‘An irresistible confection of fabulous food and curdled relationships’: The best
Piglet by Lottie Hazell (Penguin £9.99, 304pp)
In 98 days, Piglet and her fiancé, Kit, will be married.
She is a cookbook editor and life at their home in Oxford revolves around food – she even plans to make her own croquembouche wedding cake.
Kit and Piglet seem the ideal couple, but there are widening cracks in their perfect life.
Piglet’s relationship with food is more anxious than joyful; compared with Kit’s middle-class family, she is ashamed of her parents, who live in Derby and eat at Pizza Hut; and her relationship with her best friend, Margot, has changed with Margot’s pregnancy.
Then, just days before the wedding, Kit has a confession to make and Piglet’s cravings become overwhelming. Hazell’s debut novel is an irresistible confection of fabulous food and curdled relationships.
The Final Hours of Muriel Hinchcliffe by Claire Parkin (Pan Macmillan £9.99, 320pp)
The Final Hours of Muriel Hinchcliffe is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Muriel and Ruth (Moo and Roo) have been best friends since they were born, just 15 seconds apart, in a north London hospital.
Now 76, they live together in Hampstead, where Roo has cared for Moo since she became wheelchair-bound.
But behind the friendship are dark undercurrents: Moo is a former model and the author of bestselling romantic novels, while Roo is a failed journalist whose husband left her for Moo.
When Moo announces that she is going to die in 72 hours time, a series of unnerving events ensue, including menacing anonymous faxes and disturbing flashbacks.
Parkin’s pitch-black comedy of two devoted frenemies is outrageously readable.
The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli (Pushkin Press £9.99, 304pp)
The Wizard of the Kremlin is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Arriving in Moscow to research the writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose 1920s novel We inspired George Orwell’s 1984, an academic is summoned to a night-time meeting with a mysterious fellow admirer of Zamyatin.
Arriving at a mansion in a forest, he finds he is the guest of Vadim Baranov, a former adviser to the Russian president who disappeared years ago.
The son of a Soviet-era apparatchik and grandson of a former aristocrat, Baranov was a TV producer who became Putin’s closest adviser, known as the ‘new Rasputin’, who goes on to reveal his role in the power plays of Putin’s Russia.
A brilliant reflection of the real-life distorting mirror of Russian politics.