Books of the month for January

General Fiction:  Charlotte Wood – The Natural Way of Things

A horror parable about a group of women who awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned and forced to do hard labour. Powerfully explores contemporary misogyny and corporate control.

British Crime: Andrew Martin – The Yellow Diamond

India, 1923. On the broiling Night Mail from Calcutta to Jamalpur, a man is shot dead in a first class compartment. Detective Inspector Jim Stringer was sleeping in the next compartment along. Was he the intended target?

Tough Crime: Tim Baker – Fever City

Nick Alston, a Los Angeles private investigator, is hired to find the kidnapped son of America's richest and most hated man. Hastings, a mob hitman in search of redemption, is also on the trail. But both men soon become ensnared by a sinister cabal that spreads from the White House all the way to Dealey Plaza.Decades later in Dallas, Alston's son stumbles across evidence from JFK conspiracy buffs that just might link his father to the shot heard round the world. Violent, vivid, visceral: Fever City is a high-octane, nightmare journey through a Mad Men-era America of dark powers, corruption and conspiracy.

Fantasy: V. E. Schwab – A Darker Shade of Magic (#1)

Most people only know one London; but what if there were several? Kell is one of the last Travelers – magicians with a rare ability to travel between parallel Londons. There's Grey London, dirty and crowded and without magic, home to the mad king George III. There's Red London, where life and magic are revered.Then, White London, ruled by whoever has murdered their way to the throne. But once upon a time, there was Black London…

Science Fiction: Stephen Baxter – Proxima

The very far future: The Galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, chill white dwarfs. The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous Galaxy-spanning intelligence each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light…

The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun - and (in this fiction), the nearest to host a world, Proxima IV, habitable by humans. But Proxima IV is unlike Earth in many ways. Huddling close to the warmth, orbiting in weeks, it keeps one face to its parent star at all times. The 'substellar point', with the star forever overhead, is a blasted desert, and the 'antistellar point' on the far side is under an ice cap in perpetual darkness. How would it be to live on such a world?

Yuri Jones, with 1,000 others, is about to find out …

Paranormal/Urban Fantasy: Ari Marmell – Hot Lead, Cold Iron (Mick Oberon Job No. 1)

First novel in a new fantasy detective series. In 1930s Chicago supernatural detective Mick Oberon must wade through Fae politics and mob power struggles to find a kidnapper in a particularly weird case.

Teen: Katherine Webber – Wing Jones

For fans of David Levithan, Jandy Nelson and Rainbow Rowell: a sweeping story about love and family from an exceptional new voice in YA. With a grandmother from China and another from Ghana, fifteen-year-old Wing Jones is often caught between worlds. But when tragedy strikes, Wing discovers a talent for running she never knew she had. Wing's speed could bring her family everything it needs. It could also stop Wing getting the one thing she wants.

Classic: J. G. Ballard – High-Rise

A film tie-in edition of this compelling and unnerving tale of what happens when life in a luxury apartment building descends into chaos.

Non-Fiction: William Finnegan – Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY 2016
WINNER OF THE 2016 WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE

Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way of life.

William Finnegan first started surfing as a young boy in California and Hawaii. Barbarian Days is his immersive memoir of a life spent travelling the world chasing waves through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa and beyond. Finnegan describes the edgy yet enduring brotherhood forged among the swell of the surf; and recalling his own apprenticeship to the world's most famous and challenging waves, he considers the intense relationship formed between man, board and water.

Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, a social history, an extraordinary exploration of one man's gradual mastering of an exacting and little-understood art. It is a memoir of dangerous obsession and enchantment.

Short Story Collection: Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Collected Stories

"Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel García Márquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo's revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings. Teeming with the magical oddities for which his novels are loved, Márquez's stories are a delight. Gabriel García Márquez 's Collected Stories are re-issued on Gabriel García Márquez 's birthday to celebrate the publication of his books as ebooks for the first time."