Flesh
By David Szalay,
Jonathan Cape
The winner of this year’s Booker Prize chronicles its protagonist’s inarticulate life with stark minimalism, showing a man shaped by impulse, chance and partial self-understanding.
The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories
By Salman Rushdie,
Hamish Hamilton
This collection of short stories
written in the shadow of age and violence shows flashes of charm and dwells on the limits
of language.
SMall Boat
By Vincent Delecroix,
Simon & Schuster
A border officer’s cool, unaffected voice exposes bureaucratic indifference, drowned migrants, and the unsettling complicity created when tragedy becomes routine.
The City and its Uncertain Walls
By Haruki Murakami,
Harvill Secker
Drifting through familiar motifs of shadows, longing and middle-aged self-scrutiny, this work is wrapped in a cool, opaque style that soothes more than it surprises.
Memories of Distant Mountains
By Orhan Pamuk,
Hamish Hamilton
These illustrated diaries mix vivid art with scattered reflections, raising questions about publishing the personal while offering insights into Orhan Pamuk’s literary and political preoccupations.
Dream Count
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
Fourth Estate
The novel features four women navigating loss, love, corruption, and betrayal across Nigeria and America, revealing tangled bonds, fraught politics, and persistent gendered injustices.
Theft
By Abdulrazak Gurnah,
Bloomsbury
Tracking intertwined lives in postcolonial Zanzibar, Theft reveals endurance, inequality, shifting power, and the quiet resilience of those deemed insignificant.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
By Kiran Desai,
Hamish Hamilton
A sprawling tale that follows Sonia and Sunny through isolation, fractured families, abusive entanglements, and fragile reconnection, creating a haunting study of loneliness.
Notes to John
By Joan Didion,
Fourth Estate
Culled from unpublished therapy notes, the book dwells on self-analysis, troubled motherhood, intrusive psychiatry, and the unresolved question of whether such intimate material should have been made public.
What We Can Know
By Ian McEwan,
Jonathan Cape
The hunt for a vanished poem inside a drowned futuristic Britain blends obsession, memory, fractured relationships, and a quiet dread that loneliness is the final human constant.
Mudritha
By Jissa Jose,
HarperPerennial
An enigmatic woman’s disappearance becomes a lens to study female agency, quiet rebellion, and the unsettling freedom found in stepping beyond society’s expectations.
Endling
By Maria Reva,
Virago
When a snail-obsessed recluse joins two sisters on a chaotic mission shadowed by war, reality bends, genres shift and themes of extinction, displacement, and absurd hope intertwine.
Odyssey
By Stephen Fry,
Michael Joseph
Stephen Fry takes a sweeping
look at Greece’s homecoming tales, mixing bold reinterpretation with witty footnotes that brim
with curiosity.
Flashlight
By Susan Choi,
Jonathan Cape
Across seven decades, a family is shaped by exile, illness, and a father’s unexplained disappearance in a carefully detailed narrative.
The Greatest Game
By Stephen Alter,
Aleph
In 1947’s charged landscape, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim returns to navigate riots, espionage, loss and longing with remarkable agility, giving a beloved character a graceful second life.
On the Calculation of Volume (I)
By Solvej Balle,
Faber & Faber
Time halts on a single November day, forcing one woman to
relive her relationship in countless loops where jealousy, desire,
and temporal ruptures sharpen into a compact reflection on
love’s limits.
Alice Sees Ghosts
By Daisy Rockwell,
Bloomsbury
Guided by a gentle ghost,
a young woman who inherits
a collapsing New England house unearths long-buried family
secrets while healing old wounds, blending psychological realism with a light touch of the
uncanny.
We Do Not Part
By Han Kang,
Hamish Hamilton
Grief, memory, and the strange pull of wonder converge as a despairing writer is summoned by a friend’s crisis, leading to a work that is a profound exploration of the fragile endurance of life.
