Nonfiction
The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World by Sumit Paul-Choudhury (Canongate)
The science journalist, who lost his wife to ovarian cancer, investigates the potent emotional forces that drive us on in the face of great hardship. Why do we have this capacity for optimism, and what distinguishes it from wishful thinking?
Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard (Allen Lane)
Professor of philosophy and a public intellectual for the internet age, Callard shows how Socrates can inform the way we live our lives – from romance to politics – nearly two and a half thousand years after his death.
Hope: The Autobiography by Pope Francis (Viking)
Pope Francis planned to release this memoir only after his death, but apparently “the needs of our times … have moved him to make this precious legacy available now”. It will be the first ever papal autobiography.
The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)
The American novelist, critic and doyen of queer literature looks back, aged 84, at his own sexual past, from furtive encounters in the 1950s midwest to app-facilitated hookups in the 2000s.
Fiction
Another Man in the Street by Caryl Phillips (Bloomsbury)
Phillips’s first novel in seven years explores the complicated legacy of Windrush through the portrait of one West Indian man in London, from the 60s to the present day.
Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan (Doubleday)
The follow-up to the buzzy Bellies is another deft contemporary study of love, gender identity and social etiquette.
Oromay by Baalu Girma, translated by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu (MacLehose)
A classic of Ethiopian literature, first published in 1983 and widely believed to have cost the author his life for its political satire, translated into English at last.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (4th Estate)
The pressure points of modern life – sex, identity politics, the influence of the internet – are probed in a provocative novel-in-stories from the American writer who Carmen Maria Machado has called “a pervert, a madman and a stone-cold genius”.