It was a brave/foolish move by Rachel Kushner to centre Creation Lake around the comings and goings of a repugnant spy-cop, Sadie Smith, whose Ayn Rand certainties and judgements get increasingly tedious. In the UK in particular most people think the best…

Dur e Aziz Amna caused a real splash with her debut novel ‘American Fever’ and she’s followed it up with another compelling narrative, this one set in Pakistan in the 1990s/early 2000s. Telling the tale is Tara who draws us into her confidence from the of…

Anthony Quinn – Liverpool fan and one of the UK’s most acclaimed novelists – has scored with an entertaining biography of one of England’s most famous footballers, Kevin Keegan. It’s fairly concise (I read it in two sittings) but the author still finds ro…

Janice Hallett appears to have cornered the market when it comes to epistolary thrillers, with the narratives solely powered by emails, texts, WhatsApp messages etc. Her latest begins with emails sent by Dominic Eastwood to TV production companies, specif…

I loved William Boyd’s cold-war thriller ‘Gabriel’s Moon’, and this, the next in the series, is equally as enthralling. It’s 1963 and Gabriel Dax is still trying to keep many different plates spinning. He’s a travel writer and a journalist (working for a …

A female academic in her late twenties descends into madness amid the news that her husband, John, has been sleeping with students – but she’s not anguished for the reasons you think. In the wake of a petition calling for John’s removal, forty-something V…

In this award-winning self-help book, forensic psychotherapist Jennfier Cox explores how women can learn to let their rage out through a series of case studies, from parentified young girls to wives of emotionally incompetent men. Women’s unspoken rage is…

Is there anything left to say about Britpop? Well, based on Miranda Sawyer’s Uncommon People (Britpop and Beyond in 20 songs), yes, there is. Smartly it’s not a linear history treading a well-worn path, but a chapter-by-chapter review of a favourite Britp…

What’s Lauren Elkin’s brilliant novel Scaffolding like? Well, it’s arty, like a French film, very involved, kind of angsty, questioning and it’s all about love and sex or variations thereof. “There is so much we will never know about other people, no matt…

It’s the late 1980s and former World War 2 test pilot Peter Thorpe is now in his 70s. In the past he’s written books about the war but now his publishers would like his new tome to take a more personal angle. Due to his failing memory, however, he’s strug…

The title of Virginia Feito’s second novel calls to mind Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘American Psycho’ and, rather like Easton Ellis’s blackest of satires, it also features a protagonist who can’t help but see the world through a mirror that has been warped by all…

It’s 2019, and no one knows that it’s the end of an era. A group of mostly queer friends and acquaintances step into the hottest weekend of the year, each one guarding secrets that threatens to change their lives. The kaleidoscopic structure of ‘Evenings …

US author Danielle Valentine is something of a big name in YA horror circles (writing under the name Danielle Vaga), penning – among other hits – The ‘Merciless’ series. She published her well-received first adult novel in 2023, ‘Delicate Condition’, and …

A depressing facet of heterosexual womanhood is that sometimes you convince yourself to fall in love with someone emotionally unavailable and mediocre, only for that person to end up completely breaking your heart. If you’ve been in that situation, and yo…

The poet, children’s author and political commentator Michael Rosen has proven to be a beacon of moral clarity on the genocide that is currently being wrought in Gaza, and this volume – published by Gateshead based Culture Matters – collects together a se…

Jen Calleja, “the punk-rock translator”. There’s part of me that baulks at this description as most people don’t know what punk means and therefore does her no favours. In fact, she’s a great writer, translator or not, as evidenced by the novel, Vehicle, …

The most interesting pop-stars used to be outsiders, people who drifted into music because other work/life options were just a little less appealing. Blondie being a case in point. None of Blondie were musicians, had been to ‘fame school’, or had been gro…

Peter Swanson’s latest arsenic-dunked thriller begins: “The first attempt at killing her husband was the night of the dinner party.” The husband is Thom, a lecturer at New Essex State University. His wife – and would be killer – is published poet Wendy. T…

When a book is described by Margaret Atwood as ‘genius’, you pick it up. That’s how I ended up reading ‘Bunny’, a polarising novel about a creative writing student who’s sucked in to a cult by her rich, Mean Girls-esque classmates. ‘Bunny’ is a female-foc…

‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ presents a compelling story before you even crack the spine. The novel by French psychoanalyst Jacqueline Harpman was virtually unknown until it exploded on TikTok – but don’t scrunch up your nose just yet. In my view, it’s as…

Tony Towle was born and raised in New York City. Now in his 80s, he’s published numerous collections of poems and this, his latest, is brought to us by a Newcastle-based press. It’s a collection that wears its philosophising lightly: “To the next person w…

Laura Shepherd-Robinson has won plenty of plaudits for her historical novels, and her latest is a real doozy. It’s set in London in 1749 and concerns Hannah Cole who runs a confectioners, The Punchbowl and Pineapple in Piccadilly. She’s struggling to make…

This book won’t be for everyone. A Spanish novel (translated by Christina MacSweeney) it’s something of a fable and full of the trappings of fables, not least a mysterious forest in which a dog is lost. It’s narrated by 19-year-old Lea who is telling her …

Ripped backsides, ripped notes, ripped from Richard Cabut’s travels and his life. A kind of travelogue, a kind of psycho geographic snatching of moments, memories and points of interest north, south, east and west. Richard Cabut, a post-punk mover and sha…

Right, I don’t know, grab a pinch of Piranesi, a dash of Lanark, a speck of Luckenbooth, a smidgeon of Neuromancer, then chuck ‘em all into an AI Lit Mixer & Novel Writer (available at all good retailers) and you’ll come up with something like Joelle Tayl…

Actor-turned-writer Hanako Footman has said that writing her debut novel, now out in paperback, was “a way to make peace with being half-Japanese and half-British, collecting all the parts of myself and putting them back together”. Identity is at the hear…

Yukon, Canada. 1898. As one character says early on in Beth Lewis’ rip-roaring new novel: “There are no rules here, just a destination and a dream. Every man or woman may make of themselves what they want here, should they have the will.” Many do have the…

In Phoebe Stuckes’ electrifying debut novel, the unnamed narrator wakes up after a house party covered in bruises. Not wanting to provoke the man responsible, she leaves his house and tries to move on, but an unspeakable rage follows her at every turn. At…

Jimmie works in a London call centre, helping holiday makers with the many different problems they present him with (including a woman who wants to attend a romantic spa break on her own, and another who says that her room is too orange). When not engagin…

Taylor Jenkins Reid scored huge hits with novels such as ‘The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo’ and ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ (which also became a hit mini-series on Prime Video) and I expect ‘Atmosphere’ to be similarly well received. It’s 1984. Joan Goodwin …

In her twenties Esther Rutter suffered a mental breakdown. As she tried to put herself back together – listlessly wondering what to do with her life – she took a job working in the Lake District at Dove Cottage – home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Th…

Malcom McLaren, Quentin Crisp, Genesis P Orridge, Vivienne Westwood, Leigh Bowery. We do unconventionality very well. This pick (your pick may be different) known as much for who they were as what they were. Floating free from societal expectations and th…

Claud Cockburn was a journalist who over the years had become disillusioned with the people in power and felt they were not doing anywhere near enough for the people they represented. He fully concurred with a previous boss who told him, “Every government…

Saba Sams was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2023, and her 2023 ‘Send Nudes’ short story collection won plaudits from all quarters. ‘Gunk’ is her first novel and it certainly doesn’t disappoint. It begins: “The baby is twenty-…

How you get on with the debut novel from this Kyiv-born, US-based author, is likely to be shaped by its central conceit, which is this: Kostya has the ability to summon up ghosts through the food he cooks. I’m talking real ghosts, ghosts people can actual…

The debut novel from this Chinese Canadian author is an ok thriller that wades deep into the murky world of social influencers. The set-up is suitably daft. In the US are twin sisters. Julie works at the checkout in her local store, while Chloe lives in N…

England towards the end of the 15th century is a febrile place. Princes are being killed in the Tower of London, Richard III is teetering on his throne, and there are Yorkist plotters everywhere. Much of this skulduggery, however, passes relatively unnoti…

When people started confusing the leftist journalist and author Naomi Klein and the conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, Klein realised she had a branding crisis on her hands (an irony that isn’t lost on her – she criticised the idea of branding yourself in he…

Britney Spears’ memoir opens with a memory of her walking through the woods as a child, embracing her freedom. A freedom that, as we all know by now, would not last. The Woman in Me reminds you just how big of a star Spears was, then confronts you with t…

In the latest in his series of Bowie books it’s 1975 and Simon Goddard examines the ‘bad Bowie’, the Thin White Duke who believed that he was in “great danger from witches, warlocks and other psychic parasites intent on destroying him with spells, hexes a…

The careless middle classes butt heads generationally, sexually and artistically in Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite. Apparently, the writer’s aim was to create “a massive grey area” and that she succeeds is proof of her subtlety as a writer. The main character o…

In her celebrated debut, journalist Lisa Taddeo spent eight years immersing herself in the lives of three women: Maggie, who’s dealing with the aftermath of an alleged relationship with her high school teacher; Lina, who has an affair after years of her h…

The debut novel from French author Claire Baglin (translated by Jordan Stump) is a revelation. It features two strands, both apparently drawn from Baglin’s own life. In one, we follow a working-class family – mother, father, young daughter (presumably Beg…

Uttama Kirit Patel has been a semi-finalist in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and she’s also been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her debut novel concerns Lina who lives with her husband Ishaan and his …

Born in the US, but now based in the north-east, J. Archer Avary is a poet and his latest collection is spry and stuffed with little vignettes, from the quotidian (‘A Game of Scrabble Down at the Hotspur’) to the pithily observational (“being mean is what…

Edinburgh-based Tariq Ashkanani was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger – and won the Bloody Scotland Debut Award – for his debut novel ‘Welcome to Cooper’, a dank and rather gory thriller set in small town America. Next up was ‘Follow Me to the Edge…

In the wonderfully bizarre world of Big Swiss, 45-year-old Greta moves into a decaying 18-century house filled with maggots, spiders and rapidly dying bees. While working as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist and wannabe author, she becomes obsessed w…

There’s been a lot of rubbish written about Olivia Laing in the last few years, implying she’s ‘appropriated queerness’, over identified with marginal figures and that in marrying a Cambridge don, and moved to a posh house in the country, she’s sold out. …

A lifetime ago, I worked in Selfridges on Oxford Street and to get to the record shop I worked in (hidden like an embarrassing turd at the back of the ground floor) I had to pass through the miasma of the perfume department and it was a heady experience t…

Natasha Brown caused something of a critical splash with her debut novel ‘Assembly’ and she’s followed it with another tale that is sure to glean further plaudits. It begins with a piece of longform journalism, detailing the events that happened in 2020 a…

This Ragged Grace, ‘A Memoir of Remembering and Forgetting’, follows Octavia Bright’s life over the course of seven years as she embarks on her recovery from alcoholism, a journey which takes her from London to Stromboli, New York to the English seaside (…

Torrey Peters follows up her all conquering novel ‘Destransition, Baby’ with another book that puts the experience of trans women up front and centre. ‘Stag Dance’ is made up of four separate stories, the longest of which is the titular tale. Set in the e…

Alice Chadwick’s debut novel shares some of the same DNA as Jon McGregor’s ‘Reservoir 13’. In McGregor’s Costa award winning book, a teenage girl goes missing in the hills somewhere in the heart of England. Villagers join in the search, but just as reader…

We all know the story told in The Odyssey – if not from Homer, then likely from James Joyce, Stanley Kubrick, or the 2004 classic ‘The Spongebob Squarepants Movie’. Aeaea, the island home to the witch-goddess Circe, is just one of the stops that Odysseus …