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Elena Ferrante’s taut, unsettling portrait of a woman on holiday who becomes obsessed with a young mother on the beach — and with her own buried ambivalence as a mother. A meditation on maternal love, resentment, and guilt treated with characteristic directness and complete truth.

Elena Ferrante’s standalone novel after the Neapolitan tetralogy — a teenager’s obsessive search for her father’s disreputable sister, and the painful process of seeing parents clearly for the first time. Ferociously precise on adolescent disillusionment and the discovery of adult lies.

The second Neapolitan novel — Lila married and constrained, Elena escaped to university and finding liberation complicated by loss. Ferrante traces their diverging paths with ferocity and psychological depth: richer, darker, and more complete than its predecessor, and equally essential.

The first volume of Ferrante’s celebrated Neapolitan novels — the friendship of Elena and Lila from childhood in 1950s Naples. Intense, competitive, and one of literature’s greatest portraits of female friendship: the starting point for one of the great reading experiences in contemporary fiction.

A giant frog arrives at a Tokyo bank employee’s apartment with a mission: together they must prevent an earthquake from destroying the city. Murakami’s celebrated story about heroism, invisibility, and saving the world without recognition — beautifully illustrated and a perfect introduction to his magical realism.

J.M. Coetzee’s late story collection — including the title novella about an elderly Polish musician’s love for a younger Spanish woman, and accompanying stories meditating on desire, age, and human connection. Precise, morally serious, and characteristic of a Nobel laureate’s late mastery.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Booker-shortlisted debut — Eileen Dunlop, consumed by misanthropy and dark fantasies in 1960s Massachusetts, until a glamorous colleague changes everything. Cool, precise, and wickedly funny: the novel that announced a major and discomforting new voice in American fiction.

Margaret Atwood’s taut, psychologically complex novel — a Canadian journalist’s Caribbean escape becomes entanglement in a coup and genuine danger. A thriller that explores voyeurism, bodily autonomy, and political complacency, and one of Atwood’s most formally accomplished early works.

Kurt Vonnegut’s essential story collection — science fiction, satire, and something stranger, spanning two decades and including Harrison Bergeron and other classics. Short, fast, and deceptively simple: stories that arrive quickly and leave behind ideas that expand in the mind for days.

Vonnegut’s prescient 1952 debut dystopia — a near-future America where machines have replaced human labour and the engineers who manage them form a ruling class. His satirical intelligence is already fully formed: dark comedy, humanism, and anger at dehumanising systems that feel more relevant than ever.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s debut story collection — self-destructive, deluded, and occasionally monstrous narrators rendered with the cool precision and dark humour that defines her best work. An excellent introduction to one of contemporary fiction’s most discomforting original voices.

Hiromi Kawakami’s quietly mesmerising novella about memory, longing, and the strange persistence of past love. Prose of understated precision that accumulates into something deeply moving — essential for readers who love her work and a perfect introduction for those discovering her for the first time.

A sparkling opposites-attract romance — electric tension, witty banter, and a love story that feels both inevitable and hard-won. Kate Dramis writes with genuine emotional depth, crafting characters who feel real and a relationship that earns every moment of its satisfying conclusion.

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.

Colum McCann’s powerful novel inspired by Roma poet Papusza traces a young woman whose extraordinary talent brings her into collision with Nazism, Stalinism, and cultural exploitation. A lyrical, morally complex meditation on the costs of being translated across cultures and worlds.

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.

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.