Tag: Fiction
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As You Wake, Break the Shell
by Becky Chambers Fans of the Wayfarers series will not be disappointed by the start of this new duology – this has Chambers’ characteristic style in buckets. It’s cosy, sparky, queer, and overflowing with energy and hope. As well as being comforting and easy to gobble up, it makes some rather interesting points about human…
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Boring Asian Female
By Canwen Xu An intricate, observant first-person narrative about social and family pressure to be prominent, layered with themes of identities and friendship, quietly evolves into a gripping thriller. Elizabeth Zhang habitually rates everyone’s likability, popularity, attractiveness, brilliance, etc., in percentile. She knows she is unlikable (in the 10th percentile), but she also knows she…
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Mari the Unwonderful Witch
Written by Asako Yuzuki and translated by Ecre KaradagIllustrated by Yuuki Jia and Yukako Sakaguchi Fresh, rebellious, and thoughtful. Well-written magical contemporary allegory in which intersectional feminism permeates. When witches are supposed to be wonderful and helpful, Mari uses her powerful magic only for herself; her magic is for huge yummy doughnuts that she adores,…
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Sunstruck
by William Rayfet Hunter This is one of those slowly unravelling books – it starts with decadence, desire and a playful summer lightness, before descending into the complexities of class, privilege and family trauma. The first half of Sunstruck has a vivid, honeyed setting, which I felt as mesmerised by as the protagonist does. The…
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Taiwan Travelogue
By Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (Translated by Lin King) A warm, charming, yet sharply critical postcolonial novel that also turns out to be a clever metafiction – a bold attempt to interweave fiction, history and translation into the whole multi-dimensional novel. Set in late 1930s, a Japanese writer, Aoyama Chizuko, with tremendous passion for good food and…
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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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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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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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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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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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The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig Paperback, £9.99 This novel was published in 2020, and is an antidote to the stress caused by life’s inevitable uncertainties. Haig had me thinking about what actually matters, beyond all the specific choices we all make. The Midnight Library follows music shop assistant and cat owner Nora Seed, who has had enough…
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Good Girl
by Aria Aber Paperback, £9.99 A portrait of the artist as a young woman in a Berlin that can’t escape its history: an electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery.
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