On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No one knows why they did it.

At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they’d bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota — between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy Iron Range — Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers’ lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.

Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the histories of three generations of American lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes, and is a piercing commentary on the pressures of lives lived on the edge.

Scribe, 2025

An unnamed narrator grows up overshadowed by her unconventional mother, an ex–Jehovah’s Witness and former television star with an inferiority complex. Her father is the head of a psychiatric institution, whose only form of parenting is to offer his daughter the same life advice he dispenses to his patients. Reserved and somewhat aloof, he chooses not to intervene when his wife obsesses about charisma, calorie counting, and turning their daughter into a child prodigy.

Their daughter strives to meet her mother’s expectations and bond with her father while secretly worrying she lacks the drive or charisma to do anything significant with her life. When her mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she begins to address their generational trauma, forge a new relationship with her father, and discover life on her terms. In twelve chapters — each reflecting a different phase of life — Posthuma expertly dissects a fraught family history, exposing the absurdity that often lies at the heart of life’s most poignant and challenging moments.

Translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey.

Scribe, 2025

Sunday follows, over the course of one day, the stream of consciousness of a fictionalized version of the author’s cousin, Thibault. On the day of his girlfriend’s return from an extended trip, Thibault wakes up, does nothing, gets James Brown stuck in his head, drinks and smokes, grows paranoid about his relationship, struggles to compose text messages, and watches The Da Vinci Code, all the while avoiding anyone and everyone, descending deeper into his own thoughts and fears. Meanwhile, a former crush and another cousin of Thibault’s plan a surprise birthday for him, sending the external and internal on a collision course.

Schrauwen’s brilliant comic timing and formal mastery transcends the quotidian nature of the plot. Through use of color, flashback and the dissonance between text and image, the ways in which Schrauwen layers a depiction of human consciousness as lines on paper are infused heavily with slapstick and white-knuckle tension and make for an exhilarating read and breathtaking use of the comics medium.

Fantagraphics, 2024

It all began when they started running away . . .

Life for Winona Dalloway is not as it should be. Her husband is no longer her husband, her children are not at home with her, and the city in which she lives is besieged by fires. Black ash falls like snow, songbirds screech like dinosaurs, and the doctors are calling her mad …

In this looking-glass world, Winona is forced to prove she is a sane, rational human being. As the pronouncements of the professionals grow more insistent, so too do the voices crowding inside Winona’s head. She seeks solace in the company of plants and animals, and begins to imagine an entirely other way of being – one that might make whole her broken heart.

Scribe, 2025

It is the late 1980s, the closing years of Thatcher’s Britain. For the Trainspotting crew, a new era is about to begin – a time for hope, for love, for raving.

Leaving heroin behind and separated after a drug deal gone wrong, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie each want to feel alive. They fill their days with sex and romance and trying to get ahead; they follow the call of the dance floor, with its promise of joy and redemption.

Sick Boy starts an intense relationship with Amanda, his ‘princess’ – rich, connected, everything that he is not. When the pair set a date for their wedding, Sick Boy sees a chance for his generation to take control at last. But as the 1990s dawn, will finding love be the answer to the group’s dreams or just another doomed quest?

Irvine Welsh’s sequel to his iconic bestseller Trainspotting tells a story of riotous adventures, wild new passions, and young men determined to get the most out of life.

Jonathan Cape, 2025

WINNER OF THE 2025 MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD

Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work.

How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed – then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art?

Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino.

UQP, 2024

This book’s title, No Straight Road Takes You There, is an evocation and a declaration. Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places, or the landscape is cleared away – logged, graded, levelled, tunnelled through – but to stick to these roads is to miss what else is out there. In her writing and activism, Rebecca Solnit has sought the pathless places in order to celebrate indirect and unpredictable consequences, and to embrace slowness and imperfection, which, she argues, are key to understanding the possibilities of change.

In her latest essay collection, the award-winning writer explores responses to the climate crisis, as well as reflections on women’s rights, the fight for democracy, the trends in masculinity, and the rise of the far right in the West. Incantatory and poetic, positive and engaging, these essays argue for the long-term view and the power of collective action, making a case for seeding change wherever possible, and offering us all a path out of the wilderness.

Granta, 2025

The incredible first memoir from the Booker-winning radical icon Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, this is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’.

Distraught and even a “little ashamed” at the intensity of her response to the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen, Arundhati began to write Mother Mary Comes to Me. The result is this astonishing, disconcerting, surprisingly funny chronicle-unique and simultaneously universal, of the author’s life, from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace-a memoir like no other.

Hamish Hamilton, 2025

‘There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.’

Things In Nature Merely Grow is essential reading, especially if you’ve ever been depressed, though it’s not a self help book. It’s Yiyun Li’s insights into existing in what she refers to as an ‘abyss’, ie the world as it is without her children. There is no moving past this abyss, nor does the abyss have an end, there is only the ‘now and now and now and now’. How can one reside in this space, and how does one live a life when a life is not necessarily worth living?

This biography is about death, about thinking instead of feeling, but also about life and linguistics, and the human capacity for language. And of course the limitations of our language, and our ability to understand the world. ‘Yes, I loved them, and still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives’.

If Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking resonated with you, this book will too.

4th Estate, 2025

A lyrical work that explores the fallibility of memory and asks if we can ever really know the ones we love or ourselves …

Estranged sistes—Eva and Elisabeta Novak—have not spoken since Eva’s young daughter, Gracie, was killed in a road accident. More than a decade later, and long after Eva has moved overseas, Elizabeta calls, insisting that Eva return home.

But when Eva arrives at her sister’s house, she discovers that Elizabeta is dead. Eva finds that she has been appointed the executor of Elizabeta’s estate, and as she undertakes the monumental task of clearing out the house, she comes to know her sister again through the objects and documents that she encounters. Through this process, Eva is forced to reckon with their shared history and the possibility that her mind cannot be trusted.

Foreign Country engages with themes of grief and loss, and the instability of memory. The novel explores the difficulty of coming to terms with conflicting accounts of the past and asks how well we ever really know the ones that we love, or our own past selves.

Ultimo Press, 2025

Everybody wants something.

An addict pleads to rid himself of the mystical force ruling his life. A girl takes drastic action to ensure her grandmother lives forever. A man untangles his memories and succeeds only in unravelling himself.

Glutt examines the cost of our desires, traversing the boundary of literary horror and speculative fiction to produce a gut-churning appraisal of wanton desperation.

Darkly humorous and at times eerily grotesque, this debut anthology toys with fantasy and comedy to explore hunger in its most physical and discarnate forms.

Grattan St Press, 2024

My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.

Through long winter mornings, a man sits by the bedside of his elderly father.

His father, one of a generation of tragic smokers born at the end of the Second World War in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes.

His father, who created and le behind a garden, blooming from a barren village yard: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees – and endless stories.

His father, without whom the man’s past begins to quietly crack, leaving him buried in all the a fternoons of childhood. Because the end of our fathers is the end of a world.

From the winner of the International Booker Prize comes a novel about a father, a son and an orphaned garden. Set in a fading world, it spans from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia, interweaving the botany of sorrow, the consolations of storytelling and the arrival of the first tulips of spring.

Translated by Angela Rodel

Orion, 2025

They are the unhappy husbands, the disengaged grandfathers and the angry ‘letters to the editor’ writers. They sneer at generational change, know exactly where that bloody apostrophe should go and gather in sad groups bemoaning the modern world. They are Grumpy Old Buggers.

Geoff Hutchison became determined not to turn into one himself upon retirement from a career in journalism. So he wondered: what is it about ageing that tends to have this effect on Australian men, and what can be done to arrest that development?

Consulting a wide range of experts and mining his own experience and that of the other men in his life, Geoff has discovered how we can all live a happier, healthier and less grumpy life.

Affirm Press, 2025

Contradictions (both real and apparent), oppositions, enigmas, provocations, challenges—this is the kind of material that makes a life, and is the kind of material that, in fiction, one is never quite sure of. With Pretty Ugly, Kirsty Gunn reminds us again that she is a master of just such material, presenting ambiguity and complication as the essence of the storyteller’s endeavour.

The sheer force of life that Gunn is able to load these stories up with is both testament to her unrivalled skill and an exercise in what she describes as ‘reading and writing ugly’, in order to pursue the deeper truths that lie at the heart of both the human imagination and human rationality.

So here we have all the strange and seemingly impossible dualities that make up real life—and pretty ugly it can be, as well as beautiful, hopeful, bleak, difficult, exhilarating. But never, ever dull.

Rough Trade, 2025

What are we given, and what do we have to take for ourselves?

It is the 1990s. Growing up in Zanzibar, three very different young people – Karim, Fauzia and Badar – are coming of age, and dreaming of great possibilities in their young nation. But for Badar, an uneducated servant boy who has never known his parents, it seems as if all doors are closed.

Brought into a lowly position in a great house in Dar es Salaam, Badar finds the first true home of his life – and the friendship of Karim, the young man of the house. Even when a shattering false accusation sees Badar sent away, Karim and Fauzia refuse to turn away from their friend.

But as the three of them take their first steps in love, infatuation, work and parenthood, their bond is tested – and Karim is tempted into a betrayal that will change all of their lives forever.

Bloomsbury, March 2025

The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Koehler’s adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so, he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Otherwise, he works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner and also a one-room apartment in the small eastern German town of Kana. The Boss is enraged by a graffiti artist who, with wolf emblems, is defacing all the various monuments to Johann Sebastian Bach in Thuringia. A Bach fanatic and director of an amateur orchestra, he is determined to catch the culprit with the help of his gang, and Florian has no choice but to join the chase. The situation becomes even more frightening, and havoc ensues, when real wolves are sighted in the area…

Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai’s novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a devastating encapsulation of our helplessness when confronted with the moral and environmental dilemmas we face.

New Directions Publishing, 2024

The story of a nameless father and son trying to survive with their humanity intact in a postapocalyptic wasteland where Earth’s natural resources have been diminished, and some survivors are left to raise others for meat, The Road is one of Cormac McCarthy’s bleakest and most prescient novels. Dedicated to his son, John Francis McCarthy, McCarthy’s The Road is also one of his most personal novels. Among a string of other awards, it was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

This first official graphic novel adaptation of McCarthy’s work is illustrated by acclaimed French cartoonist Manu Larcenet, who ably transforms the world depicted by McCarthy’s spare and brutal prose into stark ink drawings that add an additional layer to this haunting tale of family love and human perseverance. Cormac McCarthy personally approved the making of this book before his death, and the adaptation bears the approval of the McCarthy estate.

Abrams, 2024