The one thing I’m sure about with my first October title is that it will be all over what used to be called the broadsheet review pages. I was not nearly as fond of Alan Hollinghurst’s Man Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty as many hence my doubts about Our Evenings which follows two men, once schoolmates from very different backgrounds, one of whom becomes a powerful politician the other an actor from whose perspective the story is told. ‘Both dark and luminous, poignant and wickedly funny, Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel gives us a portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from the finest writer of our age’ according to the blurb. Very much like the sound of that structure so I suspect I’ll swallow my doubts and read it.

I’m in two minds about this one, too, not being much of a comic novel fan but Richard Ayoade is so funny I can’t resist it. The Unfinished Harauld Hughes sees Ayoade stumble upon a copy of Hughes’ The Two-Hander Trilogy in a second-hand bookshop, startled to find the author’s photograph looks just like him and transfixed by the writing of this poet, playwright and scriptwriter. ‘Ayoade embarked on a documentary, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, to understand the unfathomable collapse of Hughes’s final film O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, taking us deep inside the most furious British writer since the Boer War’ says the blurb of a book which might be hilarious or too clever by half.

S. J. Naudé’s Fathers and Fugitives follows a London-based journalist who returns to South Africa to care for his elderly father until his death despite their lack of emotional attachment. His inheritance is dependent on spending time with his cousin, not seen since they were children, who lives on the old family farm with his partner and her son who is dangerously ill. ‘A literary page page-turner full of vivid, unexpected characters and surprising twists; a loving and at times shockingly raw portrayal of its protagonist’s complex psyche; and a devastatingly subtle look into South Africa’s fraught recent history’ says the blurb of a novel which sounds well worth investigating.

I’ve enjoyed both novellas I’ve read by Domenico Starnone, Ties more than Trust, and am keen to read The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan about a young boy who watches a girl dance with abandon in the building opposite his grandmother’s home and falls in love with her. His grandmother may not be educated but she loves this boy, telling him stories that he will never forget. ‘An irresistible book, as sharp as the swords of fantasy hidden under the bed, as precious as a family jewel, in which the discovery of love and the discovery of death follow each other, marking the end of childhood’ says the blurb suggesting both sadness and joy.

Billed as a love story, Federico Falco’s The Plains sees a man hoping to recover from a lost love by isolating himself for a year, planning to absorb himself in the day-to-day life of looking after a house and garden, beginning in winter. As the year unfolds so does his story set against the changing seasons as he tends the garden, leading up to the break-up and the heartbreak that took him to where he is now. ‘After a loss, a year in the country: four seasons to transform a garden and a self’ says the blurb. I rather like the sound of that.

Not much to say about Ali Smith’s new novel Gliff whose title is a dialect word for ‘a shock, a fright, a transient moment, a glance or sudden glimpse’. It will be followed next year by Glyph which ‘will tell a story which is hidden in the first so the two books will belong together but can be read independently’ according to the rather thin blurb. It continues ‘Ali always keeps her novels under wraps until they are finished, and the surprise of reading a book only when it is complete, knowing almost nothing of its content, is part of the magic’ suggesting the publishers are a little in the dark but hopeful.

That’s it for October’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 next week when H and I are back from the latest instalment of our travels which I hope will go better than our June holiday.