Discover the breakthrough storytellers ready to define the National Year of Reading
This new class of debut authors is ready to surprise, delight and challenge readers with bold perspectives and unforgettable storytelling. We’ve rounded up the titles already generating early buzz — perfect for anyone planning their reading year with intention.
A year of fantastic fiction
Six hundred years. Five interlocking lives. One computer game.
And the many paths that can lead us home.
Homebound is a coming out and coming-of-age story, a wild and precarious sea adventure, a space odyssey. As it slips through time, loss, creativity, found family, it journeys deep into humanity’s future and capacity for love.
Author of Notes on Heartbreak makes her fiction debut with The Project .
After a particularly regrettable one-night stand with her annoying friend James, Daisy starts to look around and wonder why, in a sea of intelligent, gorgeous women, all their prospects seem so hopeless. It’s time for The Project, a radical reinvention of dating, and who better to start with than James?
Falling for James is never part of The Project - but can Daisy bring down her walls enough to let someone in? Because she might not find someone perfect, but she might find something real.
Three great heroines – slave queen Goewin, the reclusive sorceress Arianrhod, and Blodeuwedd, a woman conjured from flowers – unite to avenge themselves on the most dangerous man in ancient legend.
In this vital and visceral novel, Brigid Lowe casts ancient light on desire, sex and our relationship with nature to bring these Celtic heroines to explosive, sensuous, blossoming new life.
Woody Brown’s vibrant and profoundly moving novel takes us to sun-bleached California, to a daycare centre for Los Angeles’s disabled community.
At the heart of Upward Bound is Walter, a recent college student returning to the company of his peers after a family tragedy. Around him, a story unfolds of friendships forged, connections missed and the dreams – some new, others almost forgotten – that shape us.
With his wit, empathy and astonishing gifts as a storyteller, Woody Brown immerses us in life as we have never experienced it before.
A death in the (dysfunctional) family – can they hold it together long enough to organise the funeral?
Mary’s death is bad news – for her daughter Patch, ex-partner Robin, and niece Jude. Thrown together in Mary’s tiny house, each of them is trying to feel something: to grieve, atone, join in, be better. But they rarely have one another’s best interests at heart, and as the connections between them twist and contort, they lose sight of the rules and grasp towards anything that might make it all less painful.
Darkly funny, deeply entertaining, and intensely moving, A Sense of Occasion subverts and perverts your expectations to reveal the fractious desires that simmer beneath the surface of our lives.
New to non-fiction in 2026
The sexual assault that stunned the world. A courageous woman’s rallying call for ‘shame to change sides’.
In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot inspired and moved millions of people with her astonishing courage and dignity as she chose to waive her right to anonymity in her legal fight against her husband and the 50 men accused of her sexual assault.
For the very first time, Gisèle Pelicot tells her story.
Eat bitter is a Chinese proverb meaning ‘endure hardship to taste sweetness.’ For Lydia Pang, it embodies the struggles of her Hakka ancestors, a persecuted Chinese ethnic group whose ingenuity shaped a food culture rooted in fermenting and foraging.
Pang reimagines eating bitter as a philosophy to confront her own challenges: burning out, testing her marriage, navigating fertility struggles and caring for a parent. Through eight recipes, she shares food as memory and medicine.
Imagine a world in which women have all the power. A world in which they work together to shape their societies and their futures.
In reality, women's communities have always existed, and continue to thrive. In this vital and groundbreaking book, Megha Mohan goes in search of their roots, discovering a vibrant global history, brought together here for the first time.
Essential reading for anyone interested in our collective histories, cultures, economics and governance, Herlands shows the power and possibility of new ways of living - and leading - for us all.
For 11-year-old Emma-Lee, the sound of Hong Kong in the summer of 1995 is Cantopop. she and her family will leave the city to live in England, pushing Emma-Lee’s love of Cantopop underground – the sound and symbol of her secret childhood identity.
My Cantopop Nights is the story of how Emma found herself in a Hong Kong bar twenty years later, listening to a Cantopop song and realising that this music was her inheritance. It’s about falling in love with a city, a country, its people and its music, while she seeks to find her own place within it.
