At the Service95 Book Club, we’re lucky to receive the new books coming out each month a little early, giving us plenty of time to read and review them before their release date – and these are the books we’re pressing into everyone’s hands right now. From prize-winning European epics to unforgettable memoirs, messy reflections on motherhood and deliciously dark obsessions, this list travels far and wide but stays brilliantly intimate. This is Team Service95’s rundown of the best March book releases: bold, conversation-starting stories we’ve loved, argued over and thought about long after finishing. Which one will you pick up first?
The Independent Booksellers’ Favourite
Lázár by Nelio Biedermann, translated by Jamie Bulloch
There’s been a buzz around Lázár ever since its original German-language edition won Favourite Book of Independent Booksellers last year – an endorsement from 1,000 European booksellers who, it’s fair to say, tend to know their stuff. Based on the 22-year-old author’s own family history, Lázár catalogues the demise of an aristocratic Hungarian family. Their experience of the great events of the 20th century spans the First World War, the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the rise of fascism and the Second World War and Russian occupation, ending with their escape from Budapest following the failed uprising against the Soviets in 1956. Gothic and fairytale-esque, it’s a definite page-turner.
The Indigenous Voices Award Winner
Half-Bads In White Regalia by Cody Caetano
Publishing in the UK for the first time this month, Cody Caetano’s debut is already an award-winner in his native Canada. An off-reserve member of Pinaymootang First Nation, Cody’s precarious childhood centres around the doomed family home in the highway village of Happyland. Growing up with his deadbeat dad O Touro and his mother Mindimooye – a survivor of the ‘Sixties Scoop’, a government policy of removing Indigenous children from their families and placing them with white families – this could have been a misery memoir. But thanks to Cody’s empathy, humour and rhythmic prose, it’s a coming-of-age story you won’t be able to put down.
The Must-Read For Women’s History Month
Herlands: Lessons From Societies Where Women Make The Rules by Megha Mohan
Imagine a society where women have the power. Where women make the rules. Where women control their own destinies. Then imagine that these communities already exist. In this groundbreaking book, Megha Mohan shines a light on the societies where this rings true – now, and throughout history. From the Spartan women of ancient Greece to Africa’s first private members’ club for women, Herlands is essential reading for anyone who wants to imagine how a society created by women not only could be, but is.
The Tale Of Enduring Friendship
Kin by Tayari Jones
In Kin, Tayari Jones traces the lives of two neighbouring girls growing up without mothers – one taken by violence, the other abandoned – raised by grandmothers and aunts who step in to fill the void. Bound by early loss, their friendship becomes the anchor through which Tayari explores race, class and the long shadow of motherhood, showing how absence can shape identity as powerfully as presence. As the girls take starkly different paths into adulthood, their bond stretches but endures, making this a tender, clear-eyed novel about inheritance, loyalty and the families we build for ourselves.
The Story Of A Mother In Crisis
The Other Mother by Tina Åmodt, translated by Alison McCullough
From one of Norway’s most exciting voices comes a daring novel. In suburban Oslo, Silje Marie has built an idyllic life with her wife and two sons. Yet she harbours a shattering secret: she loves one child – each conceived with the help of a different sperm donor – more than the other. When renovations unearth buried doubts and another mother enters the frame, her family’s foundations begin to crack in this fierce, intimate portrait of queer motherhood and desire.
The Cult Follow-Up
Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton
We passed around 2017’s Butter to everyone we knew, so we waited quite impatiently for Asako’s new novel, Hooked, which is just as carefully constructed and propulsive as her previous. When picture-perfect but desperately lonely Eriko becomes obsessed with Shoko, a lifestyle blogger devoted to eating convenience-store food and shirking her housewifely duties, their tenuous friendship curdles into dangerous manic obsession. Asako explores girlhood and the bonds between women with sharp insight and precise skill, and Hooked has just the right brand of uncanny, meticulous, socially off-kilter protagonists we love in Japanese fiction. You can’t fail to be reeled in by Asako Yuzuki’s luminous prose and Polly Barton’s brilliant translation. Come for the fish analogies, stay for the aquarium-based blackmail.
The One That's Made The Booker Longlist
Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur, translated by Faridoun Farrokh
Confronting, surreal and laced with Iranian mythology, Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men sweeps you away in just over 100 pages. It is a defiant exploration of sexuality and identity through the interwoven lives of five women as they break free from the suffocating confines of family and society in Iran and imagine a world beyond male control. Nearly 40 years after its original publication – and the author’s subsequent imprisonment and exile – the novel still resonates and is now being recognised with a nomination for translated fiction at this year’s International Booker Prize. So now is the time to read it.
