Dream Count isbilled as “a publishing event 10 years in the making”. Composed of the interlocking stories of four women, Chiamaka (“Chia”), Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou, it is also quintessential Adichie: ambitious, astute and powered by an accumulation of feather-light sentences that build to devastating weight.
The women are immigrants in the US. Chia, a travel writer, Zikora, a lawyer, and Omelogor, a former banker turned grad student, are Nigerian; Kadiatou, a hotel maid, is Guinean. Chia’s first-person narration establishes the novel’s melancholic tone: “I have always longed to be known,” she declares in the opening line, “truly known, by another human being.” Driven to reminiscing about past lovers during the Covid lockdowns, she passes her time “grieving what I did not even know to be true, that there was someone out there who had passed me by, who might not just have loved me but truly known me”. Her story gives way to Zikora’s, who is desperately trying to track down the boyfriend who abandoned her following a surprise pregnancy and whose own story morphs, with a sting of surprising sweetness, into a paean to the pull of motherhood. The narrative is then riven by the tragedy of Kadiatou’s story before being overtaken by Omelogor’s musings about her dissolute lifestyle in Abuja prior to quitting her high-flying career to undertake postgraduate research on pornography.
The novel threads together childbirth and pregnancy loss, abortions and hysterectomies, fibroids and female genital mutilation, sexual assault and sexual harassment, as if nothing less than the whole of female experience is within its scope. Yet at the same time it is painfully introspective, not only because it is set against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic, a built-in reminder of “how breakable we all are”, but also because it includes many moments – such as when, pondering one of her breakups, Chia muses about “how quickly mystery dissolves to dust” – in which one senses the subliminal gesture towards deeper traumas, the feeling of unbearable confinement alongside floating alienation, the hermetic numbness with which many of us experience grief. Sara Collins
Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star cycle may turn out to be even larger in scope than his six-volume autofictional bestseller, My Struggle. Four books deep, this gargantuan work of supernatural existentialism is an unsettling account of the occult phenomena that attend the appearance in the sky of a bright new star. Mysteries from the first three volumes include: who killed the musicians in the forest? What’s going on with the local wildlife? Why does no one seem to be dying any more? By the end of The School of Night, the most burning question may sound comparatively mundane: who is Kristian Hadeland?
Scattered references appeared in the saga’s first 2,000 pages. Kristian Hadeland was the 67-year-old man buried without mourners by doubting priest Kathrine Reinhardsen in The Morning Star (2021). In The Third Realm (2024), he was the sinister chap hitching a lift with Kathrine’s husband after the unloved man she buried is supposed to have died.
The School of Night offers another answer. Here, Kristian Hadeland is the author of a 500-page suicide note, and the misanthropic narrator of a compellingly nasty novel. From the remote Norwegian island where he’s preparing to end his life, Kristian sets down the story of how he got there, starting with his time as a photography student in mid-1980s London.
Young Kristian has a good eye and self-belief, even if – as a visiting professor suggests – his photos are “a bit dull. Without temperament.” Soon after arriving from Norway, he meets the enigmatic Hans, a Dutch artist into artificial intelligence, and Vivian, who is staging a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; he develops an uneasy friendship with the former and a hostile sexual relationship with the latter.
When Kristian is home for Christmas, he’s antagonistic towards his family, too. After his sister overdoses, he hears his father describing him as “a black hole … a narcissist, through and through”. Outraged, he returns to London, retreating into himself. Then a chance encounter with a homeless man sets Kristian on a path from near ruin to staggering glory.
Intimations of the supernatural give the saga much of its momentum and uncanny frisson. But can the mystery be indefinitely sustained? A lot is riding on Knausgård’s ability to deliver on the colossal promise of this sprawling epic. But for readers with the stomach, patience and faith to keep going, this work of millenarian fiction remains an object of fascination. Charles Arrowsmith
Lockwood contracted Covid early, in March of 2020, when transmission was blamed on grotty fingers and every doorknob was suspect – the era of fruit bleaching and handwashing jingles. Will There Ever Be Another You is the tale of what happened next, inflicted on a fictional Patricia: aphasia, hallucination, migraines, amnesia, paranoia, relentless self-obliteration.
The result is cortical shrapnel – you can almost hear this book rattle when you open it. Lockwood’s title carries no question mark: it is prayer, punchline, eulogy, manifesto, nightmare, often all at once. Fragmentation is not a new mode for Lockwood (she was christened, after all, “the poet laureate of Twitter”). But it is one thing to disrupt, another to be disrupted. There is a new kind of anguish here, a longing for coherence.
The opening pages are where she comes closest. Hollowed by the loss of a child, an American family travels through Scotland, kept afloat by “pure itinerary”. A precious item is lost. Shortly afterwards, our heroine slips into fever. The treasure is returned; her mind is not. It feels like a dark enchantment, a faerie bargain. “It stole people from themselves.” Lockwood writes of her illness. “You might look the same to others, but you had been replaced.”
Delirium reigns. We wheel from Roland Barthes to Cabbage Patch Kids, via Anna Karenina and the “butthole cut of Cats” (classic Lockwood territory). But there’s a drum of obsession beating underneath the chaos. Doppelgangers, changelings, clones, dolls; photographs and synonyms – these pages teem with replicants and replication. The modus operandi of a virus.
Lockwood’s detonated form is evocative, but not especially innovative (Eimear McBride was doing a version of it more than a decade ago in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing). We need accounts of long Covid, and plenty more of them. But Will There Ever Be Another You feels auteurish, the literary equivalent of a Wes Anderson film: over-styled and perilously close to self-parody. A delirious in-joke. Beejay Silcox
In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, Cora, a millennial mother, craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who is “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up (yes, that’s his job title. They all have absurd jobs). The book presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. I’d call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex. Honestly, I couldn’t put it down.
Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, I wondered what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures?
I loved this razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed at ourselves, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is. Dina Nayeri
Shteyngart’s sixth novel is a lively, skittish Bildungsroman, shading towards darkness as it tracks the journey – literal, educational, emotional – of 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, an overanxious, over-watchful academic high achiever whose run of straight As has just been blighted by a B.
Always happy to show his workings, Shteyngart cites Henry James’s 1897 novel What Maisie Knew as the prompt for Vera, or Faith’s child’s-eye account of complicated adult affairs, although his gauche heroine bears a passing resemblance to the author himself as portrayed in his 2014 memoir, Little Failure. Friendless Vera lives with her rackety Russian-Jewish father, Igor (Shteyngart’s name at birth), who edits a floundering liberal arts magazine, her harried Wasp stepmother, Anne (who added the “e” in tribute to Anne Frank), and a boisterous younger half-brother, Dylan, who likes exposing himself to houseguests. But she also has (or possibly had) a Korean-born mother, long since vanished from the scene. Invisible Iris Choi plays the tale’s white whale or MacGuffin; the elusive hidden figure that Vera is determined to locate.
The eccentric Bradford-Shmulkins are lurching towards crisis, but they seem a model of stability when compared with the rest of the country, which reveals itself in unflattering flashes in the corners of the narrative. Shteyngart’s novel, we come to realise, plays out a decade from now, in a “post-democracy” USA where red state officials monitor menstrual cycles, self-driving cars shop their owners to the feds and the news platforms are abuzz with Russian disinformation.
Shteyngart’s ode to a good American in a bad America conspires to be, by turns, a rueful human comedy and a coming-of-age caper, a dystopian chiller and an espionage yarn. The colourful tale never satisfyingly hangs together; its component pieces tend to jar more than gel. But Shteyngart sets about his material with abundant energy and charm. He sketches a convincing caricature of a near-future USA and provides a stoical heroine that we can uncomplicatedly root for. Even in a degraded, compromised, up-is-down social climate, that has to be deserving of a solid B grade at least. Xan Brooks
“Middle East on Fire: Israel positions tanks on Gaza border.” Journalist Phoebe Greenwood’s debut novel follows Sara Byrne, a freelance journalist in Gaza in 2012, who is reporting for a “pretty rightwing” British newspaper.
Vulture is a caustic study of what it means to report from a conflict, and particularly relevant to the current moment. It’s a knowing portrait by Greenwood, who was a freelance reporter in Jerusalem between 2010 and 2013, and later a foreign affairs correspondent at this newspaper. Her antiheroine visits a morgue, where the bodies of children, “dusted in sand and blood”, wear torn Spider-Man pyjamas. She narrowly escapes a bombed hospital, which is “running out of anaesthetic and even basic painkillers”. Still, her editor requires stories, and so she pursues increasingly dangerous lines of inquiry.
The title of the book is testament to its wry tone, and ultimately its position. In Byrne, Greenwood has created a particularly acerbic character, reluctant or perhaps unable to offer sincere emotions in the face of horrifying events. Her battle-weary sense of humour, however, cannot last, and Byrne’s mental state becomes increasingly unstable. She believes a bird – identified as a pigeon, but described more like a vulture – is tormenting her. Her eyes are yellow; she winces with pain when she walks. Greenwood handles this descent well; the narration remains jocular, even arrogant, meaning it never feels hackneyed.
Occasionally, Greenwood’s creative writing feels less successful than the news writing within it: the protagonist’s filed copy is sometimes clearer than the prose itself. But Vulture remains a remarkably skilful debut. Greenwood’s style is compelling and blackly comic; the story could not be more serious. Sophie Dickinson
Ambivalence towards working life is the subject of this tremendously entertaining debut novel. “I only come into the office to lower my air-conditioning bill,” says 32-year-old Marisa. She’s “head of creative strategy” in a Madrid ad agency. “That’s a big deal,” says a friend. “No,” Marisa replies, “it just sounds like one.” She kills time between projects by posting trolling comments on dismal YouTube videos. Eventually she faces the worst horror of all: a team-building retreat, which she ends up dealing with in a masterfully perverse way. There’s pain underlying her quips (“No one knows who I really am”), but her story is peppered with pithy insights into the modern workplace, and plenty of vivid characters, such as the friend who’s “had work done”. “I’m filled with plastic,” she tells Marisa. “I’m the Atlantic Ocean.” John Self
Toon’s second novel is set in St Rule, a Scottish coastal town with distinct similarities to St Andrews. In 2023, Cameron returns home on Christmas Eve; meeting old friends revives memories of his teenage crush, former classmate Joanie, last seen 10 years earlier at a calamitous end-of-schooldays party. His attempts to find her are met with vagueness, evasion and, finally, warnings off. A second narrative strand takes us back to 2013, and the 18-year-old Joanie. Adrift after her discovery that her boyfriend is cheating on her has ruined their plan for a year abroad, she falls in with an older couple. David and Erin welcome her, make her feel important and seem, for a while at least, to have all the answers. Skilfully handled themes of guilt, regret and adolescent confusion coupled with dark academia make for an insidious tingle of doom, although the rushed ending may leave some readers feeling shortchanged. Laura Wilson
The Eleventh Hour, a collection of five stories, seems intended as a kind of coda to Rushdie’s career. The stories are death-haunted. One of them is called Late; it’s an afterlife fantasy in which a Cambridge fellow, whose career has resembled both EM Forster’s (writing a great novel about India) and Alan Turing’s (helping to crack the Enigma code), dies and haunts a young Indian student named Rosa; what links them may be the buried crimes of empire. The Musician of Kahani replays Rushdie’s greatest hits: it is about a child born at midnight (“the approved hour for miraculous births in our part of the world”) who, aged four, abruptly becomes a gifted pianist (like the rock star Ormus Cama in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, playing air guitar in his cradle).
These stories are entertaining but not particularly strong. The Musician of Kahana leans pretty heavily on cliche: “the university of life”, “priceless art”, “finger on the pulse”, “the wedding of the year” … In the South is better: a deft, moving anecdote about two old men in Mumbai who bicker and needle one another from their respective verandas. One of them, Junior, dies in an accident. The other, Senior, despairs, until he comes to believe that “death and life were just adjacent verandas”. Oklahoma invokes Kafka; it is a metafiction about a young Indian writer and the older American novelist he admires, or perhaps more than admires – in cases of literary influence, the story seems to ask, who is writing whom?
“Our words fail us,” goes the final sentence of The Eleventh Hour. It is the conclusion of a story about a piazza – a public space – in which language, here figured as a human woman, is courted, usurped, ignored. Finally she screams and vanishes, at which point, the piazza’s buildings all crack: “The piazza is broken, and so, perhaps, are we.” Words have not yet failed Salman Rushdie, even if, in this self-consciously late book, the spectacular originality of his novelistic peak sounds more as an echo than as an urgently present voice. Kevin Power
First, Frankly takes us back to a council flat in the former mining village of Dreghorn, Ayrshire. There, a young Nicola identified with tomboyish George from the Famous Five, worried constantly about her dad joining the swelling ranks of the unemployed, and broke up with her primary school best friend because she wanted to spend more time on her homework. She identifies the fundamental contradiction that would propel her: “Alongside shyness, crippling lack of confidence and a dreadful fear of failure was a burning ambition, a drive to succeed, a craving to be ‘seen’.”
There are some moments of bracing honesty. She reveals she came close to having a breakdown after giving evidence at the UK Covid inquiry. I can’t think of another politician of her stature who’d describe themselves on the floor of their home office, gripped by a panic attack as they struggled to edit a crucial policy document – in this case the Scottish government’s white paper on independence. And a lengthy passage on her pregnancy loss, in which she writes about her lingering guilt and shares the name she had chosen for the baby, Isla, is almost unbearably intimate.
It’s startling to read her account of the tension and hostility she claims characterised her relationship with Alex Salmond long before the public split that resulted from her government’s handling of sexual harassment allegations made against him by two civil servants. (These later formed part of his criminal trial on 13 counts of sexual assault, of which he was acquitted in March 2020.)
At one point, Sturgeon observes that “whenever a man is alleged to have done something wrong some people’s first instinct is to find a woman to blame”. Right enough, but there are also legitimate questions about how someone in a position of power and leadership could be so ignorant of someone as close to her as Salmond was. Neither does she explain why the women who brought the original harassment complaints against Salmond described being left without any support by the Scottish government she led.
She fails to reflect on how having a married couple at the very top of the SNP for more than a decade impacted the party, encouraging the apparently lax governance so many colleagues complained about. Nor does she address the lack of succession planning for her eventual departure. Despite the book’s promise of candour, it seems like Sturgeon is only willing to entertain her readers’ curiosity so far. Libby Brooks
The first chapter of Elizabeth Gilbert’s much anticipated new memoir closes on a four-page love letter to Gilbert from her late partner Rayya, who, dead for five years, comes to her in a “visitation”. In Rayya’s voice, Gilbert calls herself babe, baby, or “sunshine baby” multiple times, emotes in all-caps, and grants herself permission to write the details of Rayya’s terrible, humiliating final year. “Let me just look at you for a minute,” “Rayya” says to Liz. “Look at your little rainbow eyes! Look at your sparkling tears! You’re so beautiful!” The letter is deeply self-indulgent and excruciating to read. “You’re going all the fucking way this time – all the way to the enlightenment.”
I believe that the dead are gone and that artists don’t need their permission to evoke them. But I was stunned that this solipsistic mess opens the book, because Gilbert is a terrific storyteller – Eat Pray Love, her memoir of self-acceptance and healing, was read by millions. So, I scrubbed the false start from my mind, reminding myself that great literature shows people as they are, which means that at some point in every good memoir, we should see the narrator being awful.
Even so, it takes discipline and restraint not to let one’s flaws harm the writing – restraint that it appears Gilbert no longer has. All through the book, she reminds us of Eat Pray Love’s success and tries to echo and relive what she learned back then: that she’s addicted to love, but she can thrive alone if she has her spiritual and creative practices.
But the prose is clunky (“an unhealed wound looking for someone to land on”) and full of preposterous flourishes, such as when an imagined Rayya says, in a poem at the end of the book: “I love it when you talk about me: it polishes me like a diamond.”
As a storyteller she shines brightest when she’s not curating, but displaying her mistakes, and mourning them. “I tried to drain all the love from Rayya into me before she died … I became a vampire”. And when, instead of simply emoting, she sits down to craft a scene, she writes transportingly. The last days of Rayya’s life, in a house with two of her exes, are funny, propulsive, raw and moving – Gilbert forgetting about herself to help her partner, who’s alone and helpless and terrified to die. Dina Nayeri
Andrea Long Chu stands accused of not playing by the rules, of appraising works of fiction as if they were essays or confessions rather than aesthetic objects. “It is true that I tend to treat a novel like an argument”, she writes in the introduction to Authority, a collection of essays and reviews published between 2018 and 2023 in outlets such as N+1, Bookforum and New York Magazine. Chu – who won a Pulitzer prize for criticism in 2023 – believes “all novels refract the veiled subjectivity of their authors”, and to pretend otherwise is to indulge a “pernicious form of commodity fetishism”. In her reviews, books betray their authors, invariably revealing some kernel of inadequacy – be it immaturity, myopia or just terminal dullness.
This approach borders on the psychoanalytical, and makes for fun reading. Chu diagnoses a case of “Munchausen by proxy” in Hanya Yanagihara, whose bestselling novels A Little Life (2015) and To Paradise (2022) are powered by “the misery principle”: “horrible things happen to people for no reason”, and the author is “a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health”. She notes a troubling tendency towards “infantile” idealisation of mothers and girlfriends in Tao Lin’s autofiction, and finds “something deeply juvenile” about the scatological motifs in Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels. Moshfegh’s medieval gore-fest Lapovona (2022), fails to shock, because “You cannot épater le bourgeois without an actual bourgeoisie”; “the leading coprophile of American letters” is trying too hard to convince us she’s not a prude.
These essays are essentially journeys – knotty and meandering, with moments of pithy, clarifying insight. If you can hold someone’s interest while figuring things out for yourself in real time on the page, you’re doing something right. Perhaps the true source of authority is companionable intelligence, and what we think of as sound judgment is just a function of familiarity – comfort in another person’s psychic skin. Houman Barekat
At 83, Werner Herzog is a living legend who can and does do precisely what he wants.Like the strange, enchanting films for which he is best known, Herzog’s seventh book defies the usual conventions of structure, narrative arc and the delineation of fact from fiction, even as it addresses the very subject of truth.
This slim volume sets out Herzog’s views on truth in a world where technologically enhanced falsehoods proliferate. These appear to be an elaboration of Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration, the 12 statements he made in 1999 at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis. Much like the declaration, The Future of Truth contains strong, gnomic opinions which include despising cinéma vérité because it obscures more than it illuminates, as well as a plethora of surprising sentences such as “rather die than wear a toupee”.
Two principles are central to Herzog’s idea of truth. First is the notion that seeking truth is a greater goal than finding it. As he puts it, “the quest itself, bringing us nearer to the unrevealed truth, allows us to participate in something inherently unattainable, which is truth”. The second is that bare facts can provide little more than a boring “accountant’s truth” that is less useful than what he calls “ecstatic truth” in helping people understand what’s really going on in life.
If anyone else had written The Future of Truth, I suspect they would come under critical fire for odd choices in structure, rambling, contradictory statements, and, to put it bluntly, taking the piss out of the reader. After all, Herzog devotes five whole pages to the histrionic plot of an opera just to demonstrate that when art forms contain concentrated, intense emotion, we “invest this preposterous kernel with the full array of our own feeling, so that it seems mysteriously genuine”. However, because this book is a collection of uniquely Herzogian mindfarts, it resists a panning. Michael Hofmann’s sparkling and inventive translation from the original German – a crypto-zoologist is described as “a ham sandwich short of a picnic” – somehow makes Herzog more Herzog in tone. Farrah Jarral
Notable New Paperbacks to Read in August by Adichie, Rushdie, and Herzog
20 Ağustos 2026The Guardian
The Guardian highlights notable new paperback releases for August, featuring works from acclaimed authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Salman Rushdie, and Werner Herzog. Adichie's 'Dream Count' explores the lives of immigrant women in the U.S., while Knausgård's 'The School of Night' delves into existential the…
Lockwood's 'Will There Ever Be Another You' addresses the impact of COVID-19 on personal identity, and Herzog's 'The Future of Truth' challenges the nature of truth in a world of misinformation.
August marks a significant time for literary releases, as many readers seek engaging titles for summer reading. The highlighted books not only entertain but also provoke thought on pressing social issues, making them timely additions to any reading list.
This month's selections reflect a diverse range of themes, from the introspective struggles of women navigating personal and societal challenges to the philosophical inquiries into truth and existence. The prominence of immigrant narratives and the exploration of contemporary issues like COVID-19 highlight the evolv…
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