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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber) — Connell and Marianne in school, then in Trinity College Dublin, then in the world: a love story of complete precision and complete emotional honesty, in which two intelligent people repeatedly fail and find each other. The novel that established Rooney as the defining literary voice of her generation in English — intimate, funny, and quietly devastating. 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 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.

My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk (Faber) — Constantinople, 1591: a master miniaturist is murdered, and the detective who must identify the killer is also in love with the murdered man’s niece. A murder mystery, a love story, and a meditation on art, style, and the threat that Western perspective posed to the Islamic painting tradition — narrated by a corpse, a dog, a tree, and the colour red itself. Winner of the Nobel Prize. Published by Faber & Faber.

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — five stories linked by music: a Venice gondolier, a London jazz guitarist, a cellist in Rome, a failed musician in an English pub, and a saxophonist in a luxury hotel. Each story requires its compression and nothing more; together they constitute something as sustained and as resonant as a novel — about the gap between what we imagined our lives would be and what they have actually become. Essential Ishiguro. Published by Faber & Faber.

Loving Sabotage by Amélie Nothomb (Faber) — Nothomb’s childhood at an elite Chinese school for diplomatic children in 1970s Beijing, where the children of foreign embassies formed their own closed world with its own cruelties. Simultaneously a comedy of manners and a disturbing account of how social worlds form and enforce themselves, written with characteristic self-deprecating humour and psychological precision. Ideal for readers who loved Fear and Trembling. Published by Faber & Faber.

Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb (Faber) — a young Belgian woman arrives in Tokyo to begin her career at a large corporation and descends, through a series of small errors and corrections, to the bottom of the organisational hierarchy. Winner of the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française — a wickedly sharp novel about the collision between Western individualism and Japanese corporate culture, told with deadpan precision and dark comedy. Perfect in its brevity. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera (Faber) — seven stories that are also one story, linked by the themes of memory and forgetting, political power, and the laughter that both subverts and accompanies it. Written after Kundera was stripped of his Czech citizenship and forced into exile — simultaneously a private grief and a political act, an insistence that the things totalitarianism destroys (memory, complexity, the individual voice) matter. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — young cadets at a Lima military academy navigate the rituals of institutional brutality presented as education, until the death of a cadet reveals how completely the institution will protect itself against any truth that threatens its dignity. Written at twenty-six from personal experience — the Peruvian military burned copies publicly. A landmark of Latin American literature. Published by Faber & Faber.