At the beginning of this year I underwent a complete literary detox: an absolute, cold-turkey abstention from cutting-edge fiction of every stripe. I subsisted on police procedurals and grown-up Ladybird books, and watched a lot of TV. It was tough, but you’ve got to defrag the old hard drive once in a while. And it was worth it: when this new batch of first novels was helicoptered in, I felt ready to approach the gig in a spirit of optimism and can-do. I’m not even going to rant about the tendency of publishers to overmarket new writers, to box them up, underplay their strangeness and render them safe and familiar.
Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce (Little Brown, £14.99) and Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa (Little, Brown, £12.99) both map acutely observed accounts of subjective emotional experience on to what might once have been called a social realist landscape.
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