This year’s essential new classic book editions and rediscoveries
Classics endure because they continue to feel alive, offering something new with every decade. These new arrivals to the Vintage Classics are designed to inspire seasoned readers and curious newcomers alike.
Murder isn’t always ugly.
Aimée is drop-dead gorgeous, razor-sharp, and lethally efficient. She arrives in the backwater town of Bléville ready to make a killing, it's a game she’s played before: stir up trouble, pit the locals against one another, then disappear with blood on her hands and money in her pocket. But this time, something breaks and the game turns on her.
Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the crime novel into a weapon of satire and stylish mayhem. Fatale is his bloodiest, funniest, and most brilliantly unhinged work. And once you're done reading, you can also check out Nada Skeletons in the Closet No Room at the Morgue also joining the shelves this year.
Mary Lavin is the great unsung voice of Irish fiction. Here are her very best, most electric stories selected and introduced by Colm Toíbín.
Mary Lavin’s stories feature ordinary people in the tight confines of ordinary life. From rural Ireland and the streets of Dublin they charm, irritate and intrigue in complicated brilliance, appearing to us with unique freshness. Good friendships, bad deeds, frustrations, missteps, hope and laughter are all found in captivating stories where real and astonishing things happen.
A writer decides to write her next book about a female author and artist unjustly forgotten by history. But what starts as an exciting research project rapidly unravels towards breakdown and horror.
Deeply unnerving and utterly original - My Death will be the book you will need to talk about with everyone you know in 2026.
When pet rat Gouri finds himself locked out of his owner’s apartment, he has no choice but to strike out alone onto the pavements of Paris.
But what begins as a strange and marvellous bedtime story - Gouri and his new friend Raka selling flour-coated worms to pigeons for spare change - soon spirals into an exhilarating whirlwind of murder, sex, unionised hamsters, courtroom drama, and, finally, Armageddon.
A masterwork of modern Chinese literature, Taipei People is a collection of dark, wistful stories following the lives and losses of those who fled to Taipei after the 1949 Communist takeover of mainland China.
Coming in Summer 2026
In their lovely, quiet Cotswolds village, Janet and Susan are known to the villagers simply as ‘the girls’. Partners in love and work, co-proprietors of a picturesque shop, they lead an enviable, enviably settled life.
But when a moment of small, surprising passion intrudes into the equilibrium of their world, the girls’ lives take a deeply unsettling turn. First comes motherhood. Then comes murder.
Part-macabre comedy, part-crime thriller, part-cosy romance, John Bowen’s The Girls is a novel like none other.
