Until August by Gabriel García Márquez (12 March)
Márquez, best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude, was working on this novel towards the end of his life while struggling with dementia but decided it should not be published. Almost ten years after his death, his sons have decided to release this ‘lost novel’ posthumously, stating that “Until August was the result of our father’s last effort to continue creating against all odds”. Until August trails a woman who, every year, visits the island where her mother is buried. It has been described as a “profound meditation on freedom, regret, and the mysteries of love, from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.”
You Are Here by David Nicholls (23 April)
With the recent TV adaptation of his novel One Day, 2024 is set to be a big year for Nicholls. His new novel You Are Here follows two lost characters, Marnie and Michael, as they are brought together on coastal walks. Nicholls has been labelled as “a writer going from strength to strength” and You Are Here has been hailed as “another classic”.
Parade by Rachel Cusk (6 June)
The author of the Outline trilogy delivers an unsteadying tour of art, family, morality, and gender. Parade follows a catalogue of lives including an artist who starts to paint upside down and a woman attacked on a Parisian street. Cusk augments the possibilities of fiction, bypassing the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a story that “reaches a kind of formal perfection”.
Knife by Salman Rushdie (16 April)
In his memoir Knife, Rushdie relives the moment he was stabbed in August 2022 as he was about to give a lecture in New York. Rushdie has said “this was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art”. Knife promises to be urgently honest and a reminder of the role of literature in making sense of the inconceivable.
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing (2 May)
Laing, author of The Lonely City, returns with an investigation into the “shocking cost of making paradise on earth”. She moves through real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to Derek Jarman’s creation in Dungeness. Inspired by the process of restoring a walled garden in Suffolk in 2020, The Garden Against Time has been described as “an enthralling book about creation, world-making, and communion”.
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