Noon in Paris, Eight in Chicago by Douglas Cowie

Read it in a sitting, but make sure you have a hot bath ready and the fires (and candles) lit. It’s a startling feminist ghost story: chilling, disturbing and radical all at the same time, we couldn’t put it down (except to go and put on another jumper and gloves). We’re really looking forward to two fiction debuts this year.įirstly, VH Leslie’s Gothic mystery of “fallen women” and hydropathy set in part in a Victorian sanatorium on the banks of the Thames, Bodies of Water. Mike McCormack is one to watch this year – you heard it here first. It’s an exceptionally beautiful meditation on family and responsibility. This new book, Solar Bones, is a strange and beautiful ghost story, and gives me Donal Ryan / Sara Baume-type tingles. Lisa and I have been fans of Mike McCormack, who is certainly one of Ireland’s most important contemporary novelists, for years: he won the Rooney Prize, has been shortlisted for Irish Book Awards, and I had the great pleasure of working with him when I was at Lilliput Press. Come and have a glass of wine with us at the launch in Dublin in a few weeks! Details will be on our website.

We think Vertigo is a tour-de-force, an intense, precise and fractured composition about the uncanny every day. But once we’d read her wry and absurd collection of stories, we went to London to pitch to her – which is again, the inverse of how publishing in Ireland functions, as talent tends usually to go the opposite direction. This is exactly the opposite of how publishing usually works at Tramp. We were aware of Joanna Walsh through her #ReadWomen work before we’d met her, and we met her before we read much of her fiction. We asked 20 to pick which books are going to make headlines in 2016. It’s going to come from someone like us, at Tramp Press, or one of the other incredible independent publishers working in Ireland and the UK. Odds are, the biggest successes in new fiction this year will come from a small, independent publisher: a publisher with an open submissions pile, and with the guts to follow through on risky new work. Here’s the truth about what’s going to happen this year in books. There are pretty good reasons for this (as The Guardian talked about recently). The stand-out successes in fiction over the last years have come from independent presses Eimear McBride, Donal Ryan, Colin Barrett, Sara Baume, Mary Costello, Danielle McLaughlin … though some of these writers are with big presses now, they all started out independent. The Guardian, the TLS and the Financial Times all have good lists of books coming out soon from the world’s biggest publishers, predicting which writers are going to be the biggest sensations this year. Like most readers, I’ve enjoyed the usual January pieces about what’s going to be hot in the world of literature this year.

Noon in Paris, Eight in Chicago by Douglas Cowie