September book releases

Our pick of this month's book releases

Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series

David Lagercrantz

MacLehose Press

The Swedish journalist and author of I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic resumes the Lisbeth Salander saga, with the fifth episode in her travails. The thriller opens with Salander imprisoned for saving the life of a young boy and Blomkvist visiting his obsessive, silent friend. Upon her release, they team up to uncover Salander's past, with excitement in the form of threats from religious extremists, a prison gang leader and a mad scientist. There is a lot going on, but the series is losing its verve. One for die-hard fans of the franchise.

 

The Burning Girl

Claire Messud

Fleet

Julia and Cassandra, age 11, are best friends in a small Massachusetts town at a time when encroaching adulthood is beginning to make life much more complicated. All too quickly, their intimacy gives way to adolescent preoccupations with celebrity, the pressure to compete among their peer group and anxiety over sex and identity, all of which overwhelms their friendship. The girls drift apart and life takes one of them on a darker journey: Cassie runs away from problems at home to find her father; the novel, narrated by Julia, charts the loss of friendship and childhood. 

My Cat Yugoslavia 

Pajtim Statovci

Pushkin Press

Statovci's debut novel won Finland's highest literary honour when it was published in 2014, and charts the surreal tale of a young man's friendship with a talking cat that gradually replaces a boa constrictor in his affections. Bekim is very much an outsider, a Muslim immigrant growing up in Finland after his unhappy parents fled Yugoslavia's civil war. As his mother plucks up the courage to leave his bullying father, Bekim finds the strength to go back in time to Kosovo with the help of his haughty and unusual pet.  

Munich

Robert Harris

Hutchinson

Harris returns to familiar ground with this spy thriller set during the Munich Conference in 1938, which saw agreement over the annexation of parts of Czechoslovakia and helped sow the seeds of the Second World War. In the run up to Neville Chamberlain's public humiliation, a German diplomat and one of the British prime minister's private secretaries, both Oxford graduates, meet on different sides. Harris paints a convincing picture of pre-war London and Hitler's imperial Munich as war awaits.

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