March 2024 books

What’s new and good to read this month? Dan Coombes has a look at what’s on offer and chooses Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton, and The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

Until August – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A tricky recommendation, this one – but definitely a recommendation nonetheless, so bear with it. A ‘lost’ novel (in this case meaning Marquez himself said ‘it doesn’t work, don’t publish it’, and a decade after his passing his sons decided to anyway…) by one of the most adored literary heavyweights of all time is always going to be big book-based news, impossible to ignore, and so here it is… a tale of love, sex, freedom and betrayal from a writer who did stuff with language most people can only dream of in One Hundred Years Of Solitude and Love In The Time Of Cholera.

Is it up there with his best? No. Is it a throroughly decent read worth the time of Marquez fans and anyone interested in the literary landscape of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers? Absolutely!

Sitting alone, overlooking the still and blue lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach surveys the men of the hotel bar. She is happily married and has no reason to escape the world she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover.

Amid sultry days and tropical downpours, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire, and the fear that sits quietly at her heart. Constantly surprising and wonderfully sensual, Until August is a profound meditation on freedom, regret, and the mysteries of love, from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.

The Last Murder at The End of the World – Stuart Turton

Where do you go next as a writer after writing a body-swapping, time-looping murder mystery you’re as likely to find on the science fiction and fantasy shelves as in with the crime fiction?

Stuart Turton could have tried his hand at a few accountancy textbooks or written a fictionalised account of snail farming in Basingstoke, but no… he went even weirder with his follow up, a post-apocalyptic, memory-wiping murder mystery, set on the last remaining outcrop of humanity, a forlorn island beseiged by a world-ending fog that has scoured all trace of humanity from the rest of the planet, which I’m sure everyone will agree is very, very different to Basingstoke.

122 villagers and three scientists, living in peaceful harmony. The villagers are content to fish, farm and feast, to obey their nightly curfew, to do what they’re told by the scientists. Until, to the horror of the islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to death. And they learn the murder has triggered a lowering of the security system around the island, the only thing that was keeping the fog at bay.

If the murder isn’t solved within 107 hours, the fog will smother the island – and everyone on it. But the security system has also wiped everyone’s memories of exactly what happened the night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer – and they don’t even know it…

The outstanding new high-concept murder mystery from the Sunday Times bestselling and Costa Book Award winning author of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.

An ingenious puzzle, an extraordinary backdrop, an audacious solution.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts – Katherine Arden

Haunting and lyrical historical fiction with an eerie atmosphere of the supernatural. Something like this needs to be sensitively written and deftly handled in our turbulent times, and Katherine Arden is very much up to the task. A poignant book with plenty to say, and the kind of read that can stick in your mind long after the last page is turned.

January 1918. Laura Iven has been discharged from her duties as a nurse and sent back to Halifax, Canada, leaving behind a brother still fighting in the trenches of the First World War. Now home, she receives word of Freddie’s death in action along with his uniform -but something doesn’t quite make sense.

Determined to find out more, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital. Soon after arriving, she hears whispers about ghosts moving among those still living and a strange inn-keeper whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion. Could this have happened to Freddie – but if so, where is he?

Freddie Iven awakens after an explosion to find himself trapped under an overturned pillbox with an enemy soldier, a German, each of them badly wounded. Against all odds, the two men form a bond and succeed in clawing their way out. Once in No Man’s Land, where can either of them turn where they won’t be shot as enemy soldiers or deserters? As the killing continues, they meet a man – a fiddler – who seems to have the power to make the hellscape that surrounds them disappear. But at what price?

A novel of breath-taking scope and drama, of compulsive readability, of stunning historical research lightly worn, and of brilliantly drawn characters who will make you laugh and break your heart in a single line, The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a book that will speak to readers directly about the trauma of war and the power of those involved to love, endure and transcend it