What to read in March - our choice of the best new books this month
From the Australian Outback to Imperial Russia, families loom large in this month’s reads – plus murder most twisty.
From the Australian Outback to Imperial Russia, families loom large in this month’s reads – plus murder most twisty.
(RRP £20, Doubleday)
The MacBrides are a resilient bunch, farmers on a million-acre sheep station in the punishing climate of Western Australia. When tragedy engulfs them in 1958, the survivors strive to carry on.
But cruel destiny is not done with them yet and, even in vast open spaces, within a close-knit community painful truths must be ferreted out. A decades-spanning epic, ten years in the writing, A Far-Flung Life sees the righteous as the bad guys and the transgressors as the innocents.
From a kangaroo shooter and former prisoner of Japan with a broken, tender heart, to the MacBride siblings burdened with a corrosive secret, Stedman’s characters could walk among us. A classic.
(RRP £18.99, Canongate Books)
English teacher Mr Burman is struggling to come to terms with the accidental death of his popular paragon wife Ada, and to connect with his surly, seething daughter Leila.
Summoned by the police to London, where his brilliant ex-student Raf stands accused of planning to blow up St Paul’s, Mr B fears that he may be implicated.
Your Life Without Me is a subtle ‘empty-chair novel’ in which the absent Ada is ever present.
(RRP £16.99, Doubleday)
In a small coastal town in the US, the Flynn family have been in turmoil since parents Bud and Catherine declared an open marriage (her idea; he’s not best pleased).
Home life is chaos, the three daughters have their own problems, and a sinister local billionaire is up to no good.
A brilliantly bonkers, gut-busting novel by a talented young author who's crafted a farce to be reckoned with. Just look at the cover!
(RRP £16.99, riverrun)
When a young African is burnt to death outside Oxford’s GoHotel, it looks like an open-and-shut case of racist mob violence for the detectives Wilkins – handsome, patrician, London-born Nigerian Ray; and street-smart, intuitive Ryan, resplendent in polyester. But Thames Valley police’s unlikeliest duo are soon neck-deep in mystery.
An electrifying read replete with feints and false leads.
(RRP £25, W&N)
Healer, mystic, holy man or charismatic charlatan, the wild-eyed, womanising, sub-literate Siberian peasant Grigori Rasputin held the last Tsaritsa, Alexandra Feodorovna, in his thrall.
Stabbed, poisoned, shot and shot again, he died (finally) a legend, and now lives again, vividly, in Beevor’s stranger-than-fiction narrative, through which the obdurate, delusional Romanovs sleepwalk to their doom.
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