From an offbeat noir by Jonathan Ames to The Dictionary Of Lost Words by Pip Williams, Paul Theroux’s absorbing tale and Rosa Rankin-Gee’s latest, this week’s best new fiction
A Man Named Doll
Jonathan Ames Pushkin Vertigo £8.99
LA gumshoe Happy Doll may have a comical name but there’s only the blackest of humour in this offbeat and powerful slice of contemporary noir. It begins when an old colleague shows up, begging Happy to donate him a kidney.
By the time Happy agrees, it’s too late: his desperate friend has set in motion a series of murders that leads to the most horrific of denouements.
John Williams
Under The Wave At Waimea
Paul Theroux Hamish Hamilton £18.99
Set in Hawaii, Theroux’s latest novel follows a legendary surfer, Joe, who is in the twilight of his career when he kills a vagrant in a drink-driving accident. The starstruck police ask no questions and, chillingly, he is able to shrug off the death until his lover, Olive, awakens his conscience by learning about the victim’s life.
An absorbing tale of self-deception and self-reckoning.
Anthony Cummins
The Dictionary Of Lost Words
Pip Williams Chatto & Windus £14.99
Esme Nicoll is the daughter of alexicographer toiling to assemble the very first Oxford English Dictionary. As she grows up, she secretly collects words that the dictionary men misplace or discard, beginning with ‘bondgirl’.
With the suffragettes on the march and the First World War looming, her efforts come to sum up female experience. Already a bestseller in Williams’s native Australia, this immersive, scrupulously researched debut provides poignant commentary on the ownership of language.
Hephzibah Anderson
Dreamland
Rosa Rankin-Gee Scribner £14.99
A young girl, Chance, moves to Margate with her mother and brother in the near future, paid a cash grant to leave an overcrowded London. Amid drug addiction, violence and climate disasters there is hope and a love story.
Shimmering prose makes the bleakness bearable.
Alex Peake-Tomkinson