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Library Focus 2024: librarians’ choices
From across the country, librarians share what they are looking forward to and expect to be popular in the coming months.
Stu Hennigan
Senior librarian at Leeds Libraries
I’ve got a great affinity for Calleja. A brilliant translator, a writer of terrific prose, poems, criticism and a musician to boot. I love a writer who never stands still. Hot on the heels of last year’s excellent Vehicle (Prototype), her latest promises “a theory that takes in film, literature, art and the author’s distinct and wholly original intellectual and physical response to the world”.
Crossman was raised in an experimental community in the 1970s as part of a utopian vision seeking alternative models of living. I’ve had a peep at Home Is Where We Start (Penguin Fig Tree) and it’s going to be huge. Devastatingly candid, supremely smart and wide-ranging in its references, but also very accessible.
Out in September, The Mare (Northodox Press) tells the true story of Hermine Braunsteiner, an infamous concentration camp guard in the Second World War, who was the first Nazi to be extradited from the US to West Germany to be tried for war crimes. This exploration of Arendt’s “banality of evil” looks like a terrific statement of intent.
Mary O’Hara is a champion of those in need through her journalism as well as the great work she does in the UK and US with Project Twist-It. Austerity Bites 10 Years On (Policy Press/Bristol Uni Press) explores the effects of Austerity on impoverished communities and gets right to the heart of the matter.
I’ve been a huge fan of Ben Myers ever since finding his little-known novel Richard, based on the life of vanished Manic Street Preachers guitarist Richey Edwards. A technically jaw-dropping writer (and another who should be commended for never writing the same book twice), Rare Singles (Bloomsbury Circus) is about the decayed glamour of east-coast seaside resorts and the unifying power of Northern Soul music. Guaranteed to be a real highlight for me.
Jenny Jones
Head Preparatory School Librarian, Clifton College, Bristol
There will be a queue of excited fans wanting to read Loki: A Bad God’s Guide to Making Enemies (Walker) in the school library this autumn. Stowell’s hilarious, illustrated series about the Norse god of mischief, trickery and deception has quickly become the most popular in the library.
The Bigg series has been such a welcome addition to the library. The concept of telling stories from different members of the same class is a clever idea and Lisa Williamson’s writing shows an understanding of her audience. Jess Bradley’s perfectly pitched illustrations in Secret Crush (Guppy Books) bring extra humour to this warm, enjoyable series.
I first experienced Chris Vick’s compelling storytelling when we shortlisted Girl, Boy, Sea for the Carnegie Award the year I judged it. I can’t wait to get my hands on Shadow Creatures (Bloomsbury/Zephyr), which, as a historical tale set in Nazi-occupied Norway, is an interesting change in direction for him.
I adore Liz Hyder’s beautiful writing and I’ve always loved a time-slip fantasy so I can’t wait to read The Twelve (Pushkin Press), illustrated by the brilliant Tom De Freston. I already have a mental list of the readers of serious fantasy that I’ll lend it to first so that we can discuss it.
Large, heavily illustrated non-fiction titles brimming with facts, figures and information are pored over by children reading in the library, so I’m looking forward to giving them Amazing Asia: An Encyclopedia of an Epic Continent (Wide Eyed Editions) written by non-fiction writing legend Rashmi Sirdeshepande and stunningly illustrated by Jason Lyon.
Adam Bayfield
Head of Marketing & Customer Services, Guille-Allès Library
People here in Guernsey will be excited to read Honey Bee (HarperCollins), the new book by one of the island’s most celebrated daughters, Dawn O’Porter. The novel returns readers to Renée and Flo, protagonists of her first two books Paper Aeroplanes and Goose.
I have a complicated relationship with Murakami, but when he’s good, he’s extremely good—and his new novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (Harvill Secker) sounds very much up the street of librarians, booksellers and book lovers everywhere. It’s Murakami’s first novel in six years, and we’re bound to see a run on reservations in our library.
After the runaway success of The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins could publish her shopping list and it would be one of the most anticipated books of the year—but The Blue Hour (Doubleday) looks considerably more exciting than that. When a bone at the centre of a famous sculpture is revealed to be human, three people on a Scottish tidal island are pitched into a nightmare.
Sally Rooney is one of the most acclaimed novelists of our time, and one of the most popular, too, with Normal People in particular appearing routinely on our end-of-year “most borrowed” lists. Her new novel, Intermezzo (Faber), is set in Dublin and follows brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek, 10 years apart in age and with little in common, but brought back into each other’s lives in the wake of their father’s death.
The smash success of the “Big Little Lies” TV adaptation won hordes of new readers for Liane Moriarty—so when a new book of hers comes out, it’s a big deal. Here One Moment (Penguin Michael Joseph) concerns a group of strangers whose lives begin to unravel when they each step into the path of a mysterious woman who claims to be a clairvoyant.
Charlotte Geater
Libraries officer at Hackney Central Library
Can’t wait for what promises to be a nuanced and searching look at fandom in the age of both the megastar and the global reckoning with the abuses and exploitations that fame and fandom often permit. Kisuule is a wonderful poet, so I have high hopes of her non-fiction début, Neverland (Canongate).
Having had a sneaky look at the first page of a proof copy of The Strangers (Hamish Hamilton) by Ekow Eshun, I can’t stop thinking about the imaginative prose, the internal lives conjured and written back into history. This is going to be monumental.
In The Empusium (Fitzcarraldo Editions) we have a horror novel by Nobel-winner Olga Tokarczuk set in a health resort in an outer range of the Carpathian mountains in Poland, just before the eve of the Second World War. I’m ready to swoon.
Innovative contemporary poetry looking at family and loss, and how the British medical system can fail and degrade us. The Pharmacy (The87Press) is Kat Sinclair’s second collection, and I can’t wait to read through and see how it builds on the work in her début from a few years ago.
Comparisons to Kafka, Lewis Carroll and Donald Barthelme? A strong showing for “uncanny domestic spaces”? I am so pleased to be seeing more work in translation from Latin America, and this début collection of stories, The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine (And Other Stories) by Mario Levrero seems perfectly aimed at my tastes.
Sarah Harding
Development librarian at Kirklees Libraries
I first read Rivers of London 10 years ago and I’ve loved the series ever since. The books have a special library link for me, too—three colleagues and I have been to several signings over the years as a group. I love the world Ben Aaronovitch has created, and the thought that’s gone into it, and the release of The Masquerades of Spring (Orion) is something I impatiently look forward to.
I’ve enjoyed H G Parry’s other books, particularly The Shadow Histories, both volumes of which I devoured. I love the way her books have different settings (modern-day New Zealand, an alternative history of the 18th century), all of them compelling, so I’m hoping to immerse myself in The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door (Orbit).
I loved his earlier book, A Master of Djinn, which, in addition to being a hugely entertaining adventure set in a steampunk Cairo, also explores aspects of class, status, myth and colonialism. The Dead Cat Tail Assassins (Tor Books) has a fantastic cover and the premise sounds intriguing (undead assassins? Yes, please).
Days of Shattered Faith (Head of Zeus) is the third in Tchaikovsky’s The Tyrant Philosophers series, set in a rich and detailed world, which I was introduced to when Adrian Tchaikovsky spoke at the Cosmia Festival in Huddersfield last year. I love the way the books make me think and pay attention.
T L Huchu’s The Edinburgh Nights series comprises some of my favourite books, with a determined, compelling and engaging main character. The Legacy of Anniston House (Tor Books) weaves Zimbabwean magic, Scottish history, science and philosophy in a dystopian alternate history.
