Category: Fiction
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Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Paperback ‘Does it help to know that the world is full of people who are sadder than you?’ ‘But I am not sad, I just dream.’ I rarely underline or highlight my books, and yet for some reason I had to mark a lot of the passages in Dream Count, as to…
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Having Spent Life Seeking
by Kae Tempest If you haven’t already, I really highly recommend listening to and reading Kae Tempest’s work. He creates music and poetry as well as novels and you can feel his poetic, magnetic energy and rhythm in Having Spent Life Seeking. It is at times a desperately sad novel about characters who have been…
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It Might Never Happen
By Emily Slapper Paperback The cover and the first page of this book drew me in because I suspected it would fit into the same niche as Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan – and having read it, I think it does – but it has something a little different. Slapper’s writing is more visceral, more…
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Heap Earth Upon It
By Chloe Michelle Howarth Goodness me. This is certainly a book. And it’s definitely not a coincidence that it’s coming out at Halloween. The back of my proof copy says: “A creeping story of sibling rivalry and dangerous obsession”, and I’d say that’s one of the most accurate descriptions of a book I’ve ever read.…
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Yesteryear
by Caro Claire Burke Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle – and her followers are sick with envy. Her charming farmhouse on her working ranch is artfully cluttered, her husband is a handsome cowboy, her homemade sourdough boules are each more beautiful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers and industrial-grade ovens…
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Jacob’s Transition Goals
by Arthur Webber, illustrated by Ang Hui Qing Hardback, £12.99 This is a bright and exciting picture book that tells an important and moving story, aimed at children aged 3 and up. Jacob is a young boy who is trans and loves football. He moves from the girls’ to the boys’ football team, and after…
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Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir Paperback, £9.99 Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission – and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.…
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The Names
by Florence Knapp It is 1987, and in the wake of a great storm, Cora sets out with her young daughter to register the birth of her son. Her husband expects her to follow tradition and call the baby after him – but is it right for her child to inherit his name from generations…
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Counterattacks at Thirty
By Won-pyung Sohn Paperback I started reading Counterattacks at Thirty a week after turning thirty myself, and it has been a while since I have felt a strong connection with the main character of a novel. Kim Jihye is at the early stages of her career (read: internship); she lives in a poorly lit flat…
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Flesh
By David Szalay Paperback, £9.99 This year’s Booker Prize winner! Szalay was up against writers including Ben Markovits, Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura in the running for this year’s prize. Flesh is a novel about a young Hungarian man’s journey into adult life – dealing with masculinity, loneliness, and relationships.
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Almost Life
by Kiran Millwood Hargrave Hardback, £16.99 This wonderful novel begins with Erica, who is about to start university, taking a trip to Paris in the summer of 1978. There she meets Laure, who is a few years older and draws Erica in with her cool demeanour and air of grubbiness. Hargrave lays out the ways…
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Hooked
by Asako Yuzuki The unmissable new novel of friendship and dangerous obsession from Asako Yuzuki, the award-winning author of the global bestselling sensation Butter. Eriko really wouldn’t mind being savaged, if it was her best friend doing the savaging … Eriko’s life appears perfect – devoted parents, pristine apartment and a high-flying job in the…
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The Night of Baba Yaga
by Akira Otani (Translated by Sam Bett) Paperback, £9.99 The Night of Baba Yaga is an adrenalising, cleverly-plotted queer action thriller. It is the most violent, goriest, and yet most heartfelt story I have ever read. Translated and published in English in 2024, it won the 2025 Crime Writers’ Association Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation.…
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Orange
by Curtis Garner Paperback, £10.99 This is a beautiful book. It’s Garner’s second novel, and it follows Daniel, who has moved to London from Cornwall and is figuring out how to mesh his identity together. The chapters alternate between Daniel’s somewhat pained life as a lonely teenager in Cornwall and his much livelier one as…
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James
Percival Everett The best novel I’ve read this year. The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he flees to nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn…
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Heated Rivalry
Rachel Reid Nothing interferes with pro hockey star Shane Hollander’s game. Now that he’s captain of the Montreal Voyageurs, he won’t let anything jeopardize that—definitely not the sexy rival he loves to hate. Boston Bears captain Ilya Rozanov is everything Shane’s not. The self-proclaimed king of the ice, he’s as cocky as he is talented.…
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Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte “May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you – haunt me, then” Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the…
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Vigil
by George Saunders Hardback, £18.99 The vigil in question is being held for a wealthy elderly man called K J Boone who is dying in what appears to be the present-day United States. Those coming in and out include people from his past – some from his time as a global leader of an oil…
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