“Perfect” (Random House), by Rachel Joyce, out January 14th. Joyce’s acclaimed début novel, “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” (2012), centered on a sixty-five-year-old retiree’s journey of self-discovery (the book was long-listed for the Booker prize). In her second novel, the journey belongs to an eleven-year-old boy, Byron Hemmings. His story begins in 1972, a leap year, when his friend James informs him that two seconds are being added to the clock to keep recorded time aligned with the movement of the Earth. Though his elegant mother, Diana, is unfazed by the idea of this temporal adjustment, Byron is convinced that it will have terrible consequences. (“Sometimes Byron gazed at the sky above the moor, pulsing so heavily with stars that the darkness seemed alive, and he would ache—ache for the removal of those two extra seconds.”) When an accident occurs on the way to school, his fears appear to have been well founded: his life has been irrevocably transformed. Byron’s coming-of-age story alternates and, ultimately, converges with that of Jim, a middle-aged man struggling with O.C.D. in the present day. —R.A. Read the rest of the article on the New Yorker website

The post Books to Watch Out For: January appeared first on The Official Rachel Joyce Website.