Jungle House by Julianne Pachico

Jungle House is not the sultry tropical tale you might expect either from its title or from its vivid, palm-strewn dust jacket. Instead, Julianne Pachico’s third novel concerns AI. This is not immediately obvious, and although there is an appealing directness to the writing, it means that no time is spent setting the scene or allowing readers to get their bearings fully. I could have done with more explication of the circumstances in which a young girl, Lena, comes to live in an AI-controlled house.

At the book’s opening, Lena has her work cut out:

“There’s fishing and mushroom-gathering and swimming in the river. Five days a week are for exercise and two days are for rest. In the orchard there are bananas and guavas, grapefruits and limes.”

Lena has moved out of the main house and is living in the guest hut, or ‘caretaker’s hut’, as she calls it. She refers to ‘Mother’, who these days is ‘angry all the time’, and one could easily assume at first that she is referring to her own mother.

Central Places by Delia Cai

Delia Cai is a Vanity Fair writer, but this is not the droll, wise-cracking first novel one might expect. It is very different from Monica Heisey’s Really Good, Actually, or half a dozen other novels about women who hilariously haven’t quite got their lives together – and therein lies its charm. Instead, this is a fairly straightforward story about 27-year-old Audrey Zhou, whose parents got married in Wuhan before they moved to the United States, and ultimately Hickory Grove in Peoria, Illinois, to raise her. Audrey is now engaged to a seemingly perfect white photographer called Ben whose parents are wealthy enough to offer to buy the couple a home.

Audrey and Ben are returning to her family home for the Christmas holidays, but Audrey has effectively reinvented herself while living in New York and much of the book’s tension comes from her trying to reconcile the slightly stiff teenager she was with the happy, successful professional she has become.

Comfort Eating by Grace Dent

This book, the second memoir from the restaurant critic Grace Dent, will make you hungry. Dent is both a Guardian columnist and a Masterchef judge but like many of the best food writers – Nigella Lawson is another – did not start her career writing about food. Dent has written eleven novels for young adults and had a much-missed column called World of Lather about soap operas first. 

Comfort Eating the memoir shares its name with the podcast on which she interviews celebrities about the snacks they eat behind closed doors and plenty more besides. From Siobhan McSweeney and her snack of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk with cheese and onion Taytos and a swig of Guinness to Stephen Fry with his tinned fish, it is is a revelatory and intimate podcast. The book is far cosier than her previous memoir, Hungry (2020) which was a surprisingly profound account of her life so far – as she says it reflected on both “Findus Crispy Pancakes and Alzheimer’s disease.” 

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

The Chinese-American author C. Pam Zhang has followed up her Booker-longlisted debut, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020), with what might be the most sensuous novel of the year. Zhang has said that her new book began as a “pandemic project”, describing it on social media as “a novel about food, female appetite, class, culinary hierarchy, and the sticky-sensual necessity of finding one’s own pleasure in a world gone to shit”.

The mark of the lockdown bears heavily on the text, not least in the nameless narrator’s recounting of “gray days and gray nights, no lovers no family no feasts no flights”. We are, in marked thematic contrast to Zhang’s debut – a retelling of the American West from the perspective of Chinese immigrants – in a dystopian near future in which food is disappearing. Our narrator is a Chinese-American chef lured to work in a colony of the super-rich on an Italian mountainside (referred to by a border guard as “Terra di latte e miele”). After she arrives, “it was the mountain’s private security that held me for hours, taking my passport, my retina scans, the measurements of my face and waist and earlobes, my blood, my phone, my photo”.

The Hedgehog Diaries by Sarah Sands

A book about hedgehogs is not the obvious next step for Sarah Sands, the former editor of Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today, and before that editor of the Evening Standard. But then Sands has had a rough time of it lately. In The Hedgehog Diaries, she recounts the death of her father, Noel, the news broken to her by her brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who had to climb through a window of her Norfolk house to do so since she wasn’t answering her phone. Hesketh-Harvey, who was a writer and performer and a great favourite of the King, died not long afterwards of heart failure. Julian Sands, the actor made famous by his role in A Room with a View and the father of her eldest son, Henry, went missing while hiking on a Californian mountain in January this year, not long before Hesketh-Harvey died. The actor’s body was not discovered until June.

It might therefore be understandable that Sands has been thinking a great deal about life and death and that she latched on to the poorly hedgehog she and her two-year-old grandson found trapped in the netting by her pond one day.

Autumn Reads 2023

Autumn is the perfect time to pick up a new book. It’s when publishing’s so-called Super Thursday occurs – the single day when the highest number of best-selling hardback titles is estimated to hit the shelves.

This year, in the lead up to Christmas, new books from Richard Osman, Stephen King and JK Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, will appear. There will also be memoirs from Britney Spears, Barbara Streisand and Jada Pinkett Smith. If these aren’t to your taste, here’s our choice of Autumn’s other hottest books.

The Fraud Zadie Smith

Another banger from Willesden’s finest export and possibly the most anticipated novel of the year. This is Zadie Smith’s first attempt at historical fiction, and she has said how much pleasure writing The Fraud gave her: “Every day I sat down at my desk I was happy and laughing to myself and satisfied.” It shows, although her enjoyment is not at the expense of the reader’s.