September global fiction: A new novel by Sally Rooney and five other titles to look forward to

Intermezzo, Sally Rooney

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Gabriel’s Moon, William Boyd

Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a tragedy: every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing changing landscapes in the grip of the Cold War. When he’s offered the chance to interview a political figure, his ambition leads him unwittingly into the shadows of espionage.

As Gabriel’s reluctant initiation takes hold, he is drawn deeper into duplicity. Falling under the spell of Faith Green, an enigmatic and ruthless MI6 handler, he becomes “her spy”, unable to resist her demands. But amid the peril, paranoia and passion consuming Gabriel’s new covert life, it will be the revelations closer to home that change the rest of his story.

Time of the Flies, Claudia Piñeiro, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle

Fifteen years after killing her husband’s lover, Inés is fresh out of prison and trying to put together a new life. Her old friend Manca is out now too, and they’ve started a business – FFF, or Females, Fumigation, and Flies – dedicated to pest control and private investigation, by women, for women. But Señora Bonar, one of their clients, wants Inés to do more than kill bugs – she wants her expertise, and her criminal past, to help her kill her husband’s lover, too.

Crimes against women versus crimes by women; culpability, fallibility, and our responsibilities to each other—this is Piñeiro at her wry, earthy best, alive to all the ways we shape ourselves to be understandable, to be understood, by family and love and other hostile forces.

Death at the Sign of the Rook, Kate Atkinson

Welcome to Rook Hall. The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed.

In his sleepy Yorkshire town, ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off boredom and malaise. His only case is the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But Jackson soon uncovers a string of unsolved art thefts that lead him down a dizzying spiral of disguise and deceit to Burton Makepeace, a formerly magnificent estate now partially converted into a hotel hosting Murder Mystery weekends.

As paying guests, impecunious aristocrats and old friends collide, we are treated to Atkinson’s most charming and fiendishly clever mystery yet.

The Hotel Avocado, Bob Mortimer

Gary Thorn is struggling with a big decision. Should he stay in London, wallowing in the safety of his legal job in Peckham and eating pies with his next-door neighbour, Grace and her dog Lassoo, or should he move to Brighton, where his girlfriend Emily is about to open The Hotel Avocado? Either way, he’d be letting someone down.

But sinister forces are gathering in a cloud of launderette scented-vape smoke, and the arrival of the mysterious Mr Sequence puts Gary in an even worse predicament: soon he might be dead.

All Gary wants is a happy life. But he also wants to be alive to enjoy it…

Entitlement, Rumaan Alam

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and to secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession.