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Love, Mom by Iliana Xander (Michael Joseph) — a novel in the form of letters from a mother to a daughter: advice, memory, nostalgia, and the particular quality of love that expresses itself as worry, as instruction, as the desire to prepare someone for the world’s disappointments while hoping those disappointments never arrive. Warm, funny, and ultimately moving — a portrait of a mother-daughter relationship in the only voice a mother has. Published by Michael Joseph.

Heavenly Bodies by Imani Erriu (Michael Joseph) — a novel of desire, power, and the specific pressures of being a young Black woman navigating the fashion and creative industries, praised for sharp observations about race, ambition, and the forms of self-invention that contemporary professional life demands. Written with wit, intelligence, and genuine feeling — announcing a distinctive new voice in contemporary British fiction. 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.

Beartown by Fredrik Backman (Michael Joseph) — a small hockey town’s entire identity is built around its junior team’s chance at a national championship. When a young woman accuses the star player of rape, the town divides along lines of loyalty, silence, and complicity that reveal exactly what a community’s values actually are when tested against its interests. Backman’s most ambitious novel — a book about how communities decide who matters and who doesn’t. Published by Michael Joseph.

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.

The Most Beautiful Woman in Town by Charles Bukowski (Virgin Books) — short stories from the bars, racetracks, boarding houses, and low-rent Los Angeles neighbourhoods that provided Bukowski with his material across decades of writing. The empathy beneath the cynicism, the precision beneath the rawness: dispatches from the lower depths of American life, written by someone who lived there rather than visiting. The title story is among the best things he wrote. Published by Virgin Books.

The Complete Short Stories by Franz Kafka (Vintage) — every piece of Kafka’s short fiction in a single volume: ‘The Metamorphosis’, ‘In the Penal Colony’, ‘A Hunger Artist’, the animal stories, the parables, the miniatures, the fragments. Each piece demonstrating the same formal mastery: a premise established with deadpan certainty, a logic pursued to its inevitable conclusion, an effect combining comedy and horror in proportions that never resolve. The essential Kafka collection. Published by Vintage.

89 Words Followed by a Dream by Milan Kundera (Faber) — Kundera’s final work, completed shortly before his death in 2023: short prose pieces gathered around the question of what it means to be at the end of a long life and a long literary career, to look back at the words you have written and find them both yours and not yours. As concentrated and as precisely formed as everything he wrote. The capstone of one of literature’s great bodies of work. Published by Faber & Faber.

Molloy by Samuel Beckett (Faber) — an old man lying in his room, writing; a detective sent to find him. What follows, in Beckett’s first novel of his trilogy, is a journey that is also a decomposition of narrative, identity, and the certainty that language can tell us anything reliable about the world or ourselves. One of the most radical acts of fiction ever committed to paper — essential world literature. Published by Faber & Faber.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber) — Margaret and Ivan are siblings reconciling after their father’s death, navigating an unexpected closeness that neither has words for. Rooney’s fourth novel is her most formally ambitious and emotionally confrontational — approaching a taboo subject with the same clear-eyed intelligence she brings to everything, refusing both sensationalism and comfortable elision. Her most mature and most challenging novel. Published by Faber & Faber.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Faber) — Alice and Eileen, best friends in their early thirties in Dublin, navigating professional lives, romantic complications, and the persistent sense that the world they expected has not arrived. Rooney’s most spacious novel — uncertain in ways that its predecessors were not, attempting to find beauty and goodness in a world that feels neither. For readers who have followed her development with care. Published by Faber & Faber.