Five novels to read in May

Chain Gang All Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

The American prison system is one of the largest in the world, with about 2.3-million people incarcerated. Much like our own, it is complex and controversial, with its goal punishment rather than rehabilitation. It is also disproportionately made up of people of colour, particularly black and Hispanic, and from low-income communities. It has come under fire for prioritising profit over the wellbeing of prisoners and their reintegration into society.

The inhumanity of incarceration is the subject at the centre of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the hotly awaited debut novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black (2018), a collection of short stories that explores themes of black identity against a backdrop of futuristic, dystopian settings.

Engaging and entertaining, just like the best sports writing, his bloody, satirical and terrifying novel imagines a not-too-distant future in which televised duals — between prisoners who opt into the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE) programme — offer the winners a path to freedom. The premise is built on how reality TV has reshaped our lives, the fight to the death echoing the ultimate reality television cliché: “I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to win.” It’s The Hunger Games recast as a gladiatorial farce that is all too close to the grim American realities of police violence and wrongful conviction.

“Should I be having this much fun?” asks a New York Times reviewer. “This is one queasy testament to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s talent: you cannot applaud his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, without getting blood on your hands. To enjoy the action is to share in the guilt of the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside at the live-broadcast death matches between prison inmates. Adjei-Brenyah is so good at writing fight scenes that our moral disgust never definitively stamps out the primitive thrill of reading them.”

The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese

A decade in the making, another eagerly awaited novel is The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, The New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone. The publisher describes it as “a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret.”

Oprah Winfrey recently named it her 101st book blurb title, saying, “It’s one of the best books I’ve read in my entire life. It’s epic. It’s transportive. Many moments during the read I had to stop and remember to breathe. I couldn’t put the book down until the very last page.”

The Los Angeles Times describes it as, “An immense, immersive work, brimming with interconnected storylines that meander and converge like great river tributaries  ...The novel encompasses intense passion and tragedy, as well as a medical mystery ... An essential, even healing feat of imagination, a whole world to get lost in.”

The Guest, Emma Cline

From Emma Cline, best-selling author of The Girls (2016) and the short story collection Daddy (2020), comes The Guest, the story of a week in the life of a young woman who pretends to be someone she is not. Having been thrown out by the wealthy lover she was staying with, Alex is desperate. In the week leading up to Labour Day she finds herself on Long Island, moving from one place to the next, leaving a trail of destruction wherever she goes. But scams cannot last forever.

Vogue describes The Guest as, “A grifter tale for the post-Anna Delvey era, a spellbinding literary rendering told from the perspective of the deceiver herself ... Cline is a master of depicting the nefarious and atmospheric menace that often lurks adjacent to our most glittery environments, and she does so here with subdued but no less cutting aplomb.”

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, Tom Hanks

In his debut novel, Academy Award winner Tom Hanks tells the story of the making of a blockbuster Hollywood film, an adaptation of an underground comic book.

“We all knew he could act, but the publication of Hanks’ Uncommon Type, his excellent 2017 short story collection, proved he could write, too,” said Booklist’s David Pitt. “Now he’s followed that with a full-length novel, and it is superb ... The writing is spot on, bringing to the novel all the passion Hanks feels about his profession: ‘Making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times, ephemeral and gossamer at others, slow as molasses on a Wednesday but with a gun-to-the-head deadline on a Friday.’ The whole book is like that: lovingly crafted, a wildly entertaining story beautifully told. If you love movies, you’ll love this book.”

The Half Moon, Mary Beth Keane

Malcolm has always dreamed of owning a bar, while his wife Jess has devoted herself to her law career. Then a blizzard hits their upstate New York town and Malcolm discovers shocking news about Jess. Mary Beth Keane’s new novel takes place over the course of one week, when everyone is trapped by the weather.

The New York Times describes the novel as follows: “Absorbing ... Keane excels at moments of interior deliberation ... it’s such a pleasure to sink into her quietly luminous prose ... Her recordings of the small, significant moments of life have a way of standing for something larger... [Keane’s] perceptive, generous observations and attention to her characters’ inner lives make for a book that is much, much more than the sum of its characters. She manages to find the extraordinary grace in our achingly ordinary world.”