If your summer reading list is looking thin on the ground then check out our monthly round-up of the best fiction releases in June. From Carlos Ruiz Zafon's third book in The Shadow of the Wind series to the hotly anticipated return of Martin Amis, Nikita Lalwani and Lionel Shriver, there are plenty of literary delights in store. Time to swot up!
NIGHT DANCER, CHIKA UNIGWE
Mma has just buried her mother, and now she is alone. She has been left everything. But she's also inherited her mother's bad name. A bold, brash woman, the only thing her mother refused to discuss was her past. Why did she flee her family and bring her daughter to a new town when she was a baby? What was she escaping from?
Chika Unigwe's third novel is a vibrant and prescient tale of one woman's search for belonging, set against the backdrop of Nigeria and its cultural changes over a 50 year period.
Release date: 7 June
SAN CARLOS, NEIL FORSYTH
Craig Turner is a body-building former British fascist living under a Witness Protection Scheme. After providing key evidence to dismantle a facist movement that threatened to swamp the north of England, he is hiding in Peterborough with a new name and a dying relationship. A holiday in Ibiza offers the possibility of a brief escape
Set in Ibiza in 1989, Neil Forsyth's story follows Craig as he forms a surprisingly tender alliance with a beautiful Hungarian woman named Anna. It's not long, though, until the past catches up with him.
THE NEW REPUBLIC, LIONEL SHRIVER
Ostracized as a kid, Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. A disgruntled corporate lawyer, he’s more than ready to leave his lucrative career for the excitement and uncertainty of journalism. When he’s offered the post of foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a home-grown terrorist movement, Edgar recognizes the disappeared larger-than-life reporter he’s been sent to replace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsize character he longs to emulate
This tongue-in-cheek novel draws the curtain back to reveal what really makes a person so magnetic. Be warned, though - it's so finely written that devotees of We Need to Talk About Kevin might want to reconsider what their favourite Shriver novel is after reading it
DIRT, DAVID VANN
The year is 1985 and 22-year-old Galen lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded old house with a walnut orchard in a suburb of Sacramento, California. He doesn't know who his father is, his abusive grandfather is dead, and his grandmother, losing her memory, has been shipped off to a nursing home. Galen and his mother survive on old family money - an inheritance that his Aunt Helen and seventeen-year-old cousin, Jennifer, are determined to get their hands on
A powerful story of a family on the verge of imploding, David Vann's novel might not be an easy read - but it is, undoubtedly, a book you will want to devour in a single sitting.
ANOTHER COUNTRY, ANJALI JOSEPH
Paris, London, Bombay: three cities form a backdrop to a journey through Leela’s twenties at the dawn of the new millennium, as she learns to negotiate the world, work, relationships and sex, and find some measure of authenticity
The second novel from Joseph, Another Country brings a cool eye to friendship, love, and the idea of belonging in its movement through old and new worlds.
SOUND, T. M. WOLF
Set on the Jersey Shore over the course of one long summer, Sound is the story of Cincy, a young man who reluctantly returns to his hometown. Finding it saturated with nostalgia and melancholy, he struggles in a place that seems only to offer mundanity - until one evening he meets Vera and his purpose becomes clear
A poignant love affair with an incredibly atmospheric setting, Cincy’s search for meaning and his battle to get the girl are brilliantly evoked using the form of a musical score. Sound rings out with simple, understated clarity.
THE PRISONER OF HEAVEN, CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN
Daniel, and his old friend Fermín Romero de Torres, are tending shop. Both men lead relatively happy and quiet lives. But an enigmatic visitor soon leads Fermín to open up about a past that has come back to haunt him…a story that will leave Daniel questioning his very existence
The third in the cycle of books preceded by The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game, this latest instalment bears all the Zafon trademarks: imprisonment, betrayal and the return of a deadly rival.
WHERE'D YOU GO BERNADETTE, MARIA SEMPLE
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To Elgie Branch, a Microsoft wunderkind, she's his hilarious, volatile, talented, troubled wife. To fellow mothers at the school gate, she's a menace. To design experts, she's a revolutionary architect. And to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, quite simply, mum. Then Bernadette disappears. And Bee must take a trip to the end of the earth to find her.
Maria Semple's deeply touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's place in the world. A seriously compulsive read.
THE DREAM OF THE CELT, MARI0 VARGAS LLOSA
It's summer of 1916 and Roger Casement awaits the hangman in London’s Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the disastrous Easter Rising led by his comrades of the Irish Volunteers. For the past year he has attempted to raise an Irish brigade from prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans against the British Empire that awarded him a knighthood only a few years before. And now his petition for clemency is threatened by the leaking of his private diary and hence his secret life as a gay man...
In an epic and moving novel spanning three continents, Nobel Prize winning author Mario Vargas Llosa re-imagines the life of Roger Casement, the most controversial hero of Irish nationalism.
THE VILLAGE, NIKITA LALWANI
Ray, a young British-Asian woman arrives in the afternoon heat of a small village in India. She has come to live there for several months to make a documentary about the place. This is no ordinary Indian village - the women collecting water at the well, the men chopping wood in the early morning light have all been found guilty of murder. The village is an open prison.
Nikita Lalwani's story follows Ray as she begins to grow closer to the inhabitants of the village, blurring the distinctions between innocent and guilty with disastrous consequences
LIONEL ASBO, MARTIN AMIS
Lionel Asbo - a very violent but not very successful young criminal - is going about his morning duties in a London prison when he learns that he has just won £139,999,999.50 on the National Lottery. This is not necessarily good news for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Des Pepperdine, who still has reason to fear his uncle's implacable vengeance.
Savage, funny, and mysteriously poignant, Lionel Asbo is a modern fairytale and a must for all Amis fans.
IN THE KINGDOM OF MEN, KIM BARNES
Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I'm a barefoot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that. Here is the second thing: that young woman they pulled from the Arabian shore, her hair tangled with mangrove - my husband didn't kill her, not the way they say he did.
Author of two critically acclaimed memoirs and previously shortlisted for the Pultizer, Kim Barnes serves up a novel about glamour, wealth and the corruption that hangs behind it all.
THE ADOPTION, ANNE BERRY
I was fourteen when I found out that I was adopted. I returned home from school one day, and Mother said that she needed to speak to me. And then she told me – just like that. And what I felt was not shock or grief, but the most enormous sense of relief.
Told from the perspective of three very different women, The Adoption is an astonishing, warm and wise novel about motherhood and family.
THE FLOWER READER, ELIZABETH LOUPAS
With her dying breath, Mary of Guise entrusts a silver casket containing explosive secret papers to the young Scottish heiress, Rinette Leslie. She makes Rinette promise to keep the casket hidden and only to give it to Mary, Queen of Scots, now on her way home from France to ascend the throne
Loupas' historical novel bursts with murder, intrigue and conspiracy theories. Tudor enthusiasts take note.
THE LONG EARTH, TERRY PRATCHETT AND STEPHEN BAXTER
1916: the Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong, and the wind in the leaves in the trees. Where have the mud, blood and blasted landscape of No Man's Land gone?
2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Cop Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive - some said mad, others dangerous - scientist when she finds a curious gadget - a box containing some wiring, a three-way switch and a ... potato. It is the prototype of an invention that will change the way Mankind views his world for ever
The first in a highly anticipated collaborative series between best-selling science fiction/fantasy authors Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.
BEAUTIFUL LIES, CLARE CLARK
It is 1887, and an unsettled London is preparing for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. For Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful, bohemian wife of a maverick politician, it is the year she plans to make her own mark on the world. But her husband's outspoken views inspire enmity as well as admiration - and the wife of a member of parliament should not be hiding the kind of secrets Maribel has buried in her past. When a notorious newspaper editor begins to take an uncommon interest in her, Maribel fears he will destroy not only her husband's career but both of their reputations.
Praised by Hilary Mantel as 'one of those writers who can see into the past and help us feel its texture', Clark creates a brilliant story thread that illuminates Victorian England in its own Jubilee year.
ADAMTINE, HANNAH BERRY
All people could do was speculate on the fate of those who vanished - strangers; seemingly random, unconnected: all plucked from their lives and never seen again. The notes found left behind, apparently describing some slender reason for their removal, were all that linked them. They were all delivered by one man.
Hannah Berry tells the tale of four seemingly unconnected strangers, as they take the last train home with sinister consequences. A compulsively readable modern whodunit.
Release date: 7 June