Sing, I by Ethel Rohan (Triquarterly Books, £23.95)
Set in the Californian coastal town of Half Moon Bay, Ethel Rohan’s Sing, I begins with a man in a giraffe mask performing an armed robbery in a corner shop. The novel’s protagonist, Ester Prynne (named after the character in The Scarlet Letter), is unharmed, but her co-worker Crystal is rushed off in an ambulance. Disturbed by the fact that the gunman has not been caught, Ester seems primed to become the unlikely detective in a noir. Instead, the novel takes an unexpected turn into the domestic. Ester does not set out to seek justice but is rather forced to confront a tangle of inner tensions: old grief, disappointment in marriage, her father’s dementia and her own fear of ageing. Sing, I is a novel that depicts, often in excruciating detail, the constrictive banality of adult life while offering glimpses of hope through community, queerness, and the possibility of transformation. RUBY EASTWOOD
Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Déaki (Galley Beggar Press, £10.99)
In the market town of Godalming in Surrey, a 25-year-old illiterate woman once fooled everyone – including doctors – into believing she could give birth to rabbits. A curious story Noémi Kiss-Déaki reimagines in her debut novel, Mary and the Rabbit Dream. Not the first novel about the medical hoax that enthralled a nation, it is the first to be told with such exquisite wit. Quicker than it takes a rabbit to reproduce, Kiss-Déaki takes us from laughter to agony, making us wonder who was the villain in Mary’s story. In a tale of inequality where “the poorest of the poorest” would come up with anything to gain fame, the author explores power play and how one can lose control of their body – one rabbit at a time. MANON GILBART
The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages by Sara J Charles (Reaktion Books, £16.99)
Gold that is brought to a shine by a dog’s or boar’s tooth; foul-smelling ingredients for illuminations; blood, urine and earwax that go to work on shaved animal skin; quills that take a year to prepare; silence as you work. Doesn’t sound very romantic, does it? Even while illustrating in precise detail all that went into the creation of manuscripts from St Columba to Charlemagne and up to the invention of the Guttenberg Press, Sara Charles retains a distinct wonder at the painstaking efforts that went into what we might now eulogise as the sole remit of monks in mysterious monasteries. The reality of the creation of early books is rather more visceral and political, as this thoroughly readable and enjoyable book shows. CLAIRE LOOBY
Feeding the Machine by James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Cant (Canongate Books, £20)
Large language models (LLMs) don’t learn in the ether; they’re trained on data sets containing vast amounts of text data scraped from the Internet by workers paid pitiful wages by some of the wealthiest companies in the world. The race to integrate AI tools into products from manufacturing and healthcare to logistics saw the global AI market in 2023 valued at $200 billion (€180 billion) and expected to grow to $2 trillion by 2030. But the exact number of annotators, engineers, technicians, artists and operators involved globally is unknown. Researchers Muldoon, Graham and Cant relate many dark stories about this emerging industry in this thoughtful, thorough and accessible book, and by shining a light on the work and workers they also highlight how conditions can be improved. CLAIRE LOOBY
Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20)
In Same As It Ever was, Lombardo once again proves herself a master of the human psyche. This is an epic about mothers, motherhood, and the unique ability of family to simultaneously drag you to the brink and pull you back from it. Julia, our protagonist, grapples with her role as daughter, mother and wife, and an existential loneliness that drives her instinct to love in an equally ambivalent and unhinged manner. With insight and kindness, Lombardo, explores the humdrum of familial love, and the extraordinariness of these bonds that can often only be understood with hindsight. At almost 500 pages it is a long read, but if certain passages momentarily sag, stick with it. The last hundred pages pack an emotional punch, comparable to David Nicholl’s One Day. BRIGID O’DEA
Resolution by Irvine Welsh (Jonathan Cape, £20)
In Irvine Welsh’s Resolution, former cop Ray Lennox is determined to get a fresh start, away from Edinburgh and addiction. In Brighton, he finds himself a new job and a younger girlfriend whose hunger for sexual experiment knows no bound. He is introduced to Matthew Cardingworth, a property developer whose demeanour looks oddly familiar. As he links the disappearance of foster boys to Cardingworth, a tormented Lennox is doomed to face the demons of his past. Despite a slow start, Welsh sets the gritty tone he is known for as he invites the reader to chase the answer Lennox is desperately looking for. Unsettling and grim, Resolution offers the central character his redemption – as Welsh gives us the best and final novel in the Crime series. MANON GILBART
