რბილი ყდა

Write Me for You by Tillie Cole (Michael Joseph) — a romance novel delivering the full force of romantic longing, delayed gratification, and the particular pleasure of a love story that takes both its characters and its readers completely seriously. Written with warmth, wit, and genuine emotional intelligence — the kind of book that reminds you why romance fiction, at its best, is one of the most satisfying reading experiences available. Published by Michael Joseph.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson (Michael Joseph) — a true crime author at a family holiday gathering when someone turns up dead, applying his own logical methodology to the problem and discovering that real-world murder investigation is rather less neat than its literary equivalent. A witty, inventive, genuinely clever mystery that plays knowingly with genre conventions while delivering a genuine puzzle. Published by Michael Joseph.

Us Against You by Fredrik Backman (Michael Joseph) — the sequel to Beartown continues the story of the town divided by violence and its aftermath, now with the additional pressure of a rival hockey team and the escalating conflict between communities that mirrors and amplifies the personal conflicts at the novel’s centre. Backman writes about sport with a precision and a seriousness that few literary novelists bring to it. Published by Michael Joseph.

Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Hodder & Stoughton) — Evie Porter has spent years cataloguing every reason she plans to kill her spectacularly incompetent villain employer, a list that grows longer every day. When a genuine threat emerges, Evie and her villain find themselves on the same side — discovering that competence and incompetence can, in sufficiently desperate circumstances, produce something unexpected. A fantasy romance of great charm and dark wit. Published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Factotum by Charles Bukowski (Virgin Books) — Henry Chinaski drifts from city to city and job to job through 1940s America, losing each position with a combination of incompetence, insubordination, and constitutional inability to take orders from people he considers his inferiors. Bukowski’s picaresque of American working-class life — the novel of the itinerant years before Post Office, written with complete authenticity and dark, dry humour. Published by Virgin Books.

Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski (Virgin Books) — Henry Chinaski wanders through bars and rooming houses, working menial labour, drinking heavily, loving badly, and observing the world with merciless precision. Not comfortable, not meant to be: the essential Bukowski short story collection, establishing him as one of the defining voices of American underground literature. Published by Virgin Books.

Piercing by Ryu Murakami (Bloomsbury) — Kazuki, quiet and seemingly ordinary, is methodically planning a murder with great care. A slim, wickedly precise psychological thriller about the relationship between violence and intimacy, written in the sparse, disturbing style that made In the Miso Soup an international sensation. A masterclass in literary horror that illuminates rather than merely disturbs — not for the faint-hearted. Published by Bloomsbury.

Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead by Milan Kundera (Faber) — a young man visits his dying elderly father and finds himself unable to say what needs to be said before time runs out. Among the most painful and most perfectly formed things Kundera ever wrote: a meditation on time, parenthood, and the words that remain unsaid between people who love each other. Part of the Faber Stories series. Published by Faber & Faber.

Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk (Faber) — the Ottoman island of Mingheria, 1901: a deadly plague spreading through a population whose Muslim and Greek communities are held in delicate balance, and a governor and his princess wife at the centre of a crisis that is simultaneously medical, political, and historical. Pamuk’s pandemic novel — begun before COVID-19, completed during it — at his most historically ambitious. Published by Faber & Faber.

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (Faber) — Frances, twenty-one, a spoken-word poet in Dublin, falls in love with Nick, a married man ten years older, and the affair dismantles the emotional self-sufficiency she was absolutely sure she possessed. Rooney’s debut established her as the defining voice of a generation — a writer who takes seriously the specific emotional and political reality of being young and intelligent and precarious in contemporary Europe. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera (Faber) — four old friends meet in a Paris park, and in their conversation Kundera finds the vehicle for a final meditation on the questions that have occupied him for six decades: the nature of art, the comedy of existence, the possibility that what we think matters does not, and that this might be not a tragedy but a liberation. Barely a hundred and twenty pages — the perfect capstone to one of the great bodies of work in twentieth-century literature. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — two Peruvian men face simple choices: one refuses to sell his house to a developer, one refuses to pay extortion money. In the simplicity of these choices, Vargas Llosa finds the substance of a meditation on what honour costs and what it is worth. Among his most warmly human novels — lighter in tone than his major works but no less precise. The ideal entry point for readers new to Vargas Llosa. Published by Faber & Faber.

The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — a holy man and his thousands of followers in the Brazilian backcountry face four military expeditions from the newly formed Republic in one of the most extraordinary episodes in South American history. Vargas Llosa’s most ambitious novel — vast in scope, intricate in structure, overwhelming in historical and human detail. One of the defining Latin American novels and a genuine masterpiece of world literature. Published by Faber & Faber.