My favourite book of the year is actually from 1966: Emeric Pressburger’s The Glass Pearls, reissued this year in the excellent Faber Editions series. A proper thriller that keeps ramping up the tension until the very end, it tells the story of Karl Braun, a Nazi war criminal hiding in plain sight among the German émigrés of grimy, down-at-heel 1960s London. (It felt to me like precisely the same London as that of his long-time collaborator Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, and I couldn’t help picturing the whole thing in that glorious Eastmancolor.) What makes the book so extraordinary though is that Pressburger – a Hungarian jew forced to flee Berlin in the 1930s, whose mother and many of his other relatives were murdered in Auschwitz – insists on the humanity of his monstrous protagonist, to the point of giving Braun some of his own backstory and characteristics (Kevin Macdonald, in his afterword, describes it as a kind of self-portrait); noticing where your sympathy lies while reading is a strange and unsettling experience.
From the publisher:
For fans of The Passenger, this thrilling tale of an ex-Nazi surgeon hiding in plain sight in 1960s London by the celebrated filmmaker is a lost noir gem, introduced by Anthony Quinn.‘A wonderfully compelling noir thriller…
From the publisher:
In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot in a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa…
From the publisher:
A landmark illustrated history of rural church monuments - the forgotten national treasures of England and WalesDeep in the countryside, away from metropolitan abbeys and cathedrals, thousands of funerary monuments are hidden in parish…
From the publisher:
Translated by Sophie HughesInside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor – an attractive…
From the publisher:
Subversive and playful, Nettleblack is a neo-Victorian queer farce that follows a runaway heir/ess and an organisation of crime-fighting misfits as they struggle with the misdeeds besieging a rural English town.The year is 1893.…
From the publisher:
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERAN OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK‘Deeply moving’ Sarah Winman, author of Still Life‘Remarkable’ Afua Hirsch‘A sweeping epic … Outstanding’ Daily MailAiley Pearl Garfield…
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Translated by Charlotte BarslundA cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middle aged artist and her aging mother, as Vigdis Hjorth returns to the themes of her controversial modern classic, Will…
From the publisher:
'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout – I loved it' Charlotte Mendelson‘One of the great writers of our time’ Tash Aw‘Wonderfully strange and alive’ Jon McGregorA propulsive, seductive new novel about…
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