These are the books the Service95 team can’t stop passing between desks this August. From buzzy new fiction and quietly brilliant debuts to a poetry collection worth slowing down for, here’s everything we’re reading – and recommending – right now.
Chinese Fish by Grace Yee
This poetry and prose collection follows the Chin family as they leave Hong Kong for Christchurch in New Zealand, sometime between the 1960s and 1980s. The family runs a local fish and chip shop, and the long hours behind the counter become the backdrop for the racism they encounter, the language barriers and the gap between what they were promised and the life they ended up with.
The book revolves around Ping, a mother isolated inside her own home, and her daughter Cherry, who is pulled between the culture her parents hold onto and the one she’s expected to assimilate into; something anyone who feels like they live between worlds will relate to. It’s a textured depiction of immigrant life – one that resists the easy-to-explain “model minority” story and gives Ping and Cherry the nuance that many immigrants stories hold.
Queen Mab by Emily McBride
A haunting exploration of motherhood, madness and the myths we rely on to make sense of our own reality. After Madeleine’s baby daughter Maud arrives following a traumatic labour, the joy of new motherhood quickly turns into something much more unsettling. When Maud won’t stop crying, Madeleine begins to wonder if her daughter has been replaced by a fairy changeling. As her grip on reality starts to shift, she turns to literature and folklore for answers. Blending psychological intensity with the vulnerability of early motherhood, Queen Mab asks a chilling question: is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine?
Kitten by Stacey Yu
This tender debut from Californian-born Stacey Yu follows Katie, a twentysomething fresh out of college and far from home, desperate to skirt the ever-pressing demands of adult life. An unexpected attachment to her boyfriend’s family cat, Silver, slowly peels back the layers of her inner life, exposing the strange logic, vulnerabilities and quiet compulsions that shape the way she moves through the world. With an almost dreamlike quality, Kitten favours atmosphere over momentum, immersing readers in Katie’s flawed, often frustrating interiority. Its restrained style may divide readers, but Yu’s debut is a thoughtful meditation on mother-daughter relationships, class, love and the fragile threshold between childhood and adulthood that you won't want to put down.
The Strangling Fig by Fauzia Musa
Already earning fans like Riz Ahmed, who called it “both epic in its sweep and haunting in its intimacy”, The Strangling Fig is an absorbing debut about the ties that bind families across generations. Beginning in Partition-era Hyderabad, after a young girl’s father is murdered, the novel follows the ripple effects of that loss through three generations of women, all the way to California, where a teenage girl begins seeing her grandmother’s ghost. Blending history with magical realism, Musa crafts a gripping family saga that asks how far we’ll go to escape the past – and what happens when it refuses to let us go.
Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli
Already being hailed as one of the summer’s hottest reads, Beginning Middle End is about what it really means to start again. After the breakdown of her marriage, a mother sets off on a road trip through Sicily with her young daughter, hoping distance might bring clarity. But as they travel through volcanic landscapes and shifting family memories, the journey becomes something much bigger: a search for where they come from, what they’ll leave behind and how to rewrite a life when the old story no longer fits. Intimate, funny and quietly profound, Valeria Luiselli transforms a family holiday into an unforgettable exploration of love, memory and reinvention. It’s an instant classic.
