These are among the books that landed on my desk in January. The first five are from Exclusive Books’s top reads for the month. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Fire, by John Boyne (Doubleday)

Fire is the third in John Boyne’s four novels named after the elements of Water, Earth, Fire – and Air, which is due to be published later this year. I haven’t read Earth, but thoroughly enjoyed Water, and Fire looks like a cracker, judging from the first 20 or so pages.

Freya is a beautiful, successful surgeon whose speciality is skin grafts for burn victims, but it would seem she is not a particularly nice person. A horrific experience as a child may have poisoned her life.

But the reader is asked to consider whether it did in fact poison her, or if she was always going to be that person. The book is described as a psychological journey, asking the age-old question: nurture, or nature?

Pearl, by Sian Hughes (The Indigo Press)

Not many authors have the skill or the luck or the talent to get their first novel on to the Booker Prize longlist (for 2024), but Sian Hughes has managed it, as well as being shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award 2024.

The Booker Prize judges described Pearl as an exceptional debut novel, both a mystery story and a meditation on grief, abandonment and consolation.

It is based on the classic medieval poem of the same name.

Marianne’s mother goes missing from their village home in Cheshire when Marianne is eight, also leaving behind her husband and infant son. Marianne believes her father knows more than he is telling.

When Marianne has her own daughter, she realises she is looking for her mother’s eyes to meet hers. “The midwife asked if there was a family history of post-partum psychosis. I said, no. Only grief. There’s a family history of grief.”

The Granddaughter, by Bernhard Schlink (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Kaspar is a childless elderly German bookseller who comes home from the shop one day to find his apartment in disarray, a spilt wine glass, and initially no sign of his wife. Then he finds her, dead, in the bath.

She had been troubled, for years, he understands that, but he is surprised at how unmoored he is by her death. She was originally from East Germany; they had met at a music festival in 1964, and she had joined him in West Berlin in January 1965.

But there is a great deal more to her story, of which it turns out Kaspar knows little. Determined to uncover her past, he is eventually led to a rural community of neo-Nazis, and a young girl who appears to accept him as her grandfather. Kaspar decides to fight for her.

Le Monde’s comment on this novel was: “Anyone who wants to understand contemporary Germany must read The Granddaughter now”, while Le Figaro describes it as: “The great novel of German reunification.”

Thirst, by Giles Foden (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

If the name Giles Foden looks familiar, that’s because he is the author of the bestselling The Last King of Scotland, the novel on which the 2006 film was based, for which Forest Whitaker won an Academy Award.

This novel too is set in Africa, this time closer to home, in Namibia, in 2039.

Cat Brosnan, a young scientist is trying to find a much-needed but forgotten water source somewhere in the trackless Skeleton Coast.

Cat is not the first member of her family to seek the aquifer – her mother had also done so, abandoning her daughter in Ireland in the process, and never returning.

But Cat is not the only one. Some need the water for survival, but others are out there searching, including big corporations and mining companies. Heat, desert, water wars – sounds a bit scarily dystopian.

Cher – The memoir, part 1, by Cher (HarperCollins Publishers)

On page two Cher tells us that when she thinks of her family history it sounds like the opening of a Dickens novel (if Dickens had ever found himself in Arkansas).

“Ours was a sad, strange story of Southern folk coming from nothing and carving out a life after the Depression. It wasn’t pretty and it was never easy.”

I remember lying in bed in the dark after my bedtime, listening to the Hit Parade on my little transistor radio, singing along to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe, or Let it be Me.

They were big.

Sonny Bono somehow fell by the wayside, but Cher prospered, moving on to stellar careers in music and film. According to Wikipedia she is the only solo artist with Billboard number-one singles in seven consecutive decades, from the 1960s to the 2020s. She’s 78 – so when I was listening to her on the radio, she was just 19.

She’s clever, smart, strong-willed and independent, and her movie roles reflect this.

This looks like a fun read, and there are lots of pictures – but it’s over 400 pages, and is only part 1. Goodness. Do even committed fans need more than 400 pages?

Leo, by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton)

Finally the English version of the Afrikaans police thriller of the same name, and it’s all you’d expect of Deon Meyer, Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido.

It’s layered, complicated and a hefty tome with some memorable characters. You’re holding thumbs for Benny and Vaughn, but also for some of the baddies – and they really are baddies – but you kind of warm to them.

And meanwhile the clock’s ticking – will Benny be in time for his wedding?

See the full review of Leo on The Books Page on Sunday February 2. Leo was listed in Exclusive Boos’s 2024 Christmas catalogue.