ONE OF THIS WEEK'S BEST NOVELS OF 2022 The perfect novel for fans of The Last Dance, Hoop Dreams and Winning Time 'Exquisite. . . Warm, humane, and tragic.' JONATHAN LETHEM At his high school basketball try-outs, nerdy sports-obsessed Brian Blum meets new kid Marcus Hayes. As a sportswriter, Brian spends the following twenty years tracking his friends' superstar NBA career. But when Marcus mounts his last dance comeback, after a couple of years out of the game, both men must face the tensions of their unlikely dynamic, and the disappointments of getting older. Praise for The Sidekick: 'There is something so compelling about the questions of whether these two friends, despite their fraught history and hefty egos, will rekindle a genuine connection . . . you'll want to know how the game turns out.' TLS 'Compelling and emotionally resonant.' Spectator 'Contemporary fiction's best kept secret . . . It's gratifying to observe someone with a large amount of specific knowledge not only imparting that expertise, but unlocking some deeper meaning within it, like a top sports star working their magic.' Sunday Business Post

Reality versus fiction is at the heart of the current literary debate. We live in a world of docu-drama, the 'real life' story. Works of art, novels, films, are frequently bolstered by reference to the autobiography of the creator, or to underlying 'fact.' Where does that leave the imagination? And who gets to define the parameters of 'reality' and 'fiction' anyway? Five writers debate the limits of materialism and realism, in art and literature - and offer a passionate defence of the alchemical imagination in a fact-based world.

Paul is a mid-ranking tennis professional on the ATP tour. His girlfriend Dana is an ex-model and photographer, and together with their two-year-old son they form a tableau of the contented upper-middle-class New York family. But Paul's parents and siblings have come to stay in the build-up to the US Open, and with summer storms brewing, several generations of domestic tension are brought to boiling point . . .

A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Ten years out of Yale and drifting through a teaching career, Greg Marnier heads for his college reunion, jetlagged and drunk. There he bumps into an old friend, Robert James, now wealthy and influential from dotcom success. He has a plan: to buy up several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit and build a new America from their ruins. For a small investment, Greg can turn himself into a twentieth-century pioneer. But for every urban misfit who's come for a fresh start, there's a native Detroiter whose patch is being swallowed up by these new young colonials. Soon, the realities of life on America's urban frontier become all too apparent . . .

Three years after Lord Byron dismissed him from his service, Dr John Polidori has fallen on hard times. And then a young woman mistakes the doctor for the poet. As the pair fall in love, Polidori knows that he can only emerge from Byron's shadow if he confesses his true identity to the deluded girl; but was it only Byron's shadow that led her to love him in the first place? And a ghost story, The Vampyre, is published under Byron's name, but will the truth of the matter be uncovered?

Nineteen-year -old Annabella Milbanke, visiting London for the swirl of parties and engagements of the season, is introduced to Byron at a waltz. He has just published Childe Harold, and is surrounded by a crowd of admirers, one of whom is his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Annabella and Byron fall in love, but Augusta's unwelcome presence in their relationship becomes increasingly unbearable. Caught up in a potentially scandalous love triangle, Annabella must decide whether following her heart is the most dangerous thing she has ever done . . .

In Fall we see the tentative beginnings of an unlikely romance - between schoolteacher Amy and drifting former graduate, Charles. In Winter we hear how her colleague Howard learns, seventeen years too late, that he has a daughter following a brief fling with collegemate Annie. Spring and Summer tell the story of his daughter's friend Rachel's relationships with her literature teacher, Stuart, and her dying father Reuben. Executed with exquisite sympathy, tenderness and emotional nuance, Either Side of Winter is a moving and elegiac picture of people whose lives are inextricably linked by circumstance, community - and a need to be loved.

Douglas Pitt is a man obsessed. Laughed at, mocked and dismissed at every turn, Pitt has spent the best part of an unremarkable academic career attempting to prove the genius of Samuel Highgate Syme (b 1794, Baltimore; soldier, geologist, inventor). After years of frustration, Pitt finally stumbles into the good fortune he hopes will make his name: he uncovers a manuscript written by a fledgling scientist which recounts a year in the company of the irrespresible Syme. Teeming with comic detail and fierce intelligence, The Syme Papers recreates a time when to question the world and the origin of creation was the greatest project a scientist could undertake. It is a novel of genius and failure; of a man who thought he could prove the world was hollow, and in the glorious process of discover, broke his own heart.

Fresh out of college and uncertain how to proceed with life, the narrator of Ben Markovits' Playing Days finds himself drifting towards a career that once obsessed his father - professional basketball. Gaining a place on a minor league German team, he leaves Texas and lands in the small rather desolate town of Landshut, playing basketball with an eclectic group of teammates, training for most of the day and then trying to find ways to fill the rest of it. It's an odd, isolated existence, punctuated by the intense excitement - and often intense disappointment - of the game. But then he meets Anke, a young single mother who happens to be the former wife of one of his teammates; and their tentative, burgeoning relationship becomes as significant and as life changing as the game itself. Beautifully written, Playing Days is entirely recognisable in its depiction of the first long summer after university. Tinged with the melancholy and nostalgia of early steps into adulthood, it's the story of a young man's first experience of adult love, and of the discovery of his own limitations.

ONE OF THIS WEEK'S BEST NOVELS OF 2022 The perfect novel for fans of The Last Dance, Hoop Dreams and Winning Time 'Warm, humane, and tragic ... Somewhere in a golden triangle between Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, and David Shields' Black Planet.' JONATHAN LETHEM What seperates greatness from ordinary life? At his high school basketball try-outs, nerdy sports-obsessed Brian Blum meets new kid Marcus Hayes. What neither of them knows when they line up at the end of practice to shoot free throws is that Marcus will soon be living with the Blums, following his parents' messy break-up, and that he will go on to become an NBA star, the next Michael Jordan. As sportswriter Brian spends the following twenty years tracking his friends' career, he remains Marcus' only link to his pre-fame life. And, as Marcus mounts his comeback after a couple of years out of the game, both men must face the tensions and disappointments of getting older. The Sidekick is the story of a friendship, of two lives bound together but fundamentally different, and of what it's like to live your life in the shadow of greatness.

When the narrator of Childish Loves inherits a colleague Peter's writings on Lord Byron, he finds himself acting as a literary sleuth. Sorting through boxes of manuscripts he reads between the lines of these scandalous, Byron-inspired stories, meets with the Society for the Publication of the Dead, and tracks down people from Peter's past in an effort to untangle rumour from reality. In the process, he crafts a masterful story-within-a-story that turns on uncomfortable questions about childhood and sexual awakening, innocence and attraction, while exploring the lives of three very different writers and their brushes with success and failure in both literature and life.

'Intricately, intimately written, with some wonderful prose and delicate dialogue.' Guardian 'A loving and nuanced portrait of a family's myriad functions.' The New Yorker 'Utterly absorbing.' Financial Times 'A tour de force.' Sunday Times A Luminous family saga from one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists When the four Essinger children gather in Austin for Christmas, they all bring their news. Nathan wants to become a federal judge. Susie's husband has taken a job in England. Jean has asked her boyfriend and (once-married) boss to meet her family. Paul has broken up with Dana, mother of their son Cal. But their parents have plans, too, and Liesel, the materfamilias, has invited Dana and Cal to stay, hoping to bring them back together. As the week unfolds, each of the Essingers has to confront the tensions and conflicts between old families and new. Rich, intimate, and deeply perceptive, Christmas in Austin beautifully explores the deep-rooted division between the world we grow up in, and the life we make for ourselves. 'A subtle, complex, grown-up study of a modern family. There's something pleasurable and astute to be found on every page.' Literary Review