Seven Days Of Us by Francesca Hornak is published in hardback by Piatkus, priced £12.99 (ebook £6.99).
A DYSFUNCTIONAL family forced into confinement together over Christmas? Francesca Hornak has hit upon an apt and familiar setting – with a twist – for a humorous and heartwarming page-turner.
Her first novel, Seven Days Of Us sees aid worker Olivia Birch return from Africa, where she's been treating people with a life-threatening virus.
Instructed to stay in quarantine in the family home in Norfolk for a week, along with her parents and sister Phoebe, it soon becomes apparent that more than one secret risks coming out while they are unable to escape each other.
Some of the reveals are rather predictable, but there are enough absorbing elements throughout to satisfy those with a hankering for romantic settings, endearing characters, and a few emotional flourishes.
Then, as Hornak writes from the perspective of each character, there's the underlying theme of how differently people handle both tense situations and relationships with their loved ones – making it a rather relatable festive read.
8/10
Georgia Humphreys
The Mountain by Luca d'Andrea is published in hardback by MacLehose Press, priced £12.99 (ebook £6.49).
REALITY and fiction merge in Luca d'Andrea's debut novel The Mountain, which has been translated into more than 30 languages and made the Italian author something of a literary star.
Like the book's American protagonist Jeremiah Salinger, d'Andrea lives in South Tyrol and used to work on a TV documentary series called Mountain Heroes, about the Dolomites mountain rescue team.
Unlike the author, Salinger becomes involved in a terrible accident which kills several members of the team. The incident leaves him depressed and lost, until one day he finds out about a decades-old unsolved triple murder that took place in the nearby Bletterbach gorge – and Salinger becomes obsessed with solving the mystery, risking his marriage and life in the process.
If you manage to ignore The Mountain's rather antiquated depiction of its female characters – one woman is described as a "wrinkled little thing" while another has "nuclear warheads instead of boobs", and the rest tend to be either saints or crazy – you will find this an entertaining read with a wide cast of possible suspects, not all of them human.
The book's twists and turns continue right until the end, when it turns out the killer, as so often is the case, has been hiding in plain sight all along.
7/10
Verena Vogt
All The Dirty Parts by Daniel Handler is published in hardback by Bloomsbury, priced £14.99 (ebook £12.99).
COLE is a teenage boy who spends his time seducing girls and watching porn. He's willing to try anything and doesn't really think about the morality of his seduction techniques, or the hurt feelings he leaves in his wake.
It would be easy to hate him but, fortunately, Daniel Handler's clever writing keeps Cole just on the right side of likeable, as he fast forwards through all the dirty parts of his adventures.
Handler, who is perhaps better known by his pen name Lemony Snicket, gives his hero more depth when Cole meets his match in the exotic, experienced Grisaille.
As the fast-paced Bildungsroman unfolds over just 134 pages, Cole starts to experience feelings other than lust, and realises why what he saw as fun left others feeling insecure, cheap and dirty.
7/10
Beverley Rouse
Black Tudors: The Untold Story by Miranda Kaufmann is published in hardback by Oneworld, priced £18.99 (ebook £11.27). Available now
HISTORIAN and journalist Dr Miranda Kaufmann was under the impression she knew the Tudors, having studied them at length and having inhaled every TV drama and book on the subject possible.
And then she stumbled across an official letter that dates from 1596, which alerted her to the fact that, despite previous assertions and assumptions, there were Africans living in Britain during Tudor times.
Black Tudors: The Untold Story sees her focus on revealing the lives and stories of 10 African Tudors – including John Blanke, who was Henry VII and Henry VIII's royal trumpeter, and Diego, who sailed the globe with Sir Francis Drake.
You get to see into a world before Britain became disgustingly tangled up in the slave trade, when African men and women were free. Kaufmann keenly asks why attitudes changed.
A powerful and perceptive reassessment of a time that has too long been sidelined by popular historical storytelling.
7/10
Sarah Watters
