This week saw the unveiling of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 longlist, featuring five stunning debuts and eleven other incredible new additions to established authors’ bibliography. All of them will find their way onto our to-read lists, but these haunting novels are the ones that have caught our attention the most…
Salt Lick by Lulu Allison
Imagine a life where there’s no escaping to the country because the rural economy has collapsed for good. Where white nationalism is rife and imminently dangerous. Where our favourite coastlines are lost to the ocean and where food production is all overseas. Salt Lick by Lulu Allison imagines just such a British future. While the population flocks to the cities, a woman named Isolde traverses the feral countryside, camping out in cottages consumed by nature, as she looks for answers surrounding her mother’s death. This is a dystopia that doesn’t feel too far from reality, which is the most haunting thing of all.
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
From the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Night Watchmen, Louis Erdrich has returned with another novel featuring a Native American protagonist. This time, we meet Tookie - an ex-convict who finds salvation in books, and ends up working in a Minneapolis bookstore following her early release from prison. There she meets a woman obsessed with indiginous culture named Flora, who dies suddenly on All Souls’ Day. She’s the most annoying woman in the world in the eyes of Tookie, and her ghost is refusing to leave the store. Set against the backdrop of the death of George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic, The Sentence very much mirrors aspects of Erdrich’s own life - though she’s probably never been forced to investigate a baffling haunting.
Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith
The stunning debut novel from Vietnamese-American author Violet Kupersmith follows the mystery behind two missing girls who disappeared decades apart from each other, but remain inextricably linked. It’s a twisty turny novel of vengeance, spiritual possession and ghostly folklore. It may not be the most easy plot to grasp, but it will certainly bleed into your soul in a way that will leave you pondering the mystery for days after.
Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé
If you’re into Egyptian mythology, this unique tale is certainly for you. Nephthys is a taxi driver who drives passengers to unusual destinations in her haunted 1967 Plymouth. She is wracked with grief over the death of her brother Osiris who drowned in the river, and drinks her days away to cope. Her life only becomes more complicated when her great nephew Dash shows up, talking about a mysterious entity called the River Man that only he can see.
MORE: Brown Girls review: Daphne Palasi Andreades’ poetic coming–of-age debut is nostalgic to the core
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
Like The Sentence, Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel takes place around books. It follows a teenage boy named Benny who is driven from his home to the silence of the local library when he starts to hear voices coming from inanimate objects; voices that get more and more cacophonous as his hoarding mother spirals out of control. It’s there he finds a book which narrates his life, and it’s there he falls in love with a ferret-toting performance artist. There’s nothing that isn’t startling unique about this tale, and it turns into a wonderful fable about our relationship with material possessions.
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