Ordinary Human Failings: The heart-breaking, unflinching, compulsive new novel from the author of Acts of Desperation

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Broadcast last year on his podcast, Ellis’s first novel in 13 years melds autobiography and fiction to focus on a group of privileged LA students at risk from a serial killer. the fear of ever being a burden on others and the dread of nobody ever paying attention to him” (125)

The debut novel from a prizewinning essayist considers motherhood, babyhood, caregiving, reading and the creativity of everyday life. From a difficult upbringing in Baltimore to her tumultuous marriage to Will Smith, the actor and talkshow host shares lessons learned. A collection of essays from the 1970s by one of the most influential feminists of the 20th century, gathered together here for the first time.Two young Sarajevans are caught up in the first world war and beyond, in a novel about history’s revolutions and the enduring power of love. One couple’s experiences of love and betrayal in Berlin around the fall of the Wall, from the prize-winning German author. A devastating reflection on 200 years of American gun culture from the acclaimed writer and film-maker. It’s often quoted, but Tolstoys ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ really resonates in this book. And as Carmel says to Tom at one stage The author of How to Do Nothing imagines a future in which we free ourselves from the timetables imposed by the profit motive, and rediscover the pace and rhythms of the pre-industrial world.

A feminist retelling of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, as seen from the perspective of Winston Smith’s lover Julia. There is redemption though for some characters (not all) and it’s of a believable and measured sort.Drawing on a Hong Kong childhood, a new collection from the Costa award winner exploring postcolonialism and queer identity. A no-holds-barred account of what’s gone wrong with modern politics, from the outspoken former Conservative minister.

The poet and painter (daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes) writes of her unlikely love for a magpie that she rescues and rears by hand in the Welsh countryside.

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In this book, a young girl is murdered at a London housing estate, and another young girl in the complex, Lucy, is suspected of having committed the crime. Lucy is taken into questioning, and her family members - her young mother Carmel, her alcoholic uncle Richie, and her detached grandfather John - wait over a stretch of 24 hours in a hotel while she's being detained. During this time, Tom, a reporter, is on a mission to break this story, and speaks with the family members one-on-one to learn more about the events that unfolded, but also about the dynamics of their family. What we get, then, are long sections in the past, giving us pieces to understand how this poor, Irish family ended up in this situation in London.

The Irish author follows her comic debut, Exciting Times, with an ensemble novel about commitment and betrayal set around a wedding.Ordinary Human Failings is a considerably more interesting book than it claims to be. It’s pitched as a procedural thriller of sorts – an unsolved murder, the cops closing in, an ambitious journalist snooping around. While there may be a depressing commercial logic to this framing, it does the novel scant justice; those plot elements amount to little more than a deftly handled framing device. Beyond lies a subtle, accomplished and lyrical study of familial and intergenerational despair, a quiet book about quiet lives. And it also happens to be an excellent novel: politically astute, furious and compassionate. It’s considerably better than Nolan’s first novel, the acclaimed Acts of Desperation – worth stating, given our neophilic literary culture’s obsession with debuts and novelty.