“I think I killed someone.” This psychological study of a murderer begins with a man’s confession in a Manhattan Catholic church on a sweltering hot August night. Naturally, the priest launches a parallel investigation at the same time as the NYPD. A bestseller when it was published in 1951, it was hailed by legendary critic Anthony Boucher and helped pioneer (albeit in the shallow understanding of its era) the psychological profile subgenre.

Two forgotten mid-century Celias — Fremlin and Dale — are the godmothers of domestic noir. Misery’s Annie Wilkes has nothing on the Evanses, the middle-aged couple created by Dale (a British novelist and book reviewer whose career spanned much of the 20th century) in this 1966 chiller. When the seemingly kind duo welcome elderly Mrs. Fingal to stay in the spare room of their suburban home, she grows increasingly feeble and dependent — and the claustrophobic suspense slowly ratchets up. Details that chronicle both the horror and irritations of growing old help  further draw the reader and at times make them complicit. At last available in North America thanks to Virginia indie Valancourt Books, I recommend buying it alongside A Dark Corner (from 1971), Dale’s similarly bloodless tale of a young Black man who goes in search of London lodging and accidentally finds himself in the home of a ‘harmless’ elderly couple.

Since the onset of the pandemic, countless thinkpieces have extolled the psychological and physical benefits of the walking cure, and emphasising why we should all regularly be putting one foot in front of the other. This beautifully illustrated book by the French thinker is the original modern tome for why we walk. For its anniversary this summer, the part manifesto, part history lesson is being released in updated form complete with all the lore of how walking influenced great thinkers of the past intact.

When literary agent and Dean Street Press founder Rupert Heath died in early 2023, he had five new mystery revivals in the works by Dalton; the pseudonym of Katherine Renoir — a London, England-born writer whose father was Canadian. Of the lot, this 1938 title is one of her Hugh Collier detective novels set in the 1930s as fascism in Europe looms ever closer. It’s about an acrobat convicted of murdering a wealthy London eccentric (are there any other kinds?). Each book comes with an intro by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans and a remarkable vintage trompe-l’oeil cover by golden age American illustrator Coles Phillips, master of the fadeaway girl (the one for this novel originally appeared as a Life magazine cover in 1911).

This divorce and free sex novel caused a sensation when it was published anonymously in 1929, sharing space on the bestseller lists with Ernest Hemingway’s A Call to Arms. Racy and titillating, it became a cult read and was later adapted into the pre-Code Norma Shearer vehicle The Divorcée (1930s Hollywood enjoyed making movies of Parrott’s other novels, too). It’s about an emerging modern species: the new woman, young and single in New York City. To give you an idea: “She convinced me of the relativity of virtue: i.e. if a woman has been asked into twenty beds, and managed to stay out of nineteen of them, on a purely percentage basis she is a good deal more virtuous than a woman who has only been asked into one, and went.” Samantha Jones couldn’t have said it any better.

For those wishing to be more self-sufficient: British naturalist Richard Mabey’s compendium of botanical information about collecting, cooking and preparing edible plants throughout history, first published in 1972, gets a luscious 50th anniversary edition. It’s got a new foreword by the author, plenty of history and lore, as well as an identification guide for all major species.

Italian Cuban anti-fascist novelist, screenwriter and journalist de Céspedes wrote about women’s lives before and after the Second World War. Her subversive 1952 novel (written in the form of diary entries) about a middle-aged Roman woman’s domestic ennui was out of print for decades, but gets a fresh new translation. In style and content, it will be catnip to Elena Ferrante fans.

Before falling into obscurity and out of print, Newman’s autobiographical 1974 novel earned accolades from Toni Morrison. The book was written during road trips with her husband Francisco Newman while she was an actor (as a teen, she had a recurring role in Diahann Carroll’s Julia). This New Directions reissue has a new foreword by Saidiya Hartman and introduces us to unnamed narrator — a Black actress and poet — as is chock full of racy digressive stories that draw on the author’s disillusioned experience at the edges of Hollywood in the 1960s and ’70s, as well as the Black arts movement of the ’70s, with cameos by Melvin Van Peebles, Pharoah Sanders and Angela Davis. The New York Times calls it “a sensual odyssey of self-discovery and experience.”

A food writer, seven months pregnant, discovers her husband is cheating. Does the late rom-com queen’s famously delicious, gimlet-eyed revenge novel need any more introduction? If you think so, then pick up the new 40th anniversary edition of her thinly veiled roman à clef for its brief foreword by actor (and fellow gourmand) Stanley Tucci.

This novel about a stubbornly single romance novelist who takes herself into a brief exile (for having embarrassed her circle in London) won the Booker Prize in 1984. It’s all brilliantly ironic narration, a running interior monologue from when she lands at a Swiss resort hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva at the end of the season, full of sarcastic observations and commentary on the surroundings and guests. The locale alone makes it an immensely satisfying summer read, as do its scant 180 pages in the slim new Penguin Essentials edition (with gorgeous cover art by interior design wunderkind Luke Edward Hall), perfect for taking on the go.

The first novel of Anishinaabekwe activist LaDuke, who lives and works on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota, was written while she lived in Moose Factory, Ont. The Harvard-educated economist is celebrated for her work on Indigenous and human rights. The new 25th anniversary edition of her provocative debut novel — set across seven generations of an Anishinaabe family’s resistance against European colonialism — encompasses social history, oral storytelling and characters in such a way that Publishers Weekly likened it to Louise Erdrich in its original review.

Anderson, who died in 2008, was born in Panama to Jamaican parents who brought him to North Carolina as a child. After serving in the army during the Second World War, he studied philosophy at Columbia and the Sorbonne before overlapping with James Baldwin at the Yaddo artists retreat. His raw stories (first published in 1958) explore the identity and hidden lives of Black boys and men in North Carolina in the early 1940s, and are illuminated with an afterword by Kinohi Nishikawa analysing the queer elements of Anderson’s work.

This sensational 1997 Japanese novel, newly translated into English by Polly Barton, has undertones of Mrs. Dalloway. The minutiae in domestic drudgery of a middle-class wife and mother’s monotonous days (and malaise) reads like a horror story — one The Atlantic calls astonishing for its portrayal of “the dichotomy at the heart of housework.”

This beloved 1958 bestseller is a portrait of a quartet of striving women working at a publishing house in post-war New York City and was revolutionary for its frank depictions of money, ambition and sexual harassment (it’s “what you would get if you took Sex and the City and set it inside Mad Men’s universe”). The new 65th anniversary from Penguin Classics comes with an intro by New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme discussing the many resonances (#MeToo, et al) of reading the popular classic 65 years later.

In a crowded field, Sherriff’s unassuming The Fortnight in September is still easily my favourite summer book. The English writer (seriously wounded during the First World War) who is best known for his celebrated anti-war play Journey’s End also wrote this dryly humorous 1939 speculative novel — a cosy catastrophe, as they’re known — about an ordinary retired schoolmaster in a small English village preparing for the end of the world. The Times calls it “a disturbingly relevant novel that inaugurated a genre of dystopian fiction in which the resourceful hero survives the apocalypse.”

MIT Press adds to its Radium Age imprint with the creator of sleuthing priest Father Brown’s masterful 1904 debut: a political satire about a man chosen at random to become king of a near-future England (1984, hence the rumour it inspired George Orwell). The introduction unpacking why Chesterton pits London neighbourhoods against one another in a mediaeval-style contest is by American Canadian science fiction writer Madeline Ashby, with cover design by Canadian cartoonist Seth.

The jazz age rebel was an accomplished short story writer “whose long association with The New Yorker rivalled that of her contemporary John Cheever” and that alone would be reason enough for Library of America to bring her 1942 novel back into print. As it happens, it’s also a gripping triple coming-of-age story of friendships, marriages, abortions and feminist awakenings that influenced other hidden gems I mention this week by Jaffe, McCarthy, Spark, as well as Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.

NYRB Classics discusses great novels you’ve never heard of in their Unburied Books podcast — and one of them is the graphic novel by the British-born painter and cartoonist who lived in Canada. His work was key to developing the modern medium and this gloriously vertiginous must-read (nominally about technology and urban wastelands) was originally published by the illustrious Toronto small press Coach House Books in 1971.

You might call this the Rashomon of Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps, the chronicle of his 350-mile trek in 1935 West Africa (Liberia). Greene, a young woman at the time, accompanied her cousin on the journey and quietly kept her own travelogue. The contrast between the two accounts is fascinating, as she notices not only what her more confident male counterpart does not (the racial injustices, for example) but observes him observing it all.

Diets, daycare, debt and everyday racism — this anthology assembles some of the seasoned American cartoonist’s trailblazing comic strips of the early ’90s. The series, by the first nationally syndicated Black female cartoonist, traced the experiences of Black life and Black joy among several African American women, and still resonates today.