Books to Look Out For in August 2026: Part One

August’s new fiction’s a bit of a mixed bag, beginning with an author whose debut was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2023. Jacqueline Crooks’s Sky City is set in the eponymous north London housing estate where Jaycee lives after years in a homeless hostel. When she finds a clue that may help her best friend track down her father, the two women head to Atlantic City. Back in London, where her first love and old classmate Sol has come back into her life, Jaycee begins to deal with the childhood trauma that haunts her. ‘But can she find justice and healing, even as her, Sol, Ella-G’s worlds threaten to crash together and splinter apart?’ asks the blurb. Not overly enthused by that but Louise Kennedy’s description of the novel as ‘hypnotically beautiful’ has swung it for me.

Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is set in an uninhabited Chinese megacity where Xiang, fired from his job as a translator at China’s Sydney Consulate for using Google Translate, is involved in making a movie based on ancient legends with an eccentric film director after his inability to speak Chinese goes viral. Xiang’s is just one of multiple narratives running through a book which sounds remarkably ambitious or possibly a baggy mess. It comes highly rated by Charles Yu whose Interior Chinatown I loved which is the draw for me.

German writer Ruth Rehmann’s Illusions is the latest in Faber’s Editions modern classics series. Spanning a single weekend, it takes us into the private lives of an ageing secretary, a translator suffering a mid-life crisis, a once-glamourous typist and a broken-hearted trainee, all working in the shiny new, twenty-three-storey office building of the Wellis Corporation. ‘This crystalline debut novel by a pioneering female writer rewrites German literary history’ says the blurb a little ambitiously but I like the sound of it.

In Laurie Petrou’s The Rayburn Affair, Ruth works in the same faculty as Oscar, an acclaimed artist and husband of Ruth’s literary idol. At the dean’s annual party, Ruth engineers a meeting with this golden couple, amazed to find herself quickly folded into an intimate friendship. She’s thrilled when Shelby agrees to look at her stories, eagerly accepting the editorial advise her new friend offers. When a startling proposal is put to her, she decides to accept despite the risks involved. Betrayal, retribution, and revenge ensue in this page-turning exploration of friendship and creativity. Review soon…

Usually, I’d be delighted at the prospect of a new Jake Arnott, but Netherwood comes billed as a piece of folk horror which makes me a bit wary. It follows Justine and Adam who’ve moved from London to Hastings seeking a fresh start. Rumours about John Malachy, the former owner of their new home, now dead, and his association with Sacred Disease, an ‘80s rock band with links to satanism, lead them to James Blackwood a fellow band member who tells them to leave well alone, a warning Adam seems incapable of heeding. ‘The ghosts of John Malachy and the one and only Aleister Crowley himself loom large and a dark sacrificial reckoning closes in on both Justine and Adam’ says the blurb, darkly. Not at all sure about this one but I’m a big fan of several of Arnott’s previous novels.

The stories in Nell Stevens’s first collection, The Good Time, range from a young woman suffering an allergic reaction returning home to give a reading at her estranged best friend’s wedding to a new employee trying to persuade her colleague that his online girlfriend isn’t real. ‘In The Good Time, Nell Stevens introduces us to characters teetering on the edge of self-knowledge, unveiling the complexities of their inner worlds with empathy and humour’ says the blurb, promisingly. Looking forward to this one which sounds quite a contrast to The Original, her most recent novel.

That’s it for August’s first batch of new fiction. As ever, a click on a title will take you to a more detailed synopsis for any that take you fancy. Part two soon…