“The sun, the earth, love, friends”: New fiction picks

Welcome to this month’s selection of newly-acquired general fiction titles. As always, we have lined up a rich banquet of diverse titles that hopefully will appeal to every taste and pallet. First up in this month’s delicious platter of titles we have Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library,  a dark and rich satire on the very topical and important issue of book censorship.

Our next menu choice is Nothing Belongs to You by Nathacha  Appanah-Mouriquand; a delicate and sad offering about loneliness and grief. Yukiko Tominaga’s See: loss. see also: love : is a novel with comic overtones that  is set between the worlds of Japan and San Francisco. Pulizer prize winner Jane Smiley serves up her latest novel Lucky, a story circling round a folk musician’s rise to fame. Jane Smiley is widely regarded as one of America’s finest modern writers and we are thrilled to see a new work from her.

Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang is a tender tale of gay love and cinema. Long Island by Colm Tóibín is the long awaited sequel to Brooklyn. As with all of his books, Long Island features a rich concoction of characters, places and dramatic elements. The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods is a magical realism novel about a mysterious bookshop in Dublin.

Our final pick is Under the Paper Moon by Shaina Steinberg. Shaina is probably currently better known as a television and film writer.  This, her debut novel, is a thrilling romantic spy romp set in L.A.  in the late 1940s. It is in the vein of the movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith or Dashiell Hammett’sThe Thin Man’s series of novels and films.

• The book censor’s library / Al-Essa, Bothayna
• Nothing belongs to you / Appanah-Mouriquand, Nathacha
• See: loss. see also: love : a novel / Tominaga, Yukiko
• Lucky / Smiley, Jane
• Cinema love : a novel / Tang, Jiaming
• Long Island / Tóibín, Colm
• The lost bookshop / Woods, Evie
• Under the paper moon / Steinberg, Shaina