Following on from my last post. here are some more 2013 titles that have caught my eye. This time, I’m looking at debuts and books by authors whose work is unfamiliar to me.
Petite Mort by Beatrice Hitchman (March). A tale set amongst the glamour of French cinema in the early 20th century, promising a twist that the publisher pleads readers not to divulge. This sounds right up my street.
The City of Devi by Manil Suri (March). The third novel by Suri (though his name is new to me), this India-set dystopia with mythic overtones sounds intriguing.
Hunters in the Snow by Daisy Hildyard (April). A novel about history, and ‘great’ and ‘ordinary’ lives jostling for attention. The blurb makes this novel sound as though it encompasses so much; I can’t wait to see.
A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri (April). A girl growing up in 1980s Iran imagines a life for her missing mother and twin sister in America. This sounds thematically similar to Rana Dasgupta’s Solo, which is no bad thing at all.
The Sea Change by Joanna Rossiter (April). The novel’s about an estranged mother and daughter separated by half the world. But the real reason I want to read it is that I’ve seen some very incisive reviews by Rossiter (sadly no longer available online, it seems), and that makes me interested in her fiction.
Chaplin and Company by Mave Fellowes (May). A novel about a young woman obsessed with Charlie Chaplin, and her ambitions to become a mime artist. Sounds like the kind of offbeat subject matter that I enjoy in a novel.
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Even more: They’re not new, but Nicola Griffith’s Slow River joins the SF Masterworks series in February, and Jeff Noon’s Vurt gets a new edition in April for its 20th anniversary – both works I’d like to read, by authors I haven’t read before (I know, I know…)writer, so I’m mentioning them here. Though its contributors look mostly familiar to me, Salt Publishing’s Best British Fantasy Stories 2013 (April) is the first anthology in a new series which I’ll be interested to read. Among actual debuts, Rebecca Wait’s family drama The View on the Way Down (April) catches my eye, as does Matt Hill’s near-future satire The Folded Man (May).
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The Quiddity of Will Self 
I have a new 
Sunjeev Sahota’s first novel, Ours are the Streets, is presented as the last testimony of Imtiaz Raina, a young British Muslim about to become a suicide bomber; it’s his attempt to explain himself to the people he loves. We follow Imtiaz from his time at university in Sheffield, where he falls in love with Becka, the white girl he marries and has a daughter with (and who then willingly converts to Islam). After his father dies, Imtiaz goes to Pakistan for the first time, where he falls in with a group of radicals – which eventually leads him to the present moment, and the account we are reading.
Colonel Vance Peterson and colleagues are stranded on their moon base, trying to find a way home. Well, not ‘home’ exactly, because the Earth they knew has been destroyed in nuclear war. Rather, the crew of Falcon Base are using a piece of mysterious Nazi technology to reveal alternate versions of Earth from branching points in history, in the hope that one will be hospitable – and that they’ll be able to travel there.
Svevo Romano would seem to have it all, for a given value of ‘all’ – looks, money, career success, the pick of attractive women to string along or use for one night stands. It may not be commendable behaviour, but it suits Svevo just fine, thank you very much. And then he starts to experience mysterious jumps in time: he’ll miss important work meetings when a couple of hours pass in a moment; or his sleep will be disrupted when morning comes too early. Svevo addresses his story to Father Time, as he tries to find a way out of this spiral.
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