Books You May Have Missed 2021: Adult Fiction

"In 1916, Sven Ormson leaves a restless life in Stockholm to seek adventure in Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago where darkness reigns four months of the year and he might witness the splendor of the Northern Lights one night and be attacked by a polar bear the next. But his time in a mining camp ends when an avalanche nearly kills him, leaving him disfigured, after which Sven flees even farther, to an uninhabited fjord. There, with the company of a...

In Manuela Draeger's poetic 'post-exotic' novel, a group of young leftists trapped in a burning building after one year's Bolcho Pride parade plunge back into their childhood memories, trading them with each other as their lives are engulfed in flames. They remember Granny Holgolde's stories of the elephant Marta Ashkarot as she travels through the Bardo, to find her home and be reincarnated again and again. They remember the Soviet folk singer Lyudmila...

"The story is set in Uruguay, it starts in a Montevideo prison where Diego waits for his lawyer, the slick Dr Antinucci, always raybanned, chain-smoking, never frisked by the prison guards. Diego, betrayed by his partner in crime, was arrested for kidnapping a businessman. But charges will not be pressed. The businessman and his wife have described Diego as duped by his partner, certainly no master criminal, so he will be let out. But Antonucci has...

"Depicted as a graphic history and informed by newly discovered primary sources and years of archival research, Monumental resurrects, in vivid detail, Louisiana and New Orleans after the Civil War, and an iconic American life that never should have been forgotten. The graphic history is supplemented with personal and historiographical essays as well as a map, timeline, and endnotes that explore the riveting scenes in even greater depth. Monumental...

As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Aldous Huxley to Octavia E. Butler. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, and urban sprawl, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. So, bestselling author Denise Hamilton commissioned fourteen stories (including one...

"Through war and its aftermaths, a woman fights to keep her daughters safe. As a girl she sees her village sacked and her beloved father and brothers flee. Her life in danger, she joins the rebellion in the hills, where her comrades force her to give up the baby she conceives. Years later, having outlived countless men, she leaves to find her lost daughter, traveling across the Atlantic with meager resources. She returns to a community riven with...

Natalie Chan gained her corporate citizenship, but barely survived the battle for Tribulation. Now corporate has big plans for Natalie. Horrible plans. Locked away in Natalie's missing memory is salvation for the last of an alien civilization and the humans they tried to exterminate. The corporation wants total control of both―or their deletion. --from Amazon.

"When music researcher Phineas Fox is asked to verify the contents of an old scrapbook, rescued from the site of the historic Chopin Library in Warsaw, he is initially sceptical. But he soon discovers an intriguing link between the Library and an infamous piece of music known as the Dark Cadence. Legend has it that the Dark Cadence was only performed at a traitor's execution - and it has never been written down. It is believed to have last been played...

"In Beatriz Bracher's Antonio-her third novel and her breakout book in Brazil-Benjamin, on the verge of becoming a father, discovers a tragic family secret involving patrimony and determines to find out how it happened. Those most immediately involved are all dead, but their three closest confidantes are still alive-his grandmother, Isabel; Haroldo, his grandfather's friend; and Raul, his father's friend-and each will tell him different versions of...

A claustrophobic, literary dystopia set in the hot, luscious landscape of Andalusia from the author of The Golden Key.

“A richly imagined eco-gothic tale.” – The Guardian

"Exquisitely realised.” – The Times
 
After the ravages of the Green Winter, Earth is a place of deep jungles and monstrous animals. The last of the human race is...