The latest fiction, non-fiction, paperbacks and classics
Looking for your next great read? Every week, Vintage publishes new books that inform, entertain and spark conversation, from award-winning fiction and thought-provoking nonfiction to beautifully produced classics.
This regularly updated guide brings together the latest releases from across the Vintage list, helping you discover standout new books from established authors and exciting emerging voices. Whether you’re searching for literary fiction, memoir, history, science, politics or culture, you’ll find the newest Vintage books to add to your reading list right here.
What are the best new books to read right now? This week's standout Vintage releases include Long Wave by Daisy Johnson, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and London and the South-East by David Szalay. Spanning literary fiction, history and contemporary storytelling, these are some of the most talked-about new books to add to your reading list this week.
New in fiction
Matilda works at Bocca, one of Sydney’s most talked-about restaurants, where appetite, ambition and self-control are all part of the job. But behind the polished surface of her life, she is quietly managing cravings she cannot name: for food, for perfection, and for her celebrity chef boss, Colson.
When her younger half-sister Lara returns to town, Matilda’s carefully ordered world begins to fracture. Old family chaos resurfaces, long-buried secrets come loose, and the hunger Matilda has spent years trying to suppress becomes impossible to ignore. A darkly funny novel about sisterhood, desire and dysfunction, Lonely Mouth asks what happens when the things we cannot swallow down finally demand to be faced.
Read if you liked : Sweetbitter
On an uninhabited island near the shore, Ori was found as a child with no memory, no mother and only a handful of stones. Years later, with a baby of her own, motherhood begins to feel vast and destabilising, and the mystery of her early life starts to surface.
In another time, ten-year-old Ruth watches a woman and baby walk into the river and vanish. No one believes what she has seen, and her own life is soon shaped by secrecy, confinement and longing for escape. Moving across generations of women, Long Wave is a haunting novel of mothers, daughters, water, memory and survival, written with Daisy Johnson’s unmistakable strangeness and force.
New in non-fiction & poetry
When a new relationship makes poet Helen Mort a stepmother, she begins to examine a role too often flattened by myth, fairy tale and cultural suspicion.
Moving between verse, lyric essay and personal reflection, Stepmother looks at blended families, female power and the surprising forms love can take. It is a candid, inventive book about entering a family already in motion, and about what happens when an old story - the wicked stepmother, the intruder, the woman to be feared - is rewritten from the inside.
In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh was convicted of murdering his wife Maggie and their son Paul at the family’s home in South Carolina. The case exposed a world of power, privilege, fraud, addiction and violence surrounding one of the American South’s most notorious legal dynasties.
In The Family Man , James Lasdun turns from the spectacle of the trial to the human mystery it left behind: why would a man with so much to lose kill his own family? Meticulous, unsettling and deeply absorbing, this is true crime written with literary control, following the money, myths and moral evasions that made the Murdaugh story feel almost too strange to be real.
Read if you liked : In Cold Blood Say Nothing Under the Banner of Heaven
New in paperback
Paul Rainey is an ad salesman, drifting through work, weekends and relationships with a mounting sense that something in his life has gone badly wrong. Dissatisfied but unable to act, he sees a possible escape when an old colleague, Eddy Jaw, appears with the offer of a new job.
But the opportunity is not quite what it seems, and Paul’s life - along with his family’s - begins to shift in strange and darkly comic ways. London and the South-East is David Szalay’s wry, unsettling portrait of modern work, male restlessness and the stories people sell to themselves.
Read if you liked : The Office, Mad Men, The Trip, Peep Show, Sideways, or sharply observed fiction and screen drama about work, disappointment, self-deception and middle-class life under pressure.
Behind the grand façades of England’s country houses, the 1920s and 1930s were less serene than they looked. As the British Empire waned, stately homes became theatres of ritual, secrecy, class performance and private unhappiness, where aristocrats, servants, heiresses and butlers all helped preserve an image that was more polished than true.
Drawing on memoirs, letters, diaries and eyewitness accounts, Adrian Tinniswood opens the doors on the interwar country house to reveal a world at once glamorous, uncomfortable and deeply human. The Long Weekend is social history with a novelist’s eye: rich in atmosphere, sharp on class, and alert to the gap between the myth and the life lived behind it.
Read if you liked : Downton Abbey, The Crown, The Buccaneers, The Gilded Age, or stories of country houses, old money, upstairs-downstairs lives and the fading rituals of privilege.
Before the First World War, the British country house enjoyed one last age of spectacle. Ancient aristocratic seats stood beside the palaces of new wealth; dukes, duchesses, bankers, Indian princes, heiresses and society hostesses moved through a world of ceremony, luxury and elaborate performance.
In The Power and the Glory , Adrian Tinniswood opens the doors on the late Victorian and Edwardian country house, revealing a world of glamour, excess, intrigue and absurdity. Rich with detail and full-colour images, this is social history at its most vivid: a portrait of privilege at its most dazzling, just before war changed the country house, and the society it represented, forever.
Read if you liked : Downton Abbey, The Crown, The Buccaneers, The Gilded Age, or histories and dramas about aristocracy, old money, social performance and grand houses on the brink of change.
Henry and Clare’s love story does not unfold in the usual order. Henry is a librarian who is pulled helplessly through time, appearing and disappearing at moments of emotional force in his own past and future. Clare, an artist, lives her life chronologically, waiting, adapting and trying to build something lasting with a man who can never fully stay.
Audrey Niffenegger’s international bestseller is a sweeping, time-bending novel about love, absence and devotion: a story of two people trying to make a life together when time itself keeps getting in the way.
Read if you liked : One Day
Frequently asked questions
Which books are trending right now?
This week's standout Vintage releases include The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Lonely Mouth by Jacqueline Maley and Long Wave by Daisy Johnson.
What’s everyone reading now?
Many readers are looking for books that spark conversation, offer a sense of escape or help them understand the world in new ways. Popular choices this week include The Time Traveler's Wife and The Power and the Glory.
