Contemporary Fiction

Each year, judges for the Booker Prize whittle their longlist down to a five- or six-book shortlist for the title of the best new novel of the previous twelve months. This year, the finalists include two previous Booker winners– Douglas Stuart and Marlon James – and a previous shortlistee in Elizabeth Strout. We asked Rebecca Liu, 2026 judge and Guardian journalist, to talk us through the shortlisted novels.

The Women's Prize was set up to highlight the very best of women's writing, whatever their subject matter. We spoke to Salma El-Wardany, one of this year's judges, about this year's winner—Virginia Evan's heartwarming epistolary novel The Correspondent—plus the five books that made it onto their fiction shortlist, all skillfully told novels that should appeal to a wide audience.

All of summer stretching out before you, and still searching for a brilliant new novel to read in the sun? You are not alone. We asked Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn to write a round-up of books that should be on your to-be-read list this season.

For those with a taste for fine literature, but who also enjoy their fiction with a bit of suspense and momentum, the acclaimed novelist Chris Power—author of A Lonely Man—has put together a recommended reading list of five 'literary thrillers', including work by Fernanda Melchor, Roberto Bolaño and the Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano.

"We are connected to the spirit and it's an active connection. It's not somewhere that’s only in the afterlife, it's here in the present as well. That, I think, is endemic across all African cultures and traditions," says Zimbabwean novelist and poet Blessing Musariri. Here she recommends some of the best African novels, books that had a big personal impact and have stayed with her.

Experimental fiction often uses unusual forms of syntax, style, or form—perhaps taking the form of fragments, footnotes or parallel narratives. Here Rebecca Watson, author of the critically acclaimed experimental novel little scratch, recommends five of the best experimental novels and explains why a writer might choose to bend the rules—and to what effect.

Bestselling author Liz Nugent talks to Five Books about the Irish writers that have been taking the world by storm in recent years—as she selects five unmissable recent works of Irish contemporary fiction, including books by Anne Enright and Sebastian Barry.

Psychological thrillers play on our fears that those closest to us can't be trusted and that even our homes aren't safe, explains Tammy Cohen, author of Stop at Nothing and They All Fall Down. She recommends five psychological thrillers and explains what it is that makes them so deeply unsettling and utterly gripping.

Since the publication of Samuel Smiles' Self-Help (1859) in Victorian Britain, self-help has become a billion dollar industry—and its influence is even felt in the contemporary novel, says Harvard literary scholar Beth Blum, author of The Self-Help Compulsion, a new history of the rise of self-help narratives in modern literature.

From her early novellas to the Neapolitan quartet, the elusive Elena Ferrante has achieved deserved superstar status for the compulsively readable, addictive quality of her writing. Two of the authors of The Ferrante Letters, Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre, introduce us to Ferrante and recommend what to read next after My Brilliant Friend.