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International Booker Prize winner Cristina Rivera Garza’s formally daring novel — murders on a Mexican university campus investigated through the logic of poetry. Elliptical, sensory, and profoundly unsettling, a challenge to crime fiction conventions and a confrontation with language and violence.

New stories from George Saunders — Booker Prize winner and one of America’s most celebrated fiction writers. With characteristic wit, compassion, and formal ingenuity, Vigil explores the ordinary moments where human beings reveal their deepest selves. Funny, moving, and utterly essential.

Patti Smith’s dreamlike memoir set during an extraordinary 2016 — a year of personal loss and political upheaval. Moving between real events and dream-vision with characteristic poetic intensity, Smith meditates on grief, time, and the strange experience of living through history.

Khaled Hosseini’s devastating and triumphant second novel follows two Afghan women whose lives intertwine across three decades of war. A fierce, emotionally intelligent portrait of survival, resilience, and the bonds that sustain us when everything else is taken away.

Circe by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury) — the daughter of Helios, possessed of a gift for witchcraft she discovered by accident, given the interior life and psychological completeness that Greek mythology denies her. Miller transforms a witch into a woman and a woman into one of the most fully realised characters in contemporary fiction — ancient and completely contemporary, faithfully mythological and entirely original. Published by Bloomsbury.

The Dark Mirror by Samantha Shannon (Bloomsbury) — a new novel from the creator of The Bone Season and The Priory of the Orange Tree, returning to the extraordinary fantasy universe she has been building for a decade. Shannon writes fantasy with the formal intelligence and psychological realism that the best literary fiction demands — her world-building intricate, her characters real, her prose carrying genuine weight. Published by Bloomsbury.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — 1961, the Dominican Republic: five men wait in a car to assassinate the dictator Trujillo, who has governed with a terror so complete it has become the atmosphere of daily life. Vargas Llosa’s most formally accomplished novel — about the nature of absolute power, what it does to those who exercise it and those who submit to it. One of the great political novels of the twenty-first century. Published by Faber & Faber.