From Katie Kitamura's smart novel to The Women Of Troy by Pat Barker, a minor masterpiece by Susie Boyt and Paula Hawkins' latest, this week's best new fiction
Intimacies
Katie Kitamura Jonathan Cape £14.99
An unnamed narrator leaves New York for a job as a translator at the International Court of Justice, where she’s asked to translate for a former president accused of war crimes, and becomes enmeshed in the dramas of friends and lovers.
While some readers may find it overly mysterious, this smart, cool take on the atomised nature of modern life has already snagged a spot on Barack Obama’s summer reading list.
Hephzibah Anderson
The Women Of Troy
Pat Barker Hamish Hamilton £18.99
Barker continues her sequence of novels that relive how women on the losing side experienced the Trojan War. Imprisoned and enslaved, they still taste small victories. Again and again, though, The Women Of Troy shows just how far back the roots of certain modern crimes stretch, using our understanding of genocide, of rape as a weapon, and even Harvey Weinstein to engage us in this unending tale.
Tom Payne
Loved And Missed
Susie Boyt Virago £16.99
Here is a minor masterpiece, an unsparing account of a schoolteacher who decides that her drug-addict daughter’s baby should live with her. Exquisitely written, Boyt’s seventh novel manages to make a fairly ordinary tale seem riveting.
Piercingly insightful and skilfully plotted, it has so much to say about mothers and daughters, and about how love and work can truly be a bulwark against self-destruction.
Alex Peake-Tomkinson
A Slow Fire Burning
Paula Hawkins Doubleday £20
Hawkins’s latest harks back to peak-period Barbara Vine with its beautifully drawn characters and its offbeat London setting. A young man is murdered on a barge in Dalston and the subsequent investigation lays bare the tragic dysfunction of his family.
The bleak plot is offset by Hawkins’s affection for her cast of contemporary misfits. This is a subtle, haunting thriller with many twists.
John Williams
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