The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid
British Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and the spellbinding Exit West (2017), reimagines Kafka’s classic The Metamorphosis for our modern, racially charged world.
The Last White Man opens on a Kafkaesque note: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.”
Shocked at this metamorphosis, he punches the mirror that reveals the stranger he has become. At first, he tells only Oona, an old friend who is newly a lover. Soon, reports of similar incidents surface. Some begin to see the long-dreaded overturning of an established order. Fear and worry turn to hoarding and riots.
As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change provides a chance to see one another, face to face, anew. A brilliant, provocative allegory of racial transformation, the novel raises questions of racial and social justice at every turn.
Mercury Pictures Presents, Anthony Marra
Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria Lagana and her mother immigrate to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.
Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War 2, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. As the world descends into madness, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: refugee poets, architects and actors doing what they can to survive.
When a young Italian immigrant turns up at her door, Maria’s past crashes into her present. The Washington Post calls Marra’s work “a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles”. Like his earlier novels, the award-winning A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013) and The Tsar of Love and Techno (2015), this one builds a discrete world and shows how its denizens are shaped and changed by circumstance.
Written with intelligence, wit, and a thrilling sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents pays tribute to life’s bit players.
Haven, Emme Donoghue
In seventh-century Ireland, a time of plague and terror, three men — a scholar and priest called Artt and two monks, young Trian and old Cormac — vow to leave the world behind them.
They set out in a small boat for an island Artt has seen in a dream, with only faith to guide them. He rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, what they find is the extraordinary island now known as Skellig Michael.
Impossibly steep and bare, the island is inhabited by tens of thousands of birds. They claim it for God, but in such a place, what will survival mean? This is a beautiful, haunting story of adventure and survival from the New York Times best-selling author of Room, Emma Donoghue.
Deeply researched, the novel has her characteristic psychological intensity, but this story is like nothing she has written before.
A Map for the Missing, Belinda Huijuan Tang
Maths professor Tang Yitian has been living in America for almost a decade when he receives an urgent phone call from his mother: his father has disappeared from the family’s rural village in China.
Though they have been estranged for years, Yitian promises to come home. Attempting to piece together what may have happened, Yitian struggles to navigate China’s impenetrable bureaucracy as an outsider, and his mother’s evasiveness only deepens the mystery. He seeks out a childhood friend who may be in a position to help.
Tian Hanwen was “sent down” from Shanghai to Yitian’s village as part of the country’s move to get people to live in the rural areas. Young and in love, they dreamed of attending university in the city together. But Hanwen was left behind, resigned to life as a midlevel bureaucrat’s wealthy housewife.
Set between the late 1970s and the 1990s, and moving between rural provinces and big cities, Belinda Huijuan Tang’s debut novel is a multigenerational examination of family and forgiveness, and the meaning of home.
Our Wives Under The Sea, Julia Armfield
Named as a book to look out for in 2022 by The Guardian, Julia Armfied’s debut novel begins with Miri thinking she has her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe.
It soon becomes clear, though, that something has gone wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. Miri can feel Leah slipping from her grasp. Memories of what they had before — the jokes they shared, the films they watched, all the small things that made Leah hers — only remind Miri of what she stands to lose.
Our Wives Under The Sea is a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep.
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