“In the apocalyptic 22th century, a historian searches for a literary manuscript last seen at a scandalous 2014 dinner party; since then the world has been ravaged by fire, pandemic, nuclear attacks, artificial intelligence gone rogue. Imagine A.S. Byatt’s Possession set in the world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , and you’ll get an idea—and McEwan brings bravura and extravagance to this terrible vision.” Read more...
Notable Novels of Fall 2025
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
“Han Kang’s We Do Not Part deals—obliquely—with the long shadow of the Jeju massacres, the violent suppression of an island-wide uprising in 1948, during which an estimated 30,000 were killed by government forces. The Boston Globe described it as ‘a masterpiece’; Slate called it ‘despairingly beautiful.'” Read more...
Notable Novels of Spring 2025
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
It's not often that you can announce a new book by a great modernist writer, but in October 2025, three stories by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) hit the shelves. Previously known as the 'Friendships Gallery', the three interrelated stories comprise a mock-biography of Violet Dickinson, a friend of Woolf's, that had previously been dismissed as a bit of fun for family and friends. However, Urmila Seshagiri, a professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, found a more polished draft of the stories in Longleat House, home of the Marquess of Bath, where they had lain archived for 80 years.
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The lives of four interconnected women – their loves, their ambitions, their disappointments, their traumas – are scrutinised in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s dazzling fourth novel. Set across three continents and a sprawling cast of characters, Dream Count is a polyphonic work that engages with a range of charged themes, from the diaspora experience to sexual assault and the politics of female bodies. It is rigorously, bracingly contemporary – and yet it has a timelessness that characterises all great fiction.
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by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
🏆 Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize
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“In November, Olivia Laing will publish The Silver Book , a novel billed as both ‘a queer love story and a noirish thriller’ set in 1970s Italy. In it, a young English artist meets the (real) production designer Danilo Donati, before joining him as his assistant at the film studio where reality is recast and reconstructed. These are troubled times—the ‘Years of Lead,’ during which hundreds died in terror attacks—and very soon the violence will be knocking at their door.” Read more...
Notable Novels of Fall 2025
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
“In choosing the winter of 1962 when, for some weeks, life in Britain paused, suspended in heavy snow, Andrew Miller has subtly identified a moment – perhaps the moment – when we shifted from looking backwards to the Second World War which, for so many, was still the defining event of their lives, towards the future. People were still finding, and some losing, their post-war way; the sixties were not swinging yet. Down in the West Country, where The Land in Winter is set, we experience this Janus moment, this pause, this snow-suspension, with two couples negotiating themselves and their marriages. Intense, immersive and beautifully paced, we move with Bill and Rita and Eric and Irene towards an uncertain spring.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction of 2025
Katharine Grant ,
Historical Novelist
“In Cursed Daughters, a young woman believed by her relatives to be the reincarnation of her drowned cousin desperately seeks to break the family curse that leaves all their women in their maternal line heartbroken. This bleakly humorous family saga will not disappoint those who loved Braithwaite’s hit debut, My Sister, the Serial Killer and offers a fascinating portrait of life in Lagos, which she depicts as utterly modern yet deeply superstitious.” Read more...
Notable Novels of Fall 2025
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
“I love Patricia Lockwood. Her writing is irreverent and funny and full of non-sequiturs, yet also full of pathos and depth. Will There Ever Be Another You features a narrator unhinged by Long Covid, whose brain fog is modelled on symptoms experienced by Lockwood herself in 2020.” Read more...
Notable Novels of Fall 2025
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
“Kraus, the avant-garde author of I Love Dick , offers a new freewheeling autofiction in which the main character, ‘Catt’ becomes obsessed with a grim real-life murder in northern Minnesota around the time that her own partner relapses into alcoholism. Krause has explained that, while attempting to report the case in a true crime style reminiscent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song , she ‘started to realize that it was not possible to write that kind of book anymore.'” Read more...
Notable Novels of Fall 2025
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
“And if you are interested in novels that play around with form, you might also be interested in Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory , a sharp, gossipy campus novel about two married literature professors grappling with romantic temptation in the workplace. That sounds like a lot of fun to me.” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Summer 2025
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
“Another very eagerly awaited book is Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book , although this is, technically, neither quite fiction nor nonfiction. Following a devastating break-up, the author deconstructs her relationships, as well as her memories of religious fanaticism and disordered eating in her youth—partly in the form of memoir and partly as a fictional retelling, the text of each being presented upside down beside its twin, so that when you reach the end of the book you flip it over and keep going—and so on, forever.” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Summer 2025
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
🏆 Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize
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“It is indeed a skewering of the contemporary millennial lifestyle as it pertains to digital nomads in the gig economy—they’re even front-end engineers, the ‘superficial layer’ of tech—but I really hope that when people read this very entertaining novel that they also take note of the sharp critiques of privilege throughout.” Read more...
The Best Fiction Books: The 2025 International Booker Prize
Anton Hur ,
Novelist
“This is a novel that is written from the perspective of a rescue boat dispatcher who fails to dispatch a rescue team for a group of migrants who subsequently sink to their deaths. This book will hopefully disturb you and make you question why you feel so disturbed. It is a short book that is nevertheless full of horror and rage and guilt.” Read more...
The Best Fiction Books: The 2025 International Booker Prize
Anton Hur ,
Novelist
“I thought, okay, it will be a very serious book about fundamentalism and how it affects young girls like Shamima Begum, groomed young girls who were radicalised and went out to join ISIS. And it is about those girls. But, oh my God, this book is so funny. How she’s managed to make that subject funny and light, I don’t know.” Read more...
The Best Novels: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction
Kit de Waal ,
Novelist
“It’s very funny, and it’s so unexpected. When I picked up the book, I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t want to read any blurb or reviews, I just came to the work very clean. So I thought, when I picked this up, that it would be a historical novel about the Persians. I expected a different country, a different time, a different culture. But then this opens and it’s like the Kardashians of Aspen. It’s told from lots of different points of view, of women within this family. And it’s a book about who they are now, now they’ve lost their money, their clout. How can they negotiate America as immigrants—and not powerful immigrants either.” Read more...
The Best Novels: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction
Kit de Waal ,
Novelist
“A collection of seven linked stories from the author of the award-winning Private Citizens (‘the first great Millennial novel,’ according to New York magazine). Expect nihilism, tragicomedy, and provocation after provocation.” Read more...
Notable Novels of Spring 2025
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
“It perfectly captured this time in a woman’s life, or this woman’s life. She’s the daughter of an Afghan refugee in Berlin, and she’s ashamed of it. Anyone that has had shame in their lives, especially shame related to your identity, will really identify with this book. There’s a section in it where she really fancies this guy, a very unsuitable guy, and—as we all do—she is trying to be cool, trying to say the right thing, to sit right, eat right, smoke right. It has really unusual sentence structures—the way they start. It’s quite extraordinary, really. So well done.” Read more...
The Best Novels: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction
Kit de Waal ,
Novelist
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