Ordinary Human Failings: The heart-breaking, unflinching, compulsive new novel from the author of Acts of Desperation

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A collection of essays from the 1970s by one of the most influential feminists of the 20th century, gathered together here for the first time. In the summer of 2022, when life returned to something resembling its former self, my notion of contentment as an equivalent to happiness was pierced dramatically. As the world expanded again, so did my ideas about pleasure and meaning. For the first time in my life, I had real choices about how I wanted to live (an unspeakably privileged problem to complain about), and I struggled to understand whether happiness for me means stimulation and excitement or comfort and calm. For some people these things are not mutually exclusive, but for me they seem to be. It has always been one or the other, and now I have to choose. Set in 1970s Cambridge, a return to the world of idiosyncratic comic hero John Cromer, previously seen in Pilcrow and Cedilla. This subversive fairytale debut set in an alternative Hong Kong interrogates life under oppressive regimes. The beginning of a new fantasy series for 8-12, in which children travel to a magical archipelago filled with mythical creatures.

One woman is pitted against the world in Thirlwell’s latest, billed as “a contemporary novel that somehow takes place in the 18th century”. How a comic book leads, eight decades on, to a multimillion-dollar superhero movie, in the film actor’s debut novel. Still, the book begins with Tom’s perspective: his ambition and anxiety, his charm and cynicism. One minor gripe would be that while the future lives of the Green family members are hinted at towards the end, the equally interesting Tom simply slips away. Perhaps he just moves on, unaffected; perhaps, as Carmel thinks to herself, he “didn’t understand and would never feel the consequences of” the cruelty of his job, insulated by power and money. But early on, Nolan hints at a character too intelligent for that, and Tom is plagued by self-loathing. When he can’t stop the phrase “ I’m the loneliest man in the world!” from “screaming” round his brain, he foreshadows the isolation that also defines each of the Greens. It’s clear that his work – hateful as it may be – is his own act of desperate distraction. I wondered what became of him, too. The science journalist delves into deep time to uncover the historical roots of gendered oppression.The story of how Victorian and Edwardian Britain fell in love with cats, from the development of prize breeds to Louis Wain’s artistic obsession.

One of the things I really liked about this book is that you really feel that some of the characters change. It’s fine for an author to say that a character has developed, but I really felt that Carmel reached an understanding, that there was a growth from her experiences. It felt both natural and satisfying. In the same vein, another of the characters didn’t, and disappeared into his own personal, comfortable sadness, and that felt genuine too.

When a child goes missing on a London estate in 1990, the finger of blame is pointed by residents at Lucy, the young child of a reclusive Irish immigrant family. Tabloid journalist Tom Hargreaves happens upon the scene and attempts to turn it to his advantage by exploiting the family for his own journalistic gain. A memoir told through the stories of Grant’s mother, sister, uncle and others. It also covers his short-lived medical career and time at the BBC. By 2020 I had sold my novel and had the means to support myself and rent an apartment without constant worry, which was just as well as I’m not sure how I would have continued my previous cat-sitting, subletting way of life during the pandemic. I was certainly less than stoic in the face of isolation, but I embraced obligatory domesticity as best I could. After all, I had longed for it. I had wanted the burden of objects, of actually owning a bed, a decent wok and a television. And so I nested. Eventually, I got a cat. I didn’t feel happy but I felt something like contentment, and decided that this amounted to the same thing. Set in an alternative America, an ambitious, genre-busting investigation of creativity told through the life of an iconoclastic artist, as written by her grieving widow. Determined to dig up a story of “familial depravity”, after Lucy is arrested, Tom and his red-top paper put up the rest of the Greens in a hotel, where the family are plied with drink. Each of them does, it transpires, have a tale to tell, but none of it is what Tom wants; rather, they unburden themselves of “vague darknesses” that, as far as he can see, hold “no narrative coherence when placed together”. But in contrast to his myopia, Nolan is charting clear, interconnected lines of cause and effect, and what starts out looking like a whodunit, perhaps even a procedural, slowly reveals itself to be a psychologically rich portrait of a family’s struggles, shames and failures.