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The best fiction to read this year —New StatesmanOur 25 most anticipated fiction books for 2026 —Shortlist MagazineMy Bags Are Big, a darkly comic satire of wealth, reinvention, and regret – set against the surreal backdrop of Dubai.‘Is it merely a long con? Is Bitcoin just a mighty payday, or have I gatecrashed one of the great moments of history? Up there with the enslavement of fire, the invention of writing, the power of flight. A moment everyone will be pointing to for thousands of years, as long as there are people to point. And Dan was there. Bitcoin rulz okay?’With Fischer’s trademark wit, philosophical flair, and scathing insight into the absurdities of modern life, My Bags Are Big is a brilliant satire of masculinity, memory, and the costs of pretending you’ve moved on.

The People’s Book Prize 2027 FinalistFrom the author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin comes a candid, comic and irresistibly companionable portrait of a writer’s life in rural Norfolk.Drawn from Louis de Bernières’s hugely popular Facebook posts written between 2015 and 2024, Smelling of Rooks gathers a decade of reflections, anecdotes and observations on everything from music, cats and motorcycles to politics, parenting and the perils of social media. It is a book about the texture of ordinary days, told with the warmth, eccentricity and mischief that have made de Bernières one of Britain’s most beloved storytellers.Set against the rolling fields and modest peaks of what he calls the ‘Norfolk Alps’, this accidental memoir captures a writer at ease with his life, his readers and his absurdities. There are riffs on the pleasures of cooking and DIY, portraits of friends and neighbours, the escapades of his children, and the unpredictable joys of country living.At once funny, tender and defiantly unfiltered, Smelling of Rooks shows Louis de Bernières as he really is – reflective, unpretentious and gloriously human. A celebration of family, friendship and the small wonders of daily life, it is a book to dip into, laugh with, and treasure.

Short-Listed For The Felix Dennis Best First Collection Prize (Forward Prizes For Poetry 2007) In Galatea, her first collection, Challenger casts a poet’s sensitive eye across the hours of a tumultuous century to create startling poems whose voice – resolute, compassionate, original – both celebrates and mourns the tensions of human nature. The name Galatea itself refers to the female figure in Greek myth sculpted from stone by the hands of Pygmalion. Becoming enamoured of the statue, Pygmalion asks of the gods that they might turn her to flesh. Drawing her themes from this central story, Challenger portrays her subjects in trembling poise between action and inaction, consummation and defeat. A series of little epiphanies, the poems are witness to the uncovering of a mediaeval woman’s body in earth churned by the boots of soldiers at war, a sea of five hundred naked bodies marching across the urban horizon of a city, the transplanting of a titanium heart in the folds of an unknown individual’s chest. Whatever her centre of attention, Challenger transforms the singularity of her subject into a universal experience with a deliberately harsh lyricism much her own. The result is a series of lyrics – unsettling and otherwordly – whose searches for grace reveal a dark humour and intense compassion for all the reaches of human nature.

The Critic Debut Novel of the MonthAn unoccupied flat. A freshly dressed bed. The body of a young woman laid out neatly on the duvet. The dead girl looks familiar – troublingly familiar – but Detective Inspector Cassie May can’t place her. And to compound her troubles, Cassie has just started dating the flat’s owner, James Flynn.When her boyfriend is accused of murder, an ambitious young DI risks her career – and her life – by defying her bosses, the security services, and a crime syndicate, to prove the innocence of a man who seems more worried about the long-buried secrets she might unearth than the murder charge hanging over him.Set across the leafiest of Sheffield suburbs, the sink estates of South Manchester, and the bleak and snowy Pennine moors that separate them, The Wythenshawe Dandy presents a discomforting picture of a world where privilege and wretchedness coexist.

In this landmark first full-length collection, Anna Mendelssohn emerges as one of the most singular and formidable voices of the late twentieth-century avant-garde. ‘Implacable Art’ is a work of restless transformation, where the poetic page becomes a site of intense resistance against the narrowing effects of modern power and state surveillance.The collection continues Mendelssohn’s career-long exploration of persecution, loss, and the precarity of the individual. Her lyricism is both fiercely guarded and radically open, weaving esoteric wordplay and high-stakes linguistic play into a ‘fugitive’ poetics that refuses to be categorized. By treating words as magical objects capable of re-enchanting a world shaped by alienation, Mendelssohn challenges the reader to look beyond official language and accepted histories.Moving between ‘explosive’ political confrontation and the quiet, minor confusions of daily life, Implacable Art offers an ecstatic and at times painful vision of our shared dependencies and desires. It is a work of profound imaginative inventiveness – a testament to the necessity of art as a means of survival and a howl of defiance that remains as vital and audacious today as when it was first published.

Award-winning writer Alice Thompson’s compelling new novel is a story of transformation; an exploration of the shifting borderlands between imagination and reality.It is 1936. Iris Tennant has applied, under a pseudonym, to become personal assistant to Lord Melfort, the Under-Secretary of War, at his estate in the Scottish Highlands. Her plan is to find out why her younger sister Daphne committed suicide there a year previously. As Iris gradually falls under the spell of Glen Almain, she starts to see the apparition of Daphne haunting its glades and begins to wonder about the manner of her death. Is there really a beast that inhabits the woods? Who is the mysterious falconer? What actually happened to Daphne, and is Iris destined for the same fate?A backdrop of impending war and the spectre of Nazi Germany loom over this strange, dark tale. What ensues is a battle between instinct and reason, fantasy and history.

William Blake is a private detective. When he is asked by an eccentric scientist to investigate the whereabouts of his amnesiac missing wife, Louise, Will finds himself entangled in layers of deceptions and disappearances that lead him inexorably back to an unsolved mystery in his own past: the loss of his young daughter Emily. The case takes Will to brothels, night clubs and amusement arcades in the Scottish seaside resort of Portobello. Identities become confused as his sexual obsession with a night club singer becomes entwined with sightings of Louise, his own torturous memories, and new visions of the lost Emily.The Existential Detective is a surreal, dreamlike story of loss, incest and what it means to remember.

Winner of The Polari First Book Prize 2016Finalist for The People’s Book Prize 2016Shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2016Chosen for City Reads 2016Shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prizeELLE Best Books of 2015The Reading Agency: Books of 2015Mickey Donnelly is smart, which isn’t a good thing in his part of town. Despite having a dog called Killer and being in love with the girl next door, everyone calls him ‘gay’. It doesn’t help that his best friend is his little sister, Wee Maggie, and that everyone knows he loves his Ma more than anything in the world. He doesn’t think much of his older brother Paddy and really doesn’t like his Da. He dreams of going to America, taking Wee Maggie and Ma with him, to get them away from Belfast and Da. Mickey realises it’s all down to him. He has to protect Ma from herself. And sometimes, you have to be a bad boy to be a good son.

‘Fleshing out the shadowy metaphysical hints of Beckett’s novels, this intellectual romp is the best debut I have read in years’ Nicholas Lezard, The GuardianMonday lunchtime: a bank is being robbed. The gunmen tell everyone to get down on the floor, but an old man refuses. Behind him in the queue is Rada Kalenkova, an investigator for the Office of Assessment, recording everything she sees. Shots are fired and a woman is killed. Or maybe two. But Rada ignores the murders and pursues the old man instead.Nothing about the robbery or the putative killings makes sense. The robbers might be police. The bank manager denies anyone was hurt, despite the blood on the walls. Every subsequent enquiry leads towards Edward Likker, a renowned fixer. But Likker is dead.The Fat of Fed Beasts is an ambitious literary mix of existential uncertainty, murder, bureaucracy, unreliable father figures and disaffected policemen. It asks why we do what we do, whether it matters, and what, if anything, our lives are worth. And it’s funny.‘Ware has an uncluttered prose style and a willingness to stretch the boundaries of fiction. His sensibility is finely tuned to those grey areas of experience where identities shift, where people forget who they really are. No other writer springs to mind as a ready comparison to Ware: already he has defined a unique thematic territory.’ Aiden O’Reilly, The Short Review

Visiting Thailand to marry a sex worker, Raymond is informed that his father’s body has been discovered in an isolated villa on the Belgian coast. While his bride embarks on a career in the Dutch and German porn industries, Raymond moves into the villa with the intention of renovating the property.Life by the sea, however, does not go according to plan.The Beginning of the End marks the arrival of a bold new talent.

Long-listed for a Saboteur Award 2016: Best Anthology“Your indispensable guide to the poetry of these islands, now in its fifth year”The Best British Poetry presents the finest and most engaging poems found in literary magazines and webzines over the past year. The material gathered represents the rich variety of current UK poetry. Each poem is accompanied by a note by the poet explaining the inspiration for the poem.Featuring: Aria Misha Aber, Astrid Alben, Rachael Allen, Janette Ayachi, Tara Bergin, Crispin Best, Amy Blakemore, Sarah Boulton, Kit Buchan, Sam Buchan-Watts, Miles Burrows, Niall Campbell, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Sophie Collins, Claire Crowther, Paula Cunningham, Jesse Darling, Patricia Debney, Ian Duhig, Joe Dunthorne, Francine Elena, Inua Ellams, Andrew Elliott, Victoria Field, Annie Freud, Matthew Gregory, David Hart, Selima Hill, Sarah Howe, Kathleen Jamie, Tom Jenks, Luke Kennard, Amy Key, Kate Kilalea, Caleb Klaces, Zaffar Kunial, Daisy Lafarge, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Dorothy Lehane, Fran Lock, Adam Lowe, Chris McCabe, Amy McCauley, Alex MacDonald, Andrew McMillan, Kathryn Maris, Sophie Mayer, Kim Moore, Salah Niazi, Jeremy Over, Bobby Parker, Rebecca Perry, Holly Pester, Heather Phillipson, Padraig Regan, Sam Riviere, Sophie Robinson, Jessica Schouela, Stephen Sexton, Penelope Shuttle, Hannah Silva, Marcus Slease, Greta Stoddart, Chloe Stopa-Hunt, Rebecca Tamás, Jack Underwood, Mark Waldron, Megan Watkins, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial PrizeJustine is a painting, a doppelgänger and a woman of beguiling beauty. Set in contemporary London, Justine is a story of a man’s obsession with a woman – or is it two women? For Justine has a twin sister Juliette, and as the story unfolds, the opium-dazed narrator becomes increasingly unsure as to the identity of the woman he desires.

The Art of Keeping Quiet is the first anthology in English translation by Rodolfo Alonso, one of today’s most renowned Argentine poets. As early as 1956, Raúl Gustavo Aguirre noted in Alonso “a surprising verbal command, where the conquests of modern poetry meld into the terrain of language, while still respecting the structure and spirit of quotidian expression.” Fifty years later, Juan Gelman praised “this crystalline voice that has celebrated existence, giving its expression an essential structure like an expanding spiral. Beauty turns these poems into music; they’re engraved with a formal, imaginative, and conceptual rigor that is exceptional.” Alonso’s poetry is, in short, a radical questioning of solipsism, an exemplary search for the other. A poetry aware of itself, its reaches and limits, always seeking to be reinvented. A poetry that serenely unites aesthetic commitment and the social vanguard.

Christmas 2015: The top 10 debut fiction books, The IndependentMaddie and Harry: she’s an estate agent, he’s a teacher. They’ll say they live in the Black Country. They’ll say how they met Jonathan Cotard, explain how they later argued, had a car accident, thought they’d killed someone. Thought they had. And as they search for a truth, they’ll tell us their secrets, their mistakes. And we’ll judge them. We'll judge Harry's fling with a schoolgirl and Maddie's previous life. We'll judge the nature of love and violence, good and evil. The Black Country. For Maddie and Harry, it’s darker than it should be.

A young warehouseman, his promising football career cut short by injury, counts flanges, valves and couplings for a living. He longs for the warmth and women of the office, but the prostitutes who hang around the high-rise are easier to deal with. Drink provides relief, if not escape, and probably the last thing he should dream of becoming is a writer, but then he buys himself a note pad and pen.This debut novel by Neil Campbell, author of the short story collections Broken Doll and Pictures From Hopper, is a moving and darkly comic meditation on the challenge of trying to realise dreams in a harsh and unfair world.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016Observer Best Fiction of 2016Den of Geek Top Books of 2016Timothy Buchannan buys an abandoned house on the edge of an isolated village on the coast, sight unseen. When he sees the state of it he questions the wisdom of his move, but starts to renovate the house for his wife, Lauren to join him there.When the villagers see smoke rising from the chimney of the neglected house they are disturbed and intrigued by the presence of the incomer, intrigue that begins to verge on obsession. And the longer Timothy stays, the more deeply he becomes entangled in the unsettling experience of life in the small village. Ethan, a fisherman, is particularly perturbed by Timothy’s arrival, but accedes to Timothy’s request to take him out to sea. They set out along the polluted coastline, hauling in weird fish from the contaminated sea, catches that are bought in whole and removed from the village. Timothy starts to ask questions about the previous resident of his house, Perran, questions to which he receives only oblique answers and increasing hostility. As Timothy forges on despite the villagers’ animosity and the code of silence around Perran, he starts to question what has brought him to this place and is forced to confront a painful truth. The Many is an unsettling tale that explores the impact of loss and the devastation that hits when the foundations on which we rely are swept away.

A fast-paced, darkly funny crime novel set in Interior Alaska that follows down-on-his-luck cabbie, Mike Fisher, as he searches for his daughter. Her step-father has been shot in her bathroom, and Fisher thinks she killed him and fled. In a panic he tries to hide the body, but that’s not easy when it’s fifty-below outside. Things get dangerously complicated when it turns out step-dad was part of a local militia, and now they’re on Fisher’s tail. Dead of Winter evokes the harshness of winter in the ­­­sub‑arctic and the intrigue fostered in a bored, trapped and socially circumscribed small-town community.

The Guardian: Fresh voices: 50 writers you should read nowStanly is frustrated. Having set himself up as London’s protector, he’s finding that the everyday practicalities of superheroism are challenging at best, and downright tedious at worst. So it’s almost a relief when an attempt is made on his life and Stanly finds himself rushing headlong into a twisted adventure, with enemies new and old coming out of the woodwork. However, even with his friends and his ever-increasing power behind him, he may have bitten off more than he can chew this time. The monsters are coming … and nothing will ever be the same!

With an abandoned degree behind her and a thirtieth birthday approaching, amateur writer Bonnie Falls moves out of her parents’ home into a nearby flat. Her landlady, Sylvia Slythe, takes an interest in Bonnie, encouraging her to finish one of her stories, in which a young woman moves to the seaside, where she comes under strange influences. As summer approaches, Sylvia suggests to Bonnie that, as neither of them has anyone else to go on holiday with, they should go away together – to the seaside, perhaps.The new novel from the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse is a tense and moreish confection of semiotics, suggestibility and creative writing with real psychological depth and, in Bonnie Falls and Sylvia Slythe, two unforgettable characters.

Shortlisted for Best Novella in the 2017 British Fantasy AwardsDen of Geek Top Books of 2016Ginger Nuts of Horror Top 20 Books of 2016After ministering to fallen women in Victorian London, Evelyn has suffered a nervous breakdown and finds herself treated by the Water Doctors in the imposing Wakewater House, a hydropathy sanatorium.Years later, Wakewater House is renovated into modern apartments and Kirsten moves in, fresh from a break up and eager for the restorative calm of the Thames. But her archivist neighbour, Manon, fills her head with the river’s murky past and with those men of science and art who were obsessed with the drowned women who were washed up on its banks. As Kirsten learns more about Wakewater’s secrets, she becomes haunted by a solitary figure in the river and increasingly desperate to understand what the water wants from her.

Radio Nostalgia examines the borders of war, social exile, and manufactured liberty expressed through corporate media. The poet's world is mediated through news anchors, oracles and heralds, where simulated events are historicised through narrative and consumed as product. Chris Emery's auditory imagination is lurid and comically compelling, with imagery the sets the reader reeling with the terrifying beauty and sinister power of it all."As palliative as a corpse in a junkyard, Radio Nostalgia doesn't relax you so much as it opens a way into wakefulness. With a stunning lexicon, short phrases stuffed with grit, petrol and spleen, Chris Emery orchestrates a complex, resistant music into one to three-beat lines as our 'countdown to armaments'." —Forrest Gander

Dr. Mephisto is in the form of a long sequence of poems. It traces Mephistopheles as he ranges freely through time and space, at times a laconic observer, at others a thuggish participant, but always a presence wherever there is conflict and suffering and whenever there is work to be done. Far from being oppressive, this is an exciting and highly original work, whose exhilarating pace is set by Emery’s innovative use of language and form, and whose acerbic political edge keeps the vision sharp and fresh. Compelling, hard-hitting, and grimly funny, Dr Mephisto will be remembered long after being read, and a significant new poetic voice will have been recognised.

The Guardian: Fresh voices: 50 writers you should read nowCynical, solitary Stanly Bird used to be a fairly typical teenager – unless you count the fact that his best friend was a talking beagle named Daryl. Then came the superpowers. And the superpowered allies. And the mysterious enemies. And the terrifying monsters. And the stunning revelations. And the apocalypse. Now he’s not sure what he is. Or where he is. Or how exactly one is supposed to proceed after saving the world.All he knows is that his story isn’t finished.Not quite yet …

Shortlisted for the East Midland’s Book Award 2014The Pre-War House and Other Stories is the debut collection from Alison Moore, whose first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and Specsavers National Book Awards 2012.The stories collected here range from her first prize-winning short story (which appeared in a small journal in 2000) to new and recently published work. In between, Moore’s stories have been shortlisted for more than a dozen different awards including the Bridport Prize, the Fish Prize, the Lightship Flash Fiction Prize, the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Nottingham Short Story Competition. The title story won first prize in the novella category of The New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes.

PBS Recommendation. The school of forgery is a singular institution, whose principal teachings concern the volatile relationship between fakery and invention. Both you and I are its alumni, and so is the bandit boiled alive in a cauldron of oil. So are the perpetrators of hoaxes, the writers of pornographic dōjinshi, counterfeiters in love with their teachers and teens who dress up as birds to fight tyranny. Its professors proliferate. Its graduates excel in every field. Its campus is the world.This book, part prospectus and part fanzine, is made from stolen or borrowed parts – centos and collages, half-rhymes and homophonics, translations and travesties. Equally inspired by manga luminaries like Naoki Urasawa, animation and adventure stories as it is by earlier poets, the natural world and human history, School of Forgery postulates the poem as knock-off, as reclaimed scrap, and most of all as through-and-through fabrication.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa First Novel AwardShortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2018Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2018Longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical FictionNew Faces of Fiction 2017, ObserverObserver Fiction to look out for in 2017The Irish Times What To Look Out for in 2017 from Independent PublishersJen Campbell’s ‘Most Anticipated Books of 2017’Jean Bookish Thoughts ‘Most Anticipated Releases of 2017’A dark social-realist fairytale, spotlighting the shadowy underside of 1920s EnglandSummer 1923: the modern world. Orphaned Lucy Marsh climbs into the back of an old army truck and is whisked off to the woods north of London – a land haunted by the past, where lost souls and monsters conceal themselves in the trees.In a sunlit clearing she meets the ‘funny men’, a quartet of disfigured ex-soldiers named after Dorothy’s companions in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Here are the loved and the damaged, dark forests and darker histories, and the ever-present risk of discovery and violent retribution. Xan Brooks’ stunning debut is heartbreaking, disturbing and redemptive.

Longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2018How to be a Kosovan Bride opens up something entirely new to the reader: the history, culture and stories of one of the newest countries in the world. It weaves together Albanian folktale, stories of Kosovan experience of the war in 1999 and a look into the lives of modern-day Kosovan women. The dark undercurrent of Albanian blood feuds underpins a story about the impact of war and the way that new life can emerge from darkness.It is characterised by striking imagery and daring form.