198 x 129 mm

Nino Haratischvili’s latest translated novel — a decades-spanning friendship between two women against a backdrop of political upheaval and displacement. From the Georgian author of The Eighth Life: epic sweep, emotional intensity, and characters who live in memory long after the final page.

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.

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.

Audition by Ryu Murakami (Bloomsbury) — a widower uses a fake film audition to screen potential wives, and the woman who answers — quiet, composed, with a mysterious past — seems perfect. Miike Takashi adapted this into one of the most notorious horror films of the 1990s; the novel is the source of that notoriety, operating in the narrow space between literary fiction and pure dread. Brief, elegant, and unforgettable. Published by Bloomsbury.

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.

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.

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.