February 2026 Books

What’s new and good to read? Dan Coombes has a look at what’s on offer from publishers in February and chooses Departure(S) by Julian Barnes,  The Killing Time by Elly Griffith, and Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

Departure(S) – Julian Barnes

It wouldn’t be right not to mention this one, really. Across the best part of fifty years, Booker Prize winning Julian Barnes has become a revered and beloved author, and insists that this is going to be his very last book. He often tackles sombre subjects very movingly, but that finality makes this one particularly bittersweet, and he’s most definitely bowing out on a high.

Departure(s) is the story of a man called Stephen and a woman called Jean, who fall in love when they are young and again when they are old. It is the story of an elderly Jack Russell called Jimmy, enviably oblivious to his own mortality.

It is also the story of how the body fails us, whether through age, illness, accident or intent. And it is the story of how experiences fade into anecdotes, and then into memory. Does it matter if what we remember really happened? Or does it just matter that it mattered enough to be remembered? It begins at the end of life – but it doesn’t end there.

Ultimately, it’s about the only things that ever really mattered: how we find happiness in this life, and when it is time to say goodbye.

Departure(S) front cover,  Author Julian Barnes

The Killing Time – Elly Griffith

Not content with a mere thirty seven novels in seventeen years, three critically acclaimed adult crime series (crime with archaeology, crime with magicians, crime with authors) and a highly successful children’s one (crime at school) to boot, last year Elly Griffifth decided to start a fourth series, with crime and time travel.

The really disgraceful thing about all of this is that she’s consistently really, really good at it. Engaging mysteries and satisfying twists and turns, warmth, humour, and relatably normal time travellers and magicians that people tend to fall in love with.

The Killing Time is her second book to feature Ali Dawson – the head of a cold case team that can secretly travel back in time to help solve cases, who despite a ban on doing so after a bit of a to-do in the last book, finds herself embroiled in ever-increasing amounts of trouble after completely innocently just slightly meddling with the time/space continuum to help out her cat Terry.

Join Ali Dawson and her cold case team for another thrilling case. Ali Dawson is a police detective who leads a unit that investigates cases so cold her team must travel to the distant past to solve them. But Ali and the team haven’t been allowed to time-travel ever since their technical expert, Jones, got stuck in Victorian London, never to be seen again.

To distract herself from meaningless tasks, Ali decides to look into a present-day case – an apparent suicide of a young man who fell to his death from a high building. She believes the death is linked to a psychic medium called Barry Power, who convinced the boy he could fly.

Ali goes to one of Power’s shows where he claims to be in contact with Jones. When Ali notices that evening that her cat, Terry, has gone missing, she decides to go back in time just long enough to prevent Terry from escaping through his open cat flap.

A dangerous plan which backfires, and she finds herself once more in Victorian London, where she meets Jones, as well as Power, and the darkly mysterious Cain Templeton with whom Ali has unfinished business from her previous visit to the past…

The Killing Time  front cover,  Author Elly Griffith

Lost Lambs – Madeline Cash

Madeline Cash’s debut came out right at the start of the month before I started writing this, so I’m being slightly smug and annoying with this one as I already know it’s been a runaway success and is getting frantically reprinted because pretty much everyone who reads it seems to love it. Very funny indeed without just being throwaway comedy, dark without being too gloomy, smart and satirical without – unlike me pretending I didn’t absolutely just jump on the bandwagon with this one after the fact – being smug.

Think your family is dysfunctional? Meet the Flynns.

For the three Flynn daughters, it’s been disastrous since their parents opened up their marriage. Abigail, the eldest, is dating an ex-soldier several years her senior nicknamed ‘War Crimes Wes’.

Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist. And the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to a wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone – or something – is monitoring the town’s citizens.

Casting a shadow across their lives is Paul Alabaster, a nefarious local billionaire .Rumours of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with Alabaster’s machinations sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy – one that may just, finally, bring them closer together.

Lost Lambs front cover,  Author Madeline Cash

Dan Coombes has been a bookseller for fifteen years, working at Bookcase on Chiswick High Road.

Read more stories on The Chiswick Calendar

See also: Opposition call for investigation into why LB Hounslow failed to look after two vulnerable children

See also: High Court finds LB Hounslow fails in its duty of care for orphaned child

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