Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (Fourth Estate £16.99, 400pp) is available now from the Mail Bookshop. Anne Hathaway is already attached to the film adaptation of this high-concept debut. The story follows Natalie, an American Christian trad-wife influencer whose dispatches from her throwback organic ranch—where she lives with her husband and five children without phones, pesticides, or outside help—have amassed millions of followers. However, when Natalie finds herself thrust into the 1855 reality of her 21st-century fantasy, she begins to question whether she is the victim of a Truman Show-style television con trick. Through the lens of one woman's social media-fueled psychosis, this fast-paced, entertaining novel delves deep into the rotten heart of MAGA-style American feminism and the cynical, sinister delusions of supremacist Christian patriotism in the United States. It is grimly gripping.
Transcription by Ben Lerner
Transcription by Ben Lerner (Granta £14.99, 144pp) is available now from the Mail Bookshop. A journalist travels to interview his former mentor Thomas, a brilliant and reclusive polymath, when disaster strikes: he drops his phone into a sink full of water. From this brilliantly rendered set piece—the queasy panic, the abject impotence that sets in when we find ourselves away from home without a phone—Lerner spins a stealthy, hypnotic story of 21st-century digital life and its compounded existential anxieties. The novel is split into three parts: the second reveals that the journalist has published his interview 'from memory,' while the third is narrated by Thomas's son. It repeatedly gnaws at questions of how to render the truth of things in a world overwhelmed by multiple versions of reality. This is a coolly brilliant novel that demands to be read again, and again, and again.
Communion by Jon Doyle
Communion by Jon Doyle (Atlantic £17.99, 288pp) is available now from the Mail Bookshop. This tantalizing debut addresses subjects that most contemporary fiction studiously avoids: faith, working-class identity, and the question of how to live a moral, meaningful life. Mack returns to his hometown of Port Talbot after failing to become a priest and takes a security job at the local steelworks, where his father's generation has spent its entire working life. However, Mack is burdened by the confession of a woman he knew as a teenager, who is planning an act of sabotage, and he feels compelled to help her despite the consequences. Set against the backdrop of both a three-day workers' strike and the 2011 promenade production of The Passion at Port Talbot, starring Michael Sheen, Doyle's ambitious novel refuses to bluntly telegraph its message. Instead, it offers the reader something more mysterious and beguilingly suggestive.
