fuses style with subject, prose with plot, and explores the terrifying power that parents wield. Booth brilliantly cracks open the history of a country and a family and shows us the private secrets and suspicions that run underneath."
Winchelsea (2022) Alex Preston "Wilkie Collins, eat your heart out! The novel is so very impressive and so saturated with atmosphere and rich in mystery - it flows so freely, takes risks other novels might dodge, and transports us into an entirely different world. It is drenched in a love of place and history, and a perfect record of a hybrid life."
Paradise, Nevada (2021) Dario Diofebi "Paradise, Nevada is a superbly energetic novel of Las Vegas, a place teeming with glittering wins and crushing losses. When the bright lights go out, Dario Diofebi proves himself to have a great eye for the cards different people are dealt, and a great ear for laughter in the dark."
Quotients (2020) Tracy O'Neill "Quotients is a novel perfectly tuned to our times, and it contains more artistry and intelligence than our times perhaps deserve. Tracy O'Neill has constructed the moving story of a young couple trying to build their lives within a divided and constantly dividing world of big data, small faith, political gaming, and unquantifiable fear. A superb and enlivening exploration of paranoia and the search for intimacy."
Restless Souls (2018) Dan Sheehan "Restless Souls is a terrific debut novel, bold and wise, each page lit with wit and with feeling."
Oliver Loving (2018) Stefan Merrill Block "Like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, Oliver Loving is an extraordinary novel about family and community, told with real heart and humour and style. Stefan Merrill Block has the rare ability to capture, in his literature, the secrets we store in silence -- the pages of a life that are rarely read aloud."
(b.1981)
