A Month of Memory and Myth: What's Arriving This August

By Andy — 2026-08-05 — Literary News

I've spent the last few weeks staring at two books side by side on the counter. Both arrived this month. Neither is what you'd call cheerful.

The thing that struck me first was this: they're both about women who can't trust their own minds.

Fiona Mozley's Awake Awake is a meditation on memory, loss and moral courage, following a protagonist named Mary who is haunted by vivid recollections of events she suspects never happened. Not a sickness of forgetting, the novel insists—but rather an abundance of remembrances. Her mind is crowded. Too crowded.

Mozley has done this kind of work before. Her earlier novel Elmet was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. But Awake Awake feels different. Sharper. Set against the disorienting political backdrop of the 2000s and 2010s, the novel uses personal unraveling as its engine. When Mary's sense of self cracks, so does everything around her—or so she believes.

What's remarkable is how the book refuses to anchor itself.

Then there's Margrét Ann Thors's debut, Freyja, which dropped on August 4. This one moves differently. Thors is an Icelandic-American writer based in Reykjavík, and her novel is steeped in something older—folklore, myth, the weight of land itself. Her debut deals with a single mother's desperate need to bury her past while protecting her daughter, until an unsolved child-disappearance case reopens after twenty years.

Actually, that's not quite right. Let me recalibrate.

The novel isn't really about the case. It's about what memory does to a mother when she has something to hide—or thinks she does. Thors writes with a sharp, unflinching clarity about guilt, love, and the devastating cost of what we cannot remember.

Both these writers are circling the same problem: the unreliability of our own minds. But they approach it from opposite directions. Mozley's Mary has too many memories—false ones crowding out the real. Thors's Unnur has locked away the real memories entirely, and now they're knocking on the door.

For a used bookshop, this matters. These are novels people will want to discuss. They're the kind that leave marks. People finish them and sit in the quiet for a while.

Awake Awake came out in June from John Murray, so it's been drifting around the literary circuits for a couple of months. But if you've missed it, something like that feels urgent now. The Icelandic cold of *Freyja*, the political fog of *Awake Awake*—they're both about how the world outside moves through us, changes the shape of who we are, makes us strangers to ourselves.

You could read them as warnings about memory. Or you could read them as invitations to sit with confusion long enough to understand it.