Agnes Martin (1912-2004) was a Canadian-American painter known for her minimalist abstracts. She did her most famous work while living rather reclusively in the desert environment of New Mexico – in a house she built herself. She never expressed her sexua…

In this follow-up to her highly acclaimed 2017 novel ‘Butter’, Asako Yuzuki is back with another dark story (translated by Polly Barton). ‘Hooked’, like ‘Butter’, is set in Tokyo and revolves around two thirty-year-old women: Eriko is a highly strung perf…

On the coast of present-day Ireland, a family gather to mourn the death of their long-estranged father (or, in the case of Vyonne, her ex-husband). There’s the teen daughter and son, Gemma and Matthew, who are trying to figure out their place in the world…

Scottish-based author Tariq Ashkanani was responsible for one of the best thrillers of 2025 with ‘The Midnight King’ – a twisty (and twisted) new take on the serial killer genre – and he’s followed it up with another doozy. Just as he did with ‘The Midnig…

The titular Anna in Tracy Maton’s sizzling debut thriller has never known the good life. She grew up in an unstable environment where drink, drugs and then – when she hit her twenties – dead-end jobs were the norm. But when she meets Ben, the two become a…

‘This is Also a Love Story’ sees Sally Hayden reflect on her career as an international correspondent to ask, ‘Might the world be a different place if we more regularly told news stories through the prism of love?’ She explores the light she saw in some o…

New Writing North’s popular Writing Conference – an event for writers at all stages of their careers – is coming to the Tees Valley for the very first time this May. If the thought of getting your work into print feels like a byzantine process, then th…

The Ewan Brown Newcastle Anarchist Bookfair marks its fifth anniversary this May at the Star and Shadow. Hats aloft! First up, you should know that the Anarchist Bookfair is so much more than a bookfair. Yes, there are books – some that may or may not ha…

A book that smells of male sweat, male privilege, barrooms, drug-dens, music venues and cigarette smoke. I’m not sure I liked What Do You Do When You Are Lonely, mainly because I’m not sure I liked Justin Townes Earle very much, which isn’t Jonathan Berns…

The fiery age-gap, on again, off again relationship first seen in The Lesser Bohemians has taken a sombre, yet no less intense turn in Eimear McBride’s follow-up novel, The City Changes Its Face. Stephen and Eily are still in love, but are still battling …

It’s little wonder that Emma Glass’s ‘mrs jekyll’, which totally dismantles and rebuilds the Robert Louis Stephenson classic, was nominated for the Gordon Burn Prize, because it’s a wholly original, boundary-pushing piece of work. It concerns a schoolteac…

This new novel from novelist and journalist John Lanchester (‘Capital’) is narrated through the perspectives of two women. Kate is a devoted wife who is grieving the death of her perfect husband Jack, their thirty-year marriage and the secret language the…

Dilara lives in modern day Italy. She and her family are exiled from Turkey, largely because of the authoritarian regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who has reordered society along religious lines. When Dilara becomes aware that her father is suffering from d…

I love a thriller and ‘Catch!’ was a real curve-ball for me – quite literally. That’s because it involves Dani, an Italian who is due to play the games of his life in the baseball World Series in the US. Meanwhile, his mother, Roberta, who runs a laundry …

Siân Hughes was Booker-longlisted for her debut novel ‘Pearl’ and I expect ‘No Such Thing As Monday’ to be similarly lauded. It’s the present day in the West Midlands. Steffie – a 50-something woman – arrives at Stanley’s house (Stanley being her father) …

Art Cure has recently been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction, and after reading it, I can’t say I’m surprised. Armed with decades of research and a passion for the arts, award-winning scientist Daisy Fancourt shares touching case studies wh…

The rumours are that white male writers are becoming extinct, but the reality is that rumours of their extinction have been greatly exaggerated. Take David Szalay. White and male and privately educated and Oxbridge and, phew, a Booker Prize winner! The fu…

I wouldn’t describe myself as a David Keenan fanboy and if this comment makes me persona non grata to the Memorial Device nation, well, I’m sorry, but them’s the breaks. Volcanic Tongue, a compilation of David Keenan’s writings about late 20th century und…

Look, I’m not an expert about women’s art although I’m a fan of The White Pube, Nan Goldin, Jenny Saville, Cindy Sherman, the artists of Women in Revolt etc. Not a total neophyte then, and yet much of the art and many of the women artists mentioned in Lou…

Swiss writer Michelle Steinbeck made a splash with her debut novel ‘My Father Was a Man on Land and a Whale in the Water’ (it was selected as Best Book of the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2019). Her latest (translated by Jen Calleja) begins with a young wom…

Seventeen-year-old Waldo is hungry, and her unexceptional town in Alaska, Post-its from her absent mother, and nightly Shein shopping binges just won’t cut it. Enter Mr Korgy, her new creative writing teacher, whose failed dream to be a writer and married…

Fatima Bhutto has previously been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (for ‘The Shadow of the Crescent Moon’), but this memoir sees her tackling a period of her life (which encompasses the various Covid lockdowns) in which she’s in a relationship…

US author Stefan Merril Block has published three well received novels, and for ‘Home Schooled’ – a memoir of his early years – he’s also taken a novelistic approach. The results are utterly engrossing as he details his life growing up in Texas with his m…

In James Alistair Henry’s debut novel, Britain is divided into ancient tribes; but this is also a Britain of office blocks, mobile phone apps, and vapes. In short, ‘Pagans’ is a high-concept alternate history thriller in which the Norman Conquest of 1066 …

During the pandemic, when life stopped, and nature continued, author of ‘Hark’, Alice Vincent, asked women online why they garden. What followed was an influx of stories from women across the world. In ‘Why Women Grow’, Vincent travels to meet these women…

The premise of Ali Smith’s brilliant, dystopic novel Gliff doesn’t seem that far-fetched in a world where, currently, the forces of evil are riding high on the hog. In Ali Smith’s fictional England a few years down the political road, the sibling protagon…

Erin Somers, author of ‘Stay Up with Hugo Best’, brilliantly plays with timelines in her second novel, ‘The Ten Year Affair’. It follows Cora, who lives in a small town with a husband she doesn’t desire, two young children, and a strange mushroom that int…

This US set horror-thriller takes place in Nowhere, a verdant valley that is fairly inaccessible to most unless they know the lie of the land. Years ago, a famous movie star, Leaf Winham, lived in the valley – in Nowhere House – which he had built as a re…

Caroline Hulse has found favour with readers through her first four books, but – writing under the C.E. Hulse moniker – ‘Vivian Dies Again’ is her first crime novel. The titular, mid-30s protagonist, is something of a black sheep, certainly to her family,…

England. 1976. Jean – a teenage boy – is getting a mild dressing down in the headmaster’s study at Compton Manor. The headmaster is David Larkin, although he insists that the boys – and they’re all boys at his school – call him Davey. (It’s that type of s…

To write ‘False Calm’, María Sonia Cristoff returned to her birthplace, Patagonia, two decades after she left it. She wanted to understand why it has a global reputation for being a place of isolation, so she visited the people living in the ‘ghost towns’…

Larissa Pham is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. She’s previously had success with her non-fiction book ‘Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy’, but ‘Discipline’ is her first novel. It concerns Christine, a young author who is criss-crossing the…

Partly about America’s forgotten people and the economic and ecological disaster foisted on them by capitalist fundamentalism, Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound is also a compelling, brilliantly written (and photographed) personal journey in the slipstream of Sim…

Erin White scored a hit with her non-fiction work ‘Memoir of Love, Belonging, and Belief’ in which she discussed reconciling faith and sexuality as she grappled with her desire for both divine love and romantic love (she spent time with her girlfriend whi…

Neil Rollinson has previously published four well-received volumes of poetry, but ‘The Dead Don’t Bleed’ is his first novel. It begins in 2003 in the city of Córdoba in southern Spain. Frank is visiting the grave of his wife, Lucía, who had died a number …

My first thoughts on looking through this sumptuous coffee-table book was “Wow!” Mark Savage’s photographs are awesome (in the truest sense of the word) and capture the almost fearsome beauty of the Northumberland landscape, as well as the hardy climbers …

The premise of John Tottenham’s debut novel, ‘Service’, is ironic. It’s about Sean, a failed writer and self-proclaimed misanthrope who works in a bookstore, surrounded by customers and the work of successful writers. For Sean, everything is moving on wit…

How do you make ordinary life sound interesting? That’s a question that the author of ‘Walking on the Ceiling’ and ‘White on White’, Ayşegül Savaş, beautifully answers in ‘The Anthropologists’, a novel about married couple Asya and Manu navigating love, f…

Tess Gerritsen is a crime and thriller writer known for her exceptional technical elements – informed by her work as a physician – and she always conjures up a harrowing narrative. ‘The Killing Place’ is no exception. It has a gripping twist, which left m…

Benjamin Myers’ book Jesus Christ Kinski takes a particularly eccentric slice of Klaus Kinski’s acting life (a one-man performance about Jesus Christ!) and tries to make sense of the absurdity. A narcissistic, sex obsessed abuser, life constantly lived at…

It was originally published in 1947, but anyone coming to ‘The Inn Closes For Christmas’ for the first time, and expecting a dark Christmassy tale, will be disappointed – certainly when it comes to the Christmassy bit. Apart from the first page, and the l…

In the present day, Roma works for Electric Dreams, a shop selling all manner of geekish stuff and retro goodies. The shop intermittently receives boxes from house clearances that usually contain CDs, DVDs and the odd videogame. But one day Roma comes acr…

“All women are born and remain daughters” is how novelist, journalist, historian, and member of the well-known Sackville-West family, Juliet Nicolson, opens ‘A House Full of Daughters’. It’s a study of the lives of seven generations of women in her family…

This Judge Dredd graphic novel is an absolute classic. In the future – in Mega City One – Judge Maitland comes to realise that more Judges on the streets means more crime. As she tells the Justice Department: “Force is our primary tool… The main target of…

The debut novel from Zoë Rankin – who grew up in Scotland, but now lives in New Zealand – is a propulsive thriller that opens in a remote New Zealand town. Anya, an eight-year-old girl, stumbles out of the dense bush. She’s disorientated and hungry and ma…

This debut novel from Korean author Kim Jee Hye (recently translated by Shanna Tan) welcomes the reader into Soyangri Book Kitchen, a remote bookshop, cafe, and hotel deep in the countryside of Seoul that restores its visitors through the escape of readin…

After swapping an apartment in the city for an isolated woodshed in the countryside, a writer reflects on the complex relationships she’s had with the men of her past. There’s Xavier, her elderly ex-partner, with whom she shares a long-standing romantic c…

There’s a certain amount of mystery surrounding the author Liadan Ní Chuinn. Apparently, the name is a pseudonym. All we know is that they were born in 1998 in Northern Ireland. Well, that and the fact that their first short story collection is a bravura …

Anthony Gardner won much acclaim for his previous novel ‘Fox’ – a farcical thriller concerning a virulent disease carried by foxes – and ‘All God’s Creatures’ balances a similar madcap sense of intrigue with added satirical laughs galore. The whole caper …

The debut novel from this Albanian born author was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and it concerns an unnamed narrator who lives in a plush Manhattan apartment with her husband. He teaches a film course at university and spends much of his time wa…

The debut novel from this South Korean author (translated by Sarah Lyo) concerns Jimin, a young woman working in Seoul. Her life takes a dramatic turn when, trying to play the long-game in a breath-taking act of revenge, she secures a position that brings…

Tart was born out of ‘sluttycheff’, an Instagram account through which an anonymous chef punctuates steamy sexual anecdotes with photos of food. I’d followed her for a while before discovering she was releasing a memoir. Despite my apprehension about the …

One of the few writers in the forties and fifties to venture into and write about that ‘other America’, Jack Kerouac was a literary trailblazer who, arguably, turned from that other America and became the kind of aged right-wing American the younger versi…

If you’re into local geology, ancient history, stunning photos of landscapes and objects that carry echoes of human activity across the centuries, or if you just fancy learning about some northern sites worth rambling to, then this book should feed your …