After settling down, she wrote short fiction for women's magazines and then graduated to her first novel. On the National Post 's Paperback Fiction Best-Sellers list in 2007, Lawson's second novel, The Other Side of the Bridge, took the number-one spot.

She brilliantly breathes life into Clara, Elizabeth and Liam as they experience losses, which they meet with resilience, making the most of their situations even as they struggle to understand how they've arrived at this point in their lives.

Sally Rooney, who was nominated for the Booker for her 2018 novel Normal People, was overlooked by judges for her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, which is out in September. Damon Galgut’s The Promise (Chatto) sustains the same moral purpose while being funny, angry and absurd all at once. I thought that the Temiskaming Speaker was an imaginary newspaper, created to show the quaint parochialism of Northern Ontario.

Geographical range’ … 2021 Booker prize longlistees (from left clockwise: Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, Richard Powers, Patricia Lockwood, Sunjeev Sahota and Nadifa Mohamed. Ellie Taylor opens up about going back to work after eight weeks of maternity leave: 'Feeling very grateful.In nonfiction, I enjoyed We Need to Talk About Money (Fourth Estate) by Otegha Uwagba, which challenged me to rethink my relationship with my finances and did so in a witty, intelligent and surprisingly touching way.

It has the same kind of feel good message as The Midnight Library, but the plot is probably a bit darker in places. However, the house is in disrepair, and to sell it he needs to spend longer in the aptly named town of Solace. I love how Katie Kitamura can channel a mind and in Intimacies (Vintage) it is the mind of an unnamed interpreter living in The Hague, interpreting for a former president on trial for war crimes. Serena Williams tries to slip into denim Valentino skirt as a 'goal' five months after giving birth. The genius of the author is how she takes the narrative of hatred and discrimination hurled at her and turns it upside down by “going back to where she is from” – the landscapes of the north.We learn quickly that Mrs Orchard and her husband acted as surrogate parents to Liam when he was four but that something happened under their stewardship that led to the boy and his family moving away. A feared assassin, Nena Knight soon finds her latest mission to be her most dangerous as it puts her life and her heart at risk.

As we cycle through these three characters’ perspectives in alternating chapters, we gradually come to understand the connections between them. Mothering Sunday (Scribner) by Graham Swift was not published this year, I know, but was picked up by me at the secondhand stall of Didcot Parkway station. Enter thirtyish Liam Kane, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, where he promptly moves into the house next door–watched suspiciously by astonished and dismayed Clara, whose elderly friend, Mrs. All of Lawson’s creations, even the secondary figures, are dealing with distressing memories or a loss of some kind, the details of which might only emerge much later on.The rigorous questioning of nation and identity, given my incessant preoccupations, made it a truly therapeutic literary meal. It emerges that Liam has recently split up with his high-flying wife, and has resigned from his job as an accountant. An international bestseller and one of The Times' "Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century," Claire Keegan's piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US. Clara’s parents are off-limits to her, as their misery has taken the form of bottling up and explosive recriminations.