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

It’s 1992, and ten-year-old Molly is tired of living in the fire-rotted, nun-haunted House of Friends: a Semi-Cooperative Living Community of Peace Faith(s) in Action with her formerly blind dad and their grieving housemate Evelyn. But when twenty-three-year-old Jeanie, a dirt bike-riding ex-con with a shady past, moves in, she quickly becomes the object of Molly’s adoration. She might treat Molly terribly, but they both have dead mums and potty mouths, so naturally Molly is the moth to Jeanie’s scuzzy flame.

When Jeanie fakes her own death in a hot-air balloon accident, Molly runs away to Chicago with just a stolen credit card and a sweet pair of LA Gear Heatwaves to meet her pen pal Demarcus and hunt down Jeanie. What follows is a race to New Year’s Eve, as Molly and Demarcus plan a sance to reunite with their lost mums in front of a live audience at the World’s Fair.

A surrealist and bold take on the American coming-of-age novel, Holly Wilson’s debut is about the interstices of loss, grief, and friendship.

Zando, 2024