3/18/2024
Mister, Mister

Mister, Mister

This is an engrossing and thought-provoking novel about identity and belonging. You are drawn into a world where cultures collide, secrets unravel while an undercurrent of dread creeps along, but also where the power of friendship shines through. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking a deeply satisfying and enlightening story.

3/11/2024
Tell Me I'm Worthless

Tell Me I'm Worthless

An emotional rollercoaster that is heart-wrenching and inspiring, unflinching and visceral in its exploration of identity, mental health and self-worth. Its authenticity and rawness makes it a challenging but important read, and one that will resonate long after you finish the last page.

3/4/2024
Whale

Whale

This story twists and turns through a magical and sometimes grotesque world of giants, tricksters, a girl who can communicate with elephants, a crone who controls honey bees with a whistle, the building of a cinema and the making of many bricks. Full of surprises, violence and humour, this is a page-turner on an epic scale.

2/26/2024
The Chain-Gang-All-Stars

The Chain-Gang-All-Stars

This is a future US where violent criminals become idols and sex symbols and compete for freedom in Hard Action Sports. Physically and mentally tortured, they must kill or be killed in televised matches. Broad in scope and told from multiple perspectives, this violent novel packs a punch as it examines sin, redemption, prejudice and privilege. It’s a discomforting read interspersed with factual footnotes that show injustice is a reality.

2/19/2024
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

The Jewish and black residents of a poor neighborhood in Pennsylvania come together to welcome a deaf-mute boy into their community. When he is placed in an inhumane institution, at the hands of a racist, they form a complex plan to free him. I enjoyed the storytelling, the dry wit and the way the author paints the people, but was shocked at the scenes in the psychiatric ward. But in the end, it's the good in ordinary people that delivers hope.

2/12/2024
The Coward

The Coward

A car accident leaves Jarred unable to walk again. And to make matters worse, he will now have to live with his father. This sets the tone for a book that is as candid as anything you're likely to read on family relationships, disability and coming to terms with life pre and post accident . Punctuated with some bitingly funny humour, Jarred will be a character you will want to get to know and cheer for.

2/5/2024
Salt Slow

Salt Slow

Slyly beautiful, and with a teasingly unnerving relationship to reality, this short story collection will seductively detour you into the uncanny. This is a place where boundaries blur and merge: between land and sea, skin and bone, human and animal, the mythic and the everyday. The horror-lore of vampires and werewolves lurks here, but only in shadow-glimpses; what gives this collection its greatest power is its profound emotionality.

1/29/2024
Ada’s Realm

Ada’s Realm

Ada is born and reborn in a 15th century Ghanaian village, a world war 2 concentration camp and modern day London and Berlin. Her lives are linked by a bracelet and a narrator who embodies a door knocker, a hut and a passport - and who has a long running tussle with God to be born a human. Moving yet often funny, I loved the whole concept and originality of this debut novel and its progress through the centuries. God is brilliant!

1/22/2024
Your Love Is Not Good

Your Love Is Not Good

A challenging read, in which the nameless main character reflects on youth, heritage, race, art and sexuality. Sometimes dreamlike, even hallucinating, sometimes harsh or brutal. Every detail seems to count, while the artist painter questions motivations and goals in life, and tries to come to terms with it. A haunting tale that keeps on lingering.

1/15/2024
Western Lane

Western Lane

Deceptively simple, this short novel doesn’t need prior knowledge of the game of squash. The game highlights how this British Pakistani family is dealing with their collective grief, and we watch their emotions unfold through small gestures, overheard conversations and familial obligations, hiding their heartbreak. A great deal is revealed in the silence between them. I was thinking of Gopi and her sisters long after I finished reading.

1/8/2024
Fish Tale

Fish Tale

It starts with a dream, a missing painting and a fatal fishing accident - an incident around which multiple lives over numerous generations then revolve. Gambles are taken and decisions made on the flip of a coin for which the outcomes are far reaching and unexpected. This unusual read is as slippery as a fish. It’s playful, whimsical, even absurd but also asks big questions about chance, fortune and self determination.

1/1/2024
Cuddy

Cuddy

The immense personality and legacy of St Cuthbert (Cuddy) shines through every page of this alternative history of Northeast England. It could have been like a novel by Tolstoy – a saga of the significance of common people - but although epic in dimension, it defies genre. Instead it delivers a forceful fusion of scholarly hagiography, psychic poetry, wonderment at architectural triumph and a profound empathy for the victims of history.

12/25/2023
A Hunger

A Hunger

This is a novel about love and duty: about a woman's ambition to have a career and to excel in it, and how a woman is expected to put her husband first, especially when he becomes very ill and is dependent on her. This is what Anita has to deal with - and how she copes is the story that unfolds. Sufficient to say that coping is not easy and the demands of duty are very hard indeed.

12/18/2023
Dryland

Dryland

A hazy and fluid coming of age story told from the perspective of 15 year old Julie, at the moment of her own queer sexual awakening. Evocatively set in the early 1990s, REM, skater culture and the haze of clove cigarettes run throughout. The read is gentle, dreamlike and detached, as Julie is haunted by the absence of her swimming superstar brother and seeks to re-discover him - and herself - in the depths and rhythms of the swimming pool.

12/11/2023
Best of Friends

Best of Friends

If you still have bonds with childhood friends even though you've taken different directions, this book will resonate profoundly. Its easy and thoughtful evocation of two talented women making careers and relationships across decades and continents is quietly astonishing. Perceptive, vanity-puncturing and unexpectedly hopeful.

12/4/2023
The Love of Singular Men

The Love of Singular Men

Camilo uses crutches, his parents are always fighting, the heat is oppressive. Everything changes when his father brings a mysterious boy, Cosme, to live with them. This is a moving novella of first love and loss, perfect to read in one sitting.

11/27/2023
The Fish

The Fish

Tenderness and beauty turn to division and turmoil as environmental, world-wide crises wreak havoc for three diverse characters. This cautionary tale on climate has elements of the fantastical but its authenticity is undeniable. This is a unsettling reflection on humanity’s denial of the damage being caused to our planet

11/20/2023
Your Show

Your Show

Forget over-hyped sports memoirs, this is a fast, pacy novel that conveys what football is really like. It focuses on the ref – the figure hated by pretty much everyone. Plus this ref is Black – the only one in the League. I didn’t know Rennie, I looked him him up when I finished and found out the whole story is true – even more respect for that.

11/13/2023
Traces of Enayat

Traces of Enayat

This is a strange but mesmerising book. It tells of the detailed search into the life of Enayat al-Zayyat, a young Egyptian female author who committed suicide before the publication of her only novel. Also bound up with the posy-colonial politics of Egypt and, specifically, what happened to women under Nassar. It's by no means an easy read, but it is fascinating, and shows how the struggle continues across generations.

11/6/2023
Bellies

Bellies

This isn’t a long novel but I came away feeling that I had been on a journey with the characters. Sometimes I loved them, sometimes I thought they were awful, but I was completely absorbed in their story. Transitioning is only a part - because the book is also about friendship, family and love, delivered through a story that exudes snark, exuberant youthfulness, and dances around everyone’s longing to be seen for who they really are.

10/30/2023
The Secret Book of Flora Lea

The Secret Book of Flora Lea

After finding a fairytale written by an unknown American writer in the antiquarian bookshop where she works, Hazel embarks on a journey to find her long lost sibling. I found this a lovely tale of lost innocence, true friendship and the consolation of fantasy and nature.

10/23/2023
Of Cattle and Men

Of Cattle and Men

A sparse and brutal read with an almost biblical sense of allegory. We are immersed, gut-deep, in the bloody reality of a slaughterhouse. We smell and sweat, kill and emote with the workers. The story that emerges is one of mystery - as cattle begin to behave strangely, the workers attempt to understand why. But this read is more one of sensory experience than plotting: it's as short and powerful as a stun-gun, but not without tenderness.

10/16/2023
When I Sing, Mountains Dance

When I Sing, Mountains Dance

This highly poetic novel showed me a small mountain community where people live in symbiosis with animals, nature and the spirit world. I felt the cruelty of life, the resilience of the people and the beauty of seeing and accepting what is there. Told from different perspectives, be it human or non-human, the language has a beautiful echoing rhythm, ranging from astoundingly poetic to down-to-earth, all resonating in your head for a long time.

10/9/2023
The Silence Project

The Silence Project

Emilia’s grief is forced into the spotlight as she struggles to align herself with her mother, an activist who changed the world though coordinating a mass suicide. Gripping from the outset, the reader experiences the shocks, revelations and confusion with the protagonist as she compiles her memoir, recounting her struggle to separate her mother from the personality propelled and twisted by the increasingly powerful Community she left behind.

10/2/2023
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

A short story collection that may seduce or repel you, but is impossible to ignore. The stories reach extreme places of terror and horror, but are always grounded in a tangible reality and recognisable social divisions of class, adolescence and generational trauma. Although an intense reading experience, most of the stories are brief stabs, allowing you chance to gasp and reach for daylight in-between tales.

9/25/2023
Patricia Wants To Cuddle

Patricia Wants To Cuddle

A unique and bitingly entertaining cocktail of reality TV satire and gory body-horror, this read will gleefully keep you on your toes. Set in the final stages of a reality TV dating show, we follow the power-plays of the remaining contestants where nothing is off-limits in their bid to win. It's a thrillingly fast and wild ride, often bloody and monstrous, but ultimately a hopeful one of queer solidarity and survival, both human and Sasquatch.

9/18/2023
Yellowface

Yellowface

A hapless writer steals the unfinished manuscript of her late popular Asian friend. With its publication under her own name, the discussion about cultural appropriation gets going and everything becomes seriously out of hand. This novel is simultaneously satire, indictment and suspense. A brilliant combination that held my attention until the bitter end.

9/11/2023
Peaces

Peaces

Set on a mysterious luxury train, this is a high velocity, surreal romp of a story. Journeying with non-honeymooners Xavier and Otto, the reader accumulates a bizarre collection of playful, dark and strange backstories. Reality, sanity and perception come into question as connections between the characters emerge. Prepare for the unexpected: for ancestral pet mongooses, paintings that can’t be seen but can be described and an invisible son.

9/4/2023
Nettleblack

Nettleblack

Hold on tight for a whimsical romp with a subversive Victorian detective agency who challenge their society’s expectations about women, sexuality and gender whilst engaged in increasingly chaotic investigations. Told with wit, eccentricity and tenderness, this mysterious farce will have you gripped until the final page.

8/28/2023
Pod

Pod

You might worry that an adventure tale of dolphins, featuring their intelligence and resourcefulness in overcoming the adversities of natural survival and ecological disaster, would feel anthropomorphically sentimental. Not so. The scientific research that Paull employs in her story raises it far above any such niceness, with a powerful moral message around environmental crisis.

8/21/2023
Sell Us the Rope

Sell Us the Rope

Young Stalin in London in 1907, still with a heart, and the magnetic, legendary figures surrounding him. This short novel fizzes with politics, spying and sexual attraction. It’s direct and pacy and so believable it’s exhilarating, even in the bits you know must be invented.

8/14/2023
The Housekeepers

The Housekeepers

This joyful romp of a book delivers an Edwardian heist fronted by an team of amazing women. The plotting is whip-smart and, as the action hots up, it delivers a high octane blast of energy. The lightness of touch belies a dark underbelly which will have you shouting for justice for the vulnerable and wronged. But the overall experience in one of pure entertainment building to a hugely satisfying climax. Hail the housekeepers.

8/7/2023
Wivenhoe

Wivenhoe

The story takes place in an alternative present; a world made small by isolation and the need to survive. A violent murder has taken place but the tale that follows contains tenderness as well as menace. It is told in turns by the perpetrator’s stepmother and brother with a beautiful honesty through which you feel their despair, anger and loss.

7/31/2023
The Swimmers

The Swimmers

Imagine a situation in which you are observing life from far above, then gradually you zoom in and see more details. That’s what this book felt like to me. And the closer I got, the more I got involved emotionally. And so the language also changes. From a laconic, elaborate style with irony and even sarcasm the writing evolves to a more poignant repetitive wording and a loving, honest image of a woman’s failing mind.

7/24/2023
The Things That We Lost

The Things That We Lost

Nikhil knows there is more to his father's death than his mother is telling him, but how easy is it to find out the truth when nobody wants to talk about it? The characters in this book are so real to us we love them as though they were our own. Nikhil is suffering at a vulnerable stage in his life and I just wanted to shield and protect him. A brilliant first novel
- hopefully the first of many.

7/17/2023
The New Life

The New Life

From the opening erotic scene, this book is an amazing mix of physical details, intellectual analysis and moral dilemmas. Passion and courage blend with self-obsession and disregard for others, especially women. The evocation of a moment when things could have been different for gay people, 100 years before they were, is extraordinarily moving.

7/10/2023
Cleopatra and Frankenstein

Cleopatra and Frankenstein

At times laugh out loud funny, often poignant and always engrossing, the reader inhabits the intense turmoil of Cleo and Frank’s relationship and the lives of those closest to them: lives lived flippantly and always on the verge of disaster. This novel has a hard honesty to it and contains scenes of sexual violence and self harm.

7/3/2023
A Looking Glass Sound

A Looking Glass Sound

Wilder, a lonely boy, spends a summer by the sea and is confronted with an intruder called the Dagger Man, several missing women and a confusing friendship. A gruesome discovery haunts him for a lifetime and is the reason for a rift between him and a friend who steals his life story. Such an intriguing, dark, spooky and exciting read, I found it a real page turner - and I didn’t see the end coming at all.

6/26/2023
Grey Bees

Grey Bees

Set after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, we follow beekeeper Sergeyich, an inhabitant of the war-battered eastern Grey Zone, as he journeys through Ukraine to seek a safe location for his beehives. His quest navigates us through the complexity of contested territory, where nature, surreal humour and stoic kindness lift an undercurrent of shell-shocked numbness. An illuminating, humane read of care and survival within unending conflict.

6/19/2023
Learning to Talk to Plants

Learning to Talk to Plants

I wasn’t always sure I liked Paula - and that may be an issue for some readers - but the delicate prose drew me into this poignant portrayal of her double loss of death and betrayal. Occasional lighter moments mean that whilst this is sad, it isn’t depressing, and its brevity means the plunge into the numbness of her grief doesn’t last too long. My favourite parts were of Paula at work on the neonatal ward, and I found those very moving.

6/12/2023
Water Shall Refuse Them

Water Shall Refuse Them

An isolated Welsh village, the heatwave of 1976 and the grief of losing a child create a stifling atmosphere for this coming of age story. The threat and foreboding builds as neglected and isolated Nif looks for answers, drawing on superstition, folklore and a taste for cruelty. This is an unsettling read; shocking and haunting.

6/5/2023
Old God’s Time

Old God’s Time

Some books go so deep it is hard to describe them at all. Starting from a policeman’s retirement, this story opens out into the trauma of Ireland, a violence kept secret, its effects explored with such tenderness and empathy it is heartbreaking. The language and landscape are immense and the love of humanity that comes through every page is extraordinary.

5/29/2023
History. A Mess

History. A Mess

Just one mistaken interpretation of a historic manuscript in the Bodleian is all it takes to send her into the elation of having discovered England’s first female artist- and the stress of the thesis that follows, culminating in the realisation of the mistake, is all it takes for the fatal disintegration of her personality. The journey through her mindscape will chill you with its overlays of everyday relationships and the pathological inability of facts to stay true.

5/22/2023
The Rabbit Hutch

The Rabbit Hutch

The Rabbit Hutch is the tower-block in which the characters of this novel reside: living in close proximity yet at a distance from one another. There is mundanity, the extraordinary and trauma in the lives depicted, which all converge in a single moment, the moment the novel starts, when the main character 'exits her body'. Shocking from the start, this is a provoking, tumultuous read. It will make you think, laugh and despair in equal measure.

5/15/2023
Vagabonds!

Vagabonds!

Imagine a city created by a rather malevolent god and watched over by one of his guardian angels. That city is Lagos and the angel looks after the 'vagabonds' - people attracted to the same sex, which is illegal in Nigeria. This is a story about how they survive, undercover of the protection of the angel. It is a story of bewilderment, of defiance, of courage and, most of all, of survival against all the odds.

5/8/2023
Palmares

Palmares

A disturbing, coming of age story of a young slave girl in 17th century Brazil, seeking to find her identity. As she is moved from plantation to plantation she hears of a place called Palmares where former slaves are said to be free. But is it the paradise it seems? This complex tale is told in a dispassionate way, but is woven with magic realism and mysticism. bringing a sense of hope to an otherwise bleak struggle.

5/1/2023
Of Women and Salt

Of Women and Salt

What a lot to pack into one short book! I got totally caught up in each successive generation as the story moved from Cuba to Miami, El Salvador to Texas. The voices are so strong and honest, it’s a moving exploration of women’s strengths and their failures – and a quietly devastating analysis of what they are up against.

4/24/2023
Swimming in the Dark

Swimming in the Dark

A lyrical coming of age story set within early 1980's Poland. We follow soon-to-graduate Ludwik and their rapidly blossoming love affair with Janusz, in the temporary idyll of a summer camp. Soon, the grip of the repressive State exerts its ever stronger hold over Ludwik's attempts to live a life true to themselves. Both the freedom and the constraint is powerfully drawn - I found this an evocative and illuminating read of individual resistance.

4/17/2023
Jackal

Jackal

Horror, thriller and fantasy meet in this novel, which kept me awake through the night wanting to see how it would end. Liz, a troubled black woman, visits her nearly all-white birthplace to attend the wedding of her best friend Mel. When Mel’s young daughter disappears, it sets in motion long-forgotten memories of a creature in the woods that abducts and maims little black girls. Tense, page-turning stuff.

4/10/2023
I Am Not Your Eve

I Am Not Your Eve

A chorus of voices combine to reclaim the story of Teha-amana, muse and child-bride of artist Paul Gauguin, and subject of his painting 'Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch'. Set in Tahiti, the book interweaves exquisite retellings of Polynesian origin myths with troubling colonial power abuses behind the painting. Familiarise yourself with the artwork before reading if you can, as this makes the book's multiple voices resonate even more profoundly.