Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

I raced through The Grace Year. Think of all the speculative fiction you’ve read about how men control women, particularly in religious communities – Vox, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Farm, The Power – and you’ll understand where The Grace Year is coming from, though it feels a bit like The Hunger Games has had an influence too. If you like this kind of book, you won’t be able to resist The Grace Year.

Tierney is approaching her sixteenth year and is therefore next in her family to be sent away for her grace year. Her community believes that a girl on the cusp of womanhood is filled with magic, the evil witchcraft used by Eve to deceive Adam and curse the human race, and must be banished for a year to release their wayward, dangerous powers into the wilderness before they return.  Continue reading The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

How do you hide from a difficult past when you have a left hand with an extra ring finger and bright red hair? Even if you’re exceedingly clever with a phenomenal talent for drawing? If you’re John Dolan Vincent of The Contortionist’s Handbook, you become a forger.

Initially running from a rough childhood – an abusive father in and out of jail; a school record that mistakes his savant abilities for special needs – the lure of reinvention becomes a habit, especially after the doctors can’t diagnose his headaches and conclude they are psychologically induced. In order to avoid the mental hospital – each headache episode ends in overdose as he takes more and more drugs to control the pain – every headache requires a new identity. Continue reading The Contortionist’s Handbook by Craig Clevenger

An American Marriage starts with a newly married couple, Celestial and Roy, enjoying a romantic night in a hotel. A romantic night that begins a new and troubling era in their lives when Roy is arrested for a crime he did not commit.

The novel has three parts and is mostly told from three main first person perspectives, those of Celestial, Roy and Andre, Celestial’s childhood friend who introduced the couple. Interspersed between these first person narratives are letters sent between the characters, for the most part between Celestial and Roy but this structure also allows for letters to and from other characters, such as parents, lawyers etc. Continue reading An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

A deadly virus, spread through human contact, has forced the remaining wealthy few into isolated, decontaminated chambers; phones and computers their only means of communication with others, even their children and partners. Going outside is forbidden without prior authorisation and requires the wearing of a protective suit and mask.

This is the world of Skin, a novel narrated by mother-of-two, marketing executive, Carol. She tells her story in two threads: one which covers the outbreak and survival of the virus; and one in which she examines life in the new isolated world where she can no longer hug her children or feel the sun on her face. A chance sighting of a figure without a protective suit, spotted one day on her neighbourhood watch route, forces Carol to reevaluate the realities of the post-virus world. Skin is a great fun read for the sci-fi enthusiast as you get this double narrative arc of initial survival and then conspiracy. Continue reading Skin by Liam Brown

Ordinary People follows the lives of two couples as they struggle with the difficulties of ordinary, family life.

Melissa and Michael have a new baby and a new house in London. They seem like the perfect couple, but Melissa’s shift to freelance work begins to make her feel trapped in her own home, jealous of the greater freedom her partner, Michael, enjoys.

Damian and Stephanie live in the suburbs, near Stephanie’s parents, with their three children and Damian commutes to London for work. This separation of work and home has built a wedge between Damian and Stephanie that grows when Damian’s father dies, forcing him to reconsider what he is doing with his life.

Damian and Michael are friends from university and this brings the families together, allowing for their experiences of family life to be shared, contrasted and contested. Continue reading Ordinary People by Diana Evans

Edmeé and Pete have never met. They come from separate parts of the globe, but White follows their individual journeys to Antarctica and each other.

Why do you sign up for a job in such freezing conditions if you are not a scientist or adventurer seeking some new discovery? What is it that Edmeé and Pete want from the ice and snow, from the endless whiteness that splits champagne bottles in half and requires constant vigilance against for survival? Continue reading White by Marie Darrieussecq

Set in a fascist Britain, in the not too distant future, two women, Rosa and Teresa, fight to stay alive with some sense of integrity as the nation takes further steps towards totalitarian leadership where all citizens are monitored and given access to education, food and health care on a scale dependant upon their heritage, opinion and behaviour. Continue reading Poster Boy by N. J. Crosskey

I devoured this book (pun intended). The idea of women wanting to gorge themselves and take up more space physically as a precursor to taking it up mentally and socially, is delightfully and annoyingly radical. That pressure for the feminine to be neat, contained, and, if possible, small, quiet and submissive is deliciously subverted by a rowdy supper club where women gorge themselves silly on food, drink and drugs, taking up space with their loud voices, dancing and messy eating. The physical expansion of flesh that ensues is less embarrassing because all the individuals in the group put on weight collectively and celebrate the extra flesh rather than hiding it behind modest outfits and downcast eyes. Continue reading Supper Club by Lara Williams

Set only a couple of years in the future, Asylum is a presentation of the journals of Barry Wilbert James, an inpatient at the Pearson quarantine facility for pulmonary nodulosis in the Great Karoo of the Republic of South Africa. These personal journals, begun two years after his incarceration at the Pearson are interspersed by a preface, notes and marginalia made by Barry and various academics who studied the archives at the Museum of the Plague in South Africa, a museum dedicated to the most serious outbreak of an infectious disease since the peak of the HIV epidemic. Continue reading Asylum by Marcus Low