Fiction
Historical delights
Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton) kicks off a strong season for historical fiction. Also in September, AK Blakemore follows her acclaimed The Manningtree Witches with a darkly exuberant novel about one man’s insatiable hunger. Set in revolutionary France, The Glutton (Granta) is inspired by contemporary reports of a peasant who would eat anything, from dead rats to forks; and explores poverty, desire and social chaos in thrilling prose. Look out too for Lauren Groff’s wilderness-survival novel The Vaster Wilds (Hutchinson Heinemann), set in colonial America, as an English servant girl goes on the run in a strange new land; and the epic North Woods by Daniel Mason (John Murray), focusing on one patch of New England soil over four centuries and weaving a Cloud Atlas-style narrative of humanity under pressure and nature under threat.
