Fiction Addiction: May's Fiction Fix

Five of May's literary picks. Photo / Supplied

We're always looking for the kind of novels that could keep a book club talking (or, in our case, typing) late into the night. Books that challenge us, haunt us, engage our emotions, lure us into another world.

Each month, as well as reading our two feature books, we'll poke our noses into promising new releases. This month we've narrowed down to five the tall and teetering pile of new books on the market. We'll probably choose at least one of these to read for June's book club.

We haven't read them all and we can't guarantee you'll love them all. In fact, we hope you don't. The best book clubs thrive on a lively debate so, if you read any of these, let us know what you think. We'll be wrapping up this month's feature books - The Tiger's Wife and When God Was A Rabbit - in the next week.

The Beauty of Humanity Movement has a delicious cover, but all is not so alluring in Camilla Gibb's "fascinating portrait of modern Vietnam" (to quote British paper The Independent). Gibb welds the stories of a young tour guide leading Westerners on war tours through Vietnam, a Vietnamese-born American returning to her homeland to uncover the fate of her dissident father, and Old Man Hu'ng, who has spent his life scratching out a living from selling soup on the streets of Hanoi. "Gibb's poised and thoughtful novel does not flinch from horror but is also open to the beauty of this scarred country," says the Guardian.

The month's Fiction Fix is a bit of world tour. Next stop is Europe, the setting for The Registrar's Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages. Journalist Sophie Hardach's debut novel begins with the story of 13-year-old Selim, a Kurdish refugee whose "first view of Europe was a vast, thick carpet of shit" as he swims to shore in Italy. Fifteen years later a Paris civil servant embarks on an investigation into a forthcoming Kurdish marriage, which brings her uncomfortably close to Selim, an old acquaintance. You can read the promising first chapter on Hardach's website, sophiehardach.com.

Moving across Europe to St Petersburg, we find New Zealand author Sarah Quigley's The Conductor raising his baton above the cacophony of the Siege of Leningrad in World War II. It's based on the experiences of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who is evacuated as the Germans approach, and a conductor who remains behind. Shostakovich sends his Leningrad Symphony over enemy lines into the city, and the conductor summons his starving, bickering, second-rate orchestra to perform it, in a stirring symbol of the city's resistance. Comes with a CD of the symphony. There's an extract on www.randomhouse.co.nz. Bronwyn is thinking of picking this one for her feature book next month.

Next we head to Dublin. The Forgotten Waltz is the newest release from celebrated Irish author Anne Enright, and has the difficult task of following her dark Booker Prize-winner The Gathering. It's been four years since The Gathering was released, so this is one of the most widely anticipated books of the year. In pre-financial meltdown Dublin, a woman recalls a great love affair, while awaiting the arrival of her former lover's fragile 12-year-old daughter. The UK's Daily Telegraph says "Anne Enright's darkly funny tale of adultery in modern Dublin trumps her 2007 Man Booker Prize winner".

And then we pop over to America and pick up Left Neglected, by American doctor of neuroscience Lisa Genova. An alpha mother drops her kids at school, dials into a meeting and has a car accident, leaving her with "left neglect", a rare brain injury. She must learn to live with her condition and heal all that was "left neglected" in her former, over-scheduled, existence. USA Today wrote: "This is a well-told tale from a keen medical mind. Picking up anything written by Genova is quickly becoming, well, a no-brainer."