Category: Fiction
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It Might Never Happen
By Emily Slapper Hardback, £16.99 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,…
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The Woman Dies
by Aoko Matsuda Europa Editions, Paperback, £14.99 What I love about short stories is that they can lightly slip into the crack of everyday hectic-ness. One day, Aoko Matsuda, the author of Where the Wild Ladies Are — witty, uncanny, feminist tales rewriting Japanese folklore, winner of the 2021 World Fantasy Award Best Collection —…
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The Proof of my Innocence
by Jonathan Coe This is the funniest book I’ve read all year. Stuffed with good puns and jokes, it’s also an excellent pastiche of genres including cosy crime, autofiction and ‘dark academia’ (no, I had no idea either – apparently it includes The Secret History). I knew I’d enjoy it when I saw that the…
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My Rice is Best!
By Selina Brown and Maxwell A. Oginni Penguin, Paperback, £7.99 Any books about food immediately draw me in, and this was no exception! Brown’s storytelling and Oginni’s illustrations are bound to start conversations about favourite foods and cooking. Each page is brimming with as much energy as the children in the book, Yinka and Shane,…
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Katabasis
By R F Kuang Harpercollins, Hardback, £22 The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld. Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick. But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in…
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A Language of Limbs
By Dylin Hardcastle Verve Books, Paperback, £10.99 I picked this book up at random based on the image on the cover, which really drew me in with the affection and vulnerability portrayed, and I’m very glad I chose it. Hardcastle weaves together the stories of two very different lives with great skill and emotion, and…
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I Hope This Finds You Well
By Natalie Sue Harpercollins, Paperback, £9.99 Would you want to know what your colleagues say behind your back? Jolene certainly doesn’t. She’s riddled with anxiety, depressed, and hates her coworkers. The less she knows about them, the better. So when a catastrophic IT f*ck up grants her access to all of their emails and private…
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The Housemaid
Freida McFadden I can pretend to be whoever I like. But I’ll soon learn that the Winchesters’ secrets are far more dangerous than my own… Every day I clean the Winchesters’ beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up…
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Butter
By Asako Yuzuki Harpercollins, Paperback, £9.99 11 months ago, the paperback for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (by Gabrielle Zevin) came out and I spent the summer selling it. My first thought was that it was probably overhyped, but I was intrigued and caved when a friend lent me a copy in early autumn. I…
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All Fours
By Miranda July Canongate Books, Paperback, £9.99 “I’d whipped myself into a froth of longing — or worked, created fictions…. Was there any actual enchantment or was it all just survival, ways to muddle through?” I’m jealous of you if you are yet to read Miranda July’s All Fours, now out in paperback. It has…
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The Safekeep
By Yael van der Wouden Penguin, Paperback, £9.99 Call Me By Your Name meets Girl With A Pearl Earring in this consuming and simmering debut novel set in a rural town in the Netherlands. The Safekeep is one of those rare books where the things left unsaid speak as much as the ones on the…
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Blue Sisters
By Coco Mellors Harpercollins, Paperback, £9.99 The Blue sisters have always been exceptional – and exceptionally different. Avery, a strait-laced lawyer living in London, is the typical eldest daughter, though she’s hiding a secret that could undo her perfect life forever. Bonnie was a boxer but, following a devastating defeat, she’s been working as a…
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Suspicion
By Seichō Matsumoto Penguin, Paperback, £10.99 With an RRP that puts the price per word worryingly close to values more common to poetry books than fiction narratives, Suspicion comes across as a slight prospect, and an expensive one at that. It emphatically is not. Unlike most mystery fare, Suspicion centres on a crime whose details…
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The Exorcist
A potty-mouthed classic of all kinds of horror – psychological, Catholic, gothic. Unmissable!
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The Most
By Jessica Anthony Transworld Publishers, Paperback, £9.99 On an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957, housewife Kathleen Beckett decides she does not want to go to church with her family, as all middle-class American families ought to. Instead, she decides to go for a swim in the disused pool of their apartment complex. And there…
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Flatland
By Edwin A Abbott Penguin, Paperback, £9.99 A curious classic of the genre set in a vividly described two-dimensional world. Its hugely imaginative and brilliantly depicted premise aside, it can be read as a comment on class, status and social mores. A wonderful, if odd, book.
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Enter the Aardvark
by Jessica Anthony Transworld Publishers, Paperback, £7.99 Absurdist, queer, gothic horror, political satire: you may not think you need it in your life, but here it is, and, it turns out, you do! Very funny, very strange, very marvellous. I adore this writer, and it is time everyone else adored her too.
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The Full Moon Coffee Shop
by Mai Mochizuki Paperback, £10.99 Under a glittering full moon, a Kyoto coffee shop appears only where and when it’s needed. It’s run by talking cats serving delicious desserts and age-old astrological wisdom. This coffee shop attracts customers who have lost their way in life, from a failed video game developer to a romantically challenged…
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