I am often guilty of tsundoku, a Japanese word that means building up piles of books and not reading them. But it's not out of a compulsion to hoard books – it's out of a genuine desire to read them. Put me in any bookstore and I will find something I want to read. Sadly, my capacity to find books to read is many times better than my reading speed.
Of those I've read recently, one was the delightful Hana Khan Carries On, by Canadian writer Uzma Jalaluddin, who writes family-entwined romantic stories set in the local Muslim community. Hana, with her dreams of being a radio star, and her love for her family, is affectionately drawn, and just fun to follow.
I'm holding out for A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark, a writer I discovered in 2020. His murder mysteries set in a 1900s Cairo where magic exists are wonderfully fantastical, his worldbuilding incredibly cleverly done.
The Darkest Evening by Ann Cleeves, the newest Vera Stanhope novel, was haunting and had such a strong sense of place that I could almost feel the snow, while They All Fall Down by Rachel Howzell Hall is a dark modern take on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.
Sonali Dev writes beautiful, painful, complicated families and couples, and I'm excited to dive into her next book, Incense and Sensibility, after adoring her Recipe for Persuasion. If you're getting Jane Austen vibes, you're not wrong, but Sonali puts her own spin on the old classics, the books being centred around a politically ambitious Indian-American family.