Elizabeth Strout (Author)
Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He spends his days teaching history to high schoolers, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbours, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad—at himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his mind: how is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us?
And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.
With exquisite prose and profound insight, Elizabeth Strout captures the way grief reverberates through decades, the comfort found in deep friendships and the freedom that comes when we break free of our secrets. The Things We Never Say is a stunning new novel from one of our most acclaimed observers of the human heart.
Marlon James (Author)
‘Darkness is a mood in Jamaica . . .'
The Disappearers is Marlon James’s triumphant return to the Jamaica of A Brief History of Seven Killings – a place of heat and chaos, and of danger for anyone outside the heteronormal.
So when eight gay men meet for the first time, in Kingston in 1988, answering the casting call for an openly queer play, they are already taking a big risk. But that is nothing compared to what rains down on them when a mob descends on one of their rehearsals.
By the end of this night, one man is dead, all are injured, and two subsequently disappear.
As the survivors heal, each man finds he must confront the bigotry and homophobia that the attack laid bare. Some try to forget; some embrace their rage; and some simply vanish – but all are forever scarred.
As one of the victims puts it, ‘there’s a difference between when something ends and when something stops’. And this story won’t stop until both the disappearers and the perpetrators have been tracked, along trails both hot and cold, and an ending reached.
Epic and intimate, violent and forgiving, The Disappearers is a tour de force which only Marlon James could have written – both an unflinching portrait of the hatred and shame faced by gay men in a society which refuses to accept them, and a deeply human story of acceptance and insight.
Emma Cline (Author)
'Sublime... completely gripping... a wonder' MARK HADDON
'Her best book yet. Completely extraordinary' DAISY JOHNSON
‘A real feat... the writing really, really pops' JEM CALDER
*A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK 2026 in: BBC, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Bookstr, Glossary, Paper Trails*
A mesmerising portrait of an ageing man’s last pilgrimage, from the bestselling author of The Girls and The Guest
A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting.
A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable.
This is what David knows: Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades.
His final destination is Zurich.
David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes in: the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend’s house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life.
As David’s arrival in Zurich looms, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unravelling mind emerges, both darkly humorous and profoundly moving. Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he's relied on, vanish.
Kenan Orhan (Author)
Dilara is having her bathroom renovated. Her father's memory has started collapsing, dementia stealing a little more of him each day; her apartment must be adapted so he can move in with her. But when the builders finally unveil their handiwork, there is a problem: instead of a new bathroom, they have built a prison cell. Not just any cell - one that Dilara recognises. It is a room from Silivri Prison in Istanbul.
At first she is outraged, exasperated, determined to reverse the bizarre mistake. Dilara's family are political exiles: they fled Turkey years ago and have never been back. The last thing she wants is a piece of her abandoned homeland appearing uninvited in her new home. But gradually her indignation gives way to curiosity. Even as she struggles to care for her dying father, to stretch their dwindling savings and stop the wheels coming off her marriage, she is drawn back again and again to the mysterious prison cell, which seems to connect, impossibly, to a city that once belonged to her - to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets - a portal back to Istanbul.
Chloe Aridjis (Author)
***LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026***
'One of our boldest writers' Deborah Levy
A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality.
Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound.
When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.
‘One of the most brilliant novelists working in English today’ Garth Greenwell
‘The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka’s’ Zadie Smith
‘A subtle and courageous writer’ Ali Smith
‘Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange’ TLS
Virginia Evans (Author)
WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2026
#1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
OVER TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE
A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
AN IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER
A BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK
'A warm, funny gem of a novel'LAURA HACKETT, THE TIMES
'Masterful . . . I was delighted and moved'NEW YORK TIMES
'Immensely enjoyable'GUARDIAN
'I can't praise it enough. It's an absolute triumph'CLARE CHAMBERS
'What a novel! Tender, dry, sharp...devastating, but still feel good.'
PANDORA SYKES
'Tremendous'FREDRIK BACKMAN
'Shows us what a glorious thing growing older can be'FLORENCE KNAPP
'The year's breakout novel no one saw coming'WALL STREET JOURNAL
–Sybil Van Antwerp is seventy-three, slowly losing her sight and always writing letters . . .
To her children. Her favourite authors. Her ex-sister-in-law. The journalist poking into her past.
Her doctor. Suitors. Kindly neighbours. The infuriating gardening club.
All receive Sybil’s witty, wise correspondence, rich with everyday concerns.
But there is one letter that she has never sent. It concerns the darkest period of her life. To post it, Sybil must find forgiveness within herself.
The hardest letter to write is the one you’d never dare to send.
Lyse Doucet (Author)
'Ingenious' KAMILA SHAMSIE
'Incredible' PETER FRANKOPAN
'Beautiful' RORY STEWART
In 1969, the luxury Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul opened its doors: a glistening white box, high on a hill, that reflected Afghanistan’s hopes of becoming a modern country, connected to the world.
Lyse Doucet first checked into the Inter-Continental on Christmas Eve 1988. In the decades since, she has witnessed a Soviet evacuation, a devastating civil war, the US invasion, and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban, all from within its increasingly battered walls. The Inter-Con has never closed its doors.
Now, she weaves together the experiences of the Afghans who have kept the hotel running to craft a richly immersive history of their country. It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper, of Abida, who became the first female chef after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-somethings who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy – only to see the Taliban come roaring back in 2021.
Through these intimate portraits of Afghan life, the story of a hotel becomes the story of a people.
Diana Evans (Author)
'A pleasure and an invigoration' Guardian
'A moving, witty and seductive anthology' Financial Times
'Every piece feels beautifully sewn together and complete’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO
Crafted over twenty-five years, I Want to Talk to You invites you into a conversation about literature, art and music, identity, grief and everything in between
As a young journalist, Diana Evans was catapulted overnight into the role of culture editor, going on to interview a roster of stars including Lauryn Hill, Viola Davis, Alice Walker and Edward Enninful.
In these portraits of contemporary icons, the author remains the observer. Alongside them, in pieces collected here for the first time, we also see her turning the lens on herself. We watch as she dances on stages in London and travels through Cuba. We sit beside her desk as she develops her voice as a writer, shaped by her love for Jean Rhys, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We walk by her side as she navigates the world – her family and the midlife sandwich, reflections on fashion, yoga, the British monarchy and lockdowns, and the lasting impact of George Floyd and Grenfell.
'Truly insightful, conversational and unique... Absolutely brilliant' ORE AGBAJE-WILLIAMS
'Intimate and moving... Elegant in tone and finely wrought in form' EKOW ESHUN
'A celebration of a career that has been anything but ordinary and an intellectual mind forever evolving' CHARLIE BRINKHURST-CUFF
