World Literature

Layla

Nina De La Mer
@scarydelamarey
Myriad Editions
February 2014

Myriad Editions is claiming Nina De La Mer’s new novel is a Bright Lights, Big City [Jay McInerney] for a modern day urban population seduced by celebrity, warped by pornography and fuelled by designer drinks and drugs. De La Mer’s novel of a lap-dancing London newcomer is told in the same pulsating second person narrative of Bright Lights and already counts The Herald and Alan Bissett as fans.

The Madness of July

James Naughtie
@naughtiej
Head of Zeus
February 2014

Most famous for co-presenting Radio 4’s Today programme and his pronunciation of Jeremy Hunt, James Naughtie switches off the microphone and picks up the pen for this, his debut novel. Drawing on his intimate experience of politics on both sides of the pond, Naughtie has set his sophisticated thriller in mid-1970s Cold War London during an unusual heatwave.

The Forever Girl

The beloved, bestselling author focuses on love in his latest novel. Growing up in a community of ex-pats on the Cayman Islands, Clover's love for her childhood sweetheart James is severely tested when Clover leaves for another paradise, Scotland, and James moves to England to attend boarding schools a border apart.

The Illuminations

The secrets we keep from the ones we love is a theme that runs through O'Hagan's fifth novel. An inter-generational tale of modern war, memory and the complications of fact it promises to add another tale of emotional depth to the twice Booker-nominated author's impressive catalogue.

The Dead Beat

Anyone whose missed their bus stop or train staition to read 'just one more chapter' of Johnstone's addictive, previous fistful of novels will be chomping at the bit to devour his sixth, The Dead Beat, this spring. When a tragedy reawakens journalist Martha's past, she sets of on a frantic search around modern Edinburgh for answers of what fate befell her parents in the alternative music scene of the early nineties.