“Douglas Stuart is due to release his second novel, a highly anticipated follow up to his Booker Prize-winning, million-copy-selling debut Shuggie Bain; Young Mungo has been described as a working class Romeo and Juliet, in which two men from either side of Glasgow’s sectarian divide fall in love for the first time.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2022

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“I’m particularly excited about the February arrival of Pure Colour by Sheila Heti, surely the smartest, most erudite and exacting writer working today. Pure Colour has been billed by the publisher as ‘a galaxy of a novel’ which combines realism with surrealistic elements (at one point, the protagonist’s father moves through her as a spirit, at another she becomes a leaf), and asks the reader to consider life and death, the nature of art, and the nature of… well, nature. Unmissable.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2022

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Yanagihara’s new book is set in an alternate world, in which the American Civil War has produced a continent of rival territories—a Disunited States. It’s divided into three parts, each a hundred years apart and the final installment taking place in a dystopic 2093 as pandemics sweep the world. Characters appear and reappear in different guises, changing ethnicity and gender. It’s a novel of huge ambition, and one likely to arouse huge feeling and critical discussion; whatever your feelings about A Little Life, To Paradise is the novel everyone will be talking about in spring 2022.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2022

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“It is a very introspective examination of the lives of a group of individuals, a study of a family and family dynamics, and an account of South Africa over the course of decades—from the later years of Apartheid, into the present. And he’s able to manage all of these registers with a seamlessness that is almost deceptively simple. There’s an incredible flow. It’s in four sections, and each of the sections is unbroken as a piece of narrative. But what he’s doing through it is moving you subtly from one person’s mind to somebody else’s mind, from the past into the present, from one kind of consciousness to another. To me it’s evocative of Virginia Woolf in the way that it brings together —as the human mind does—past and present, memory and subjectivities.” Read more...

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist

Maya Jasanoff, Historian

“The Nobel laureate’s first novel in almost fifty years is billed by the publisher as ‘at once a literary hoot, a crafty whodunit, and a scathing indictment of Nigeria’s political elite’, which features stolen body parts, Yoruba royalty and a murdered engineer.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Fall 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“I was a big fan of Alexandra Kleeman’s 2016 debut You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, which was a numbly dystopic story of obsessive friendship and extreme consumerism. Kleeman’s new book Something New Under the Sun, freshly out, is an equally unsettling story of Hollywood hell in a future California so racked by climate change as to resemble Hell itself. Part cli fi, part social satire, this is a novel for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Emma Cline.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Fall 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“A 1960s-set heist billed as ‘a family saga masquerading as a crime novel’. Whitehead’s high concept novels have often leaned on the conventions of genre fiction—and subverted them to glorious effect. For Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead turned for inspiration to caper films, crafting his comedic, intricately complex plot in their image.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Fall 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“The psychological thriller that everyone is talking about this season.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“I am personally looking forward to Irish writer Megan Nolan’s debut, Acts of Desperation, about a brief, toxic relationship, its aftermath, and examining the self-negating impulse of a woman who needs to see herself reflected in the eyes of another person to feel herself to be real.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Oyler is a fantastically acerbic critic, whose work I’ve admired for a while … It goes almost without saying that a lot of eyes will be on her own fiction debut – but indications are good.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Existing fans of the Pulitzer- and National Book Award-winning Gilead sequence will be intrigued to hear that Jack is the story of Jack Boughton, the bad boy son of the local Presbyterian minister, and his relationship with a beautiful and brilliant African-American woman who becomes his common law wife in segregated St Louis.” Read more...

Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“The first time that Bouraoui’s work has been translated into English: a dreamy, poetic account of Bouraoui’s coming of age as a French-Algerian gay woman, which has been a publishing phenomenon in continental Europe.” Read more...

Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“A creepy tale set in a small Southern town, in which a stranger of indistinguishable gender and ethnicity pitches up and is soon hearing the confessions of the local residents as they prepare for their ominously titled Forgiveness Festival: Rachel Cusk meets Shirley Jackson. A modern day fable about what we project onto others.” Read more...

Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Summer 2020

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“In the hands of a careless writer, A Sin of Omission might have been an impossible read, but Marguerite Poland’s restraint, whilst not sparing us, beckons us on. We trust her, and when you trust an author, you enjoy being absorbed into the world being offered, whatever the delights or otherwise of that world itself.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist

Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist

“In The Redeemed we, like Leo and Lottie, move from what we might call the ‘prelapsarian’ world—the established, hierarchical world measured in horse-speed—towards the noisier, speedier world of the motor, with class barriers broken, or at least breached. Through their experiences we witness the birth of something new, and the birth isn’t an easy one. Many critics describe Tim Pears’ prose as ‘lyrical’. It is, but there’s steel in the lyricism. Pears shies away from nothing. Too wise to go technicolour, he instead deploys meticulous detail to intensify emotional heft. Reading The Redeemed is like watching a master craftsman at work.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist

Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist

“Shadowplay employs both first and third person narrative, uses diary pages, private notes, newspaper cuttings and, occasionally, Ellen Terry’s voice. Yet it’s so smooth. Never a hiccup. Also, though the novel’s ostensibly about three titans of the Victorian theatre, it’s really a deep exploration of the exposed and the hidden, ‘the other man that every man contains’. Joseph O’Connor wants us to shiver, and we do.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist

Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist

“James Meek has quite simply given us something technically ambitious and glorious to read. I found myself smiling and occasionally doing that strange British thing of shaking my head in admiration. It’s punchy stuff! Meek has fashioned a language both familiar and unfamiliar, in other words a language that without losing subtlety or nuance sounds ‘fourteenth century’. But readers shouldn’t be alarmed. Two pages in and you’re fluent.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist

Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist

“Ambition, bravery, freshness—The Parisian, a first novel, has all three in spades. It’s a rare talent that can take on the complications and shifting identities of early 20th-century Middle Eastern politics and keep the reader charmed. But through her hero, Midhat Kamal, Isabella Hammad does that and more. It takes a remarkable eye for detail and ear for dialogue to succeed in both broad panorama and delicate miniature.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist

Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist

“A new work of literary nonfiction by the author of Station Eleven, featuring a Ponzi scheme inspired by the case of Bernie Madoff. Though not a dystopian novel, the shipping executive Miranda and her boss Leon make an appearance in The Glass Hotel, marking it as taking place within the same fictional universe as Station Eleven.” Read more...

Editors’ Picks: Notable New Novels of Early 2020

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Set in Lagos, it follows hardworking nurse Korede as she attempts to cover up the crimes committed by her insatiable sister Ayoola, a beautiful sociopath with black widow tendencies. As well as a crime thriller, it’s a razor-sharp dissection of gender dynamics that never feels preachy or pretentious.” Read more...

Editors’ Picks: Notable Books of 2019

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“A darkly sardonic story based on the real-life witch craze that took place during the early years of the English Civil War, when a self-declared ‘Witchfinder General’ took it upon himself to root out malefaction, moral corruption and heresy among the women left behind by their soldier husbands, sons and neighbours. The prose is deeply sensual and immersive; darkly sardonic, written in modern English but bejewelled with period-appropriate vocabulary. Blakemore is a published poet, and that comes through very strongly. Highly recommended.” Read more...

The Best Novels of 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“The story centres on an unexpected pregnancy: Ames, who until recently was living as a woman, has impregnated his boss and sometime-lover Katrina. Feeling unable to cope with the idea of traditional fatherhood, he proposes an unusual solution—that they invite his ex-partner Reese, a beautiful but self-destructive trans woman, to co-parent alongside them. The result is a funny, provocative and often profound novel of ideas. I’ve thought about it a great deal since. I’d recommend it to anyone.” Read more...

The Best Novels of 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“I’ve had my eye on quite a few literary debuts this season, not least Julia Armfield’s beautifully unnerving Our Wives Under the Sea. Armfield previously published a remarkable short story collection, salt slow, which saw her shortlisted for the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year here in the UK, and this book underlines her reputation for finely crafted tales of the horrifying, the strange and the contemporary gothic.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2022

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Olga Tokarczuk’s masterpiece The Books of Jacob, which was specifically cited when she won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature. It is a thousand-page tome on the life of Jacob Frank, a self-proclaimed messiah in 18th century Poland who declared his followers exempt from moral laws, and encouraged them to break all forms of religious and sexual taboos. It is, inarguably, a daunting prospect, but it’s a worthy reading project for dark winter evenings.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Spring 2022

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“When two unnamed twenty-somethings, a photographer and a dancer, lock eyes from across a crowded room, they find themselves irresistibly drawn to one another. Their subsequent relationship—intimate but undefinable—and artistic collaboration forms the basis of this intense and lyrical novel, which also serves as a meditation on the making of art, and the experience of being young and Black in modern Britain.” Read more...

The Best Novels of 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“This is a compulsively readable novel that genuinely made me laugh out loud. I think it will appeal to anyone who has spent the pandemic working from home—read: almost everyone. Reminiscent of And Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris’s workplace novel told in the third person plural, it perfectly captures the choppy, polyphonic Greek chorus of a company’s #general channel.” Read more...

The Best Novels of 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“‘Epic’ is the word. This is a book that really pulls off this immersive experience, creating a really richly imagined set of locations and characters and places. This is a book you feel like you can move through. You can see it, you can walk into the rooms. There’s an incredible tangibility about it that I find really powerful, and I don’t know how she does it. She has an incredible ability to make you believe in the reality of what she is describing, even in this exuberantly imaginative book. She’s swinging from the launching of a luxury liner for transatlantic voyages to show-pilots in western Montana in the 1920s and bush pilots in Alaska, to Hawaii in the 1960s and ’70s. And then, of course, there is this other narrative strand set in Hollywood in the here and now. Each of these brings you in, you live in it, and you want to see where you’re going to go next and then live in that one as well. That’s what’s so powerful about this book.” Read more...

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist

Maya Jasanoff, Historian

“Mohamed really takes advantage of the novel as the vehicle for telling this story. She certainly takes advantage of the use of time, the passage of time. The other books we’ve talked about all handle that quite differently. On the one hand, we get this extremely condensed timeline—the event happens, there’s a trial, there’s an execution, all over a short period—but within that she’s giving us this whole global story that also goes back in time through the character’s earlier life. She gives us the backstory of the victim of the crime as well. So she’s able to use this novel to give what seems like a detective story, on one hand, but then bring into it all of these other kinds of perspectives. And she’s able to mobilise our empathy in a bunch of ways.” Read more...

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist

Maya Jasanoff, Historian

“One of the things that really captured us from the first page is its incredibly wise, meditative voice. It’s looking at the legacy of a conflict that is not that well known to many people. The Sri Lankan civil war was an incredibly violent, some would say genocidal, conflict.The story is told from the point of view of a young man who has grown up in its aftermath. The book asks a question that I haven’t seen addressed in fiction, or not that I can think of, which is: what happens to all of those people who are just trying to process what happened, even if it didn’t happen directly to them?” Read more...

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist

Maya Jasanoff, Historian

“Powers is a writer for whom the ideas very close to the surface—he makes them part of the plot. In this book he’s engaging with ideas about neuroscience and the brain, like: where does emotion reside? Where does reason reside? How do these relate to each other? And how does this fit into our ideas about what counts as ‘normal behaviour’. And he’s exploring all of that, in a landscape, a created world that is itself clearly shaped by the present realities of climate change. What is considered normal human behaviour is then understood against a global set of circumstances in which what is considered normal is being disrupted by the “abnormal” conditions of climate change. It’s a tension that I think he uses very fruitfully in the novel.” Read more...

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist

Maya Jasanoff, Historian

“There’s a kind of crystalline brilliance in the writing of the sentences that makes it quite remarkable. The book is full of these very short little snippets, these little vignettes. I think that she’s able to pull that off because she is so in command of her sentences. It’s a book that manages to be formally inventive without flaunting it, in a way that really makes sense for the story it’s trying to tell. She has, I think, created a method of storytelling that mirrors the experience of being extremely online.” Read more...

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist

Maya Jasanoff, Historian

“Isaiah Quintabe—IQ for short—is a irresistable take on the iconic Sherlock Holmes, who was a favorite of author Joe Ide growing up. Ide’s settings are razor sharp as IQ’s cases keep getting harder and the stakes higher. But it’s the main character—a scary-smart high school dropout from the hood penned in Ide’s snappy prose—who makes this story a joy to read.” Read more...

The Best Thrillers of 2021

Tosca Lee, Novelist

“This is Lisa Unger showing once again why she’s a master of the genre as she deliver what readers turn to her books for time and again: a twisty, addictive thrill ride of an adventure. This is the very definition of a book you can’t put down and just one more stellar example of how authors continue to enthral audiences.” Read more...

The Best Thrillers of 2021

Tosca Lee, Novelist

“This is the follow-up to Osman’s likeable and funny first book The Thursday Murder Club (see below) which has been a fixture on bestseller lists since its 2020 release. This new murder mystery returns to the sleepy retirement village of Coopers Chase, where our septuagenarian sleuths have returned to the jigsaw room—only to find their peace shattered again when a ghost from the past sends one of their number a letter, many years after his supposed violent end. The Man Who Died Twice looks set to charm all those who loved Osman’s earlier book; I’ve heard the second Thursday Murder Club outing even better than the first.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Fall 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“The Vanished Birds, opens with an absolute classic of that intergalactic perspective—picture a very distant planet, a very low tech planet that was colonised in some distant past and is now home to generations of farmers. Every 15 years, the skies open and a fleet of ships descend upon the fields. The ships are described as being made of metal and cloth—and we don’t know whether we’re seeing this through the eyes of somebody who just doesn’t know what they’re seeing or if it’s a literal description—but it’s a very beautiful image that remind me of Sir Arthur’s famous line that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“Hao Jingfang is a Chinese author, and science fiction is often discussed as a way artists and writers can use fictions as a way to write if there are issues around state censorship. All that makes the story sound very political, but the book itself is very lyrical and reflective right from its beautifully evocative opening line.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“This is really good, fun, brilliantly well written, and the characters stay with you. One of our judges said that they went back and immediately started reading this one again—this, out of hundreds of books. So that’s praise.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“the premise of The Animals in that Country is that there is a pandemic, but it’s a virus that enables humans to start to understand the speech of animals. But not in a Doctor Dolittle way, when we can just chat to them. It’s more like the Wittgenstein idea that ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.’ I think it was that breath of imagination that really appealed to the judges. How would you imagine animal speech? They also talked about the joy of the writing in this book. The imaginative feat of trying to understand how an animal might communicate, and what that communication might be.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“If you liked Blade Runner, that noir flavour of science fiction, then this is the one for you. Think crumbling societies, dispossessed populations, outlawed technologies and a (very on trend) deadly plague to name just a few of the challenges our protagonists will be facing here.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“We’ve got here a young heroine. She’s Afro-Caribbean, she’s autistic. She’s at high school, but this high school is very special in that she attends a school in the future, because she is a time traveler, born on February 29, during which a certain percentage of people are gifted with time traveling powers. But things are going wrong in the future. While it is aimed at younger readers, that doesn’t mean the writing is any less mature. It’s an absolute page turner.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“A story of parallel worlds and astral projection which offers a vision of a world in which there were no European empires, and in which a form of African cosmology has become the dominant world religion. A novel of epic proportions and massive ambition.” Read more...

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Zakiya Dalila Harris’s debut novel The Other Black Girl, earned her a million-dollar book deal and shot into the New York Times bestseller list on release. Described as Get Out meets Stepford Wives, the book begins as a slow burn office drama—in which a black publishing assistant greets the arrival of a new black colleague with excitement and then suspicion—before taking a turn for the speculative.” Read more...

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“I was eagerly anticipating Jon McGregor’s new novel Lean Fall Stand—his fifth—and it didn’t disappoint. Like his Costa Prize-winning anti-mystery Reservoir 13, it begins with a scene of high drama before allowing the consequences to spool out over the subsequent years. In Reservoir 13, it was the search for a missing girl; in Lean Fall Stand it is a freak accident during an Antarctic expedition. The pitch and intensity of that opening scene is never revisited, but serves instead as fuel to fire the reader’s interest in the slower unravelling. Striking and unusual.” Read more...

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Cusk is best known for her Outline trilogy, those cool and exacting works of autofiction. Second Place too draws from life, in as much as the main character ‘M’ is a writer who lives in an isolated marsh—not unlike Cusk herself—and the narrator gestures towards some ‘global pandemonium’ making travel difficult. But the main thrust of the plot is derived from, or adapted from, a 1933 memoir by the American salonnière Mabel Dodge Luhan, who invited the writer D.H. Lawrence to live at her arts colony in New Mexico. Like Luhan, Cusk’s M writes to a painter she admires, inviting him to live in a guest house on her property. Like Luhan, M hopes that this this celebrated artist will reflect her life and landscape in some way through his art, something she does not feel qualified to do. And—like Luhan’s relationship with Lawrence—this relationship cannot be anything other than fraught and parasitic. But who, exactly, is the parasite?” Read more...

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Well, this book just roars into action. From the first moment, you’re being swept away by the energy with which Vuillard writes. And his translator keeps up with him every step of the way. It’s about Thomas Müntzer, who’s a little-remembered hero of the European religious reformation in the 16^th century. Vuillard conjures all his persuasive brilliance, but also his selfless and self-destructive rage. This is a kind of fictionalised biography, charged with electrical imaginative power. It’s thrillingly energetic and vivid.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer

“This capacious, thoughtful, generous book is a kind of meditation on mortality. It’s a book full of sorrow and regret. But it’s also very funny. Stepanova has a wonderfully humorous way of looking at the pathos of the passing of life. It’s a very unusual approach, and it’s delightful to spend so much time—it’s a long book—in the company of an author who has such a wise spirit and such a well-furnished mind. She never says an obvious thing. Her opinions are carefully thought out, and often startling.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer

“Its structure is extraordinary. I’ve never read anything like it. It’s as though we’ve raided the filing cabinet of the human resources department on a spaceship where half the workers are humans, and the other half are… I suppose robots, or artificial intelligences contained in humanoid bodies. Each of these people, these spaceship dwellers, have been asked to report on their state of mind to the personnel department, and there’s this wonderful conjunction of fantasy with the most tedious aspects of office life and bureaucracy. It’s so funny.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer

“It has a very innovative form. It’s a series of linked pieces, each one part-essay, part-story, part-biographical account of great minds, geniuses, who—according to this account—seem always on the verge of collapsing into madness as they unlock the secrets of the universe. What I took away from this book, is a new understanding that mathematics and physics, like language, are symbolic systems. And none of those systems are really capable of containing the strangeness of the actual substance, the matter, of the universe. All that a scientist can do, and all that a creative writer can do, when grappling with what Labatut calls “the dark heart” of the physical world, is create a kind of poetry. It’s a dazzlingly clever book.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer

“This is a collection of ghost stories. Enríquez uses the conventions of gothic horror and the macabre to write these brilliantly strange parables about the modern world. Her settings are detailed and concrete and realistic, mainly in Buenos Aires—she’s an Argentinian writer. The stories are very unsettling. But they’re also colourful and flamboyant, and sometimes disconcertingly funny, and always icily intelligent. They have the energy of ghosts that just won’t agree to be exorcised.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer

“This book is frightening. Reading it, you feel you’re being hypnotised. Your emotions are set all a-jangle, and your mind is being opened up to new thoughts. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing—very powerful, very compelling. It’s a story about war, yes. But also a story about love. The author David Diop creates incantatory word music, and the translator Anna Moschovakis absolutely has managed to recreate it.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer

“This dazzling work of experimental fiction explodes the literary conventions in its recreation of its protagonist’s anxious, polyphonic stream of consciousness over the course of a single day, in the wake of a sexual assault. That might sound like hard work, but it’s an absorbing and often playful book, which made a deep impression on me.” Read more...

The Best Novels of 2021

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“This isn’t your typical whodunnit. This is a haunting look at a community of women—not just the victims, but the family, friends and neighbors surrounding the victims—their circumstances, and the setting in which their stories take place. It hops between 1999 and 2014, and is that rare crime novel that compels not just by its plot, which advances with its shifting points of view, but by its insight into gender, privilege, and power.” Read more...

The Best Thrillers of 2021

Tosca Lee, Novelist

“I love this book. This is told from the point of view of an ‘artificial friend.’ Klara is a robot who’s conscious, sentient—a person—who is designed to be a companion to a wealthy disabled girl. Her whole purpose is to be as good a companion as possible to this girl, Josie. Ishiguro is brilliant in giving you the world through the eyes of Klara. It’s a very meditative, reflective book.” Read more...

The best books on Science Fiction and Philosophy

Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosopher

“Two young cousins on the brink of puberty create an imaginary world for the two of them to share. When Natsuki and Yuu’s blossoming romance causes consternation among relatives, they are torn apart; Natsuki never truly recovers.” Read more...

Favourite Novels of 2020

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“Daisy Johnson became the youngest ever author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize with her debut Everything Under. Her second novel is about a pair of uncannily close teenage siblings who move to the north of England after an incident at their previous high school in Oxford. Eerie and oppressive.” Read more...

Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“This novel has been endorsed by the likes of Zadie Smith, Brit Bennett and Ling Ma, and highlighted as one of the most anticipated novels of Fall 2020 by everywhere from Vogue to Lithub. It’s about a young black woman working in publishing who begins an affair with a white man in an open marriage—then later comes to live with the couple and their adopted daughter in their family home.” Read more...

Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020

Cal Flyn, Journalist

“This is a ‘first contact’ novel, and notable for being set purely within our solar system rather than having an intergalactic span. It’s actually quite rare to see a book that’s solar system-set. You can’t get away from the mechanics of space flight—you can’t use made up technological shortcuts to wave away the fact that there is no gravity in space, you can’t sidestep the fact that your mode of transport is very vulnerable out there, a tiny air bubble wrapped in metal that could pop very easily. This book is playing with that. While readers might well recognise echoes of writers like Clarke, this is still a very modernised update.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2020

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“Cage of Souls uses the ‘dying Earth’ trope: we are in the final city on Earth, during what we might term as a slow apocalypse. Everything is dying, everything is running down. There’s still a lot of technology that we would all consider hugely advanced, but he doesn’t explain how any of it works; in fact, the characters don’t know, and that sense of decline is what informs the book. Humanity is dying out. The rest of the planet, however, may not be, not just yet anyhow.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2020

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“Some people might prefer to call this type of book speculative fiction rather than science fiction. I’m not really here to have those kinds of arguments, but it’s brilliant to have this book on a science fiction list, because that means that we’re going to find a lot of new audiences for this book and we’re also pushing at the boundaries of what people (and publishers!) might consider to be science fictional. And it’s certainly a book that was being talked about within science fiction circles, even if it wasn’t necessarily branded that way.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2020

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“In terms of science fiction tropes, the ‘intergalactic empire’ is what we’re dealing with here. Once you’ve got a canvas as wide as the universe, anything goes—so what’s interesting about this, then, is that zero-ing in on the political detail, the protocol, and so on, rather than the intergalactic war. There’s nothing better in science fiction than that cosmic sweep with the idea that actually one person in the right place at the right time can make a difference.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2020

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“The central science fictional concept here isn’t a new super-weapon, spaceship, super-soldier, implacable alien race or similar, but rather the means of delivering soldiers to the battlefield near-instantaneously as light transmissions, which is a fascinating twist of the ‘damn I wish I’d thought of that’ variety. It’s a fiendishly clever concept because it opens up all kinds of plotlines simply by following the logic of the technology embedded at its centre. What does it do your humanity to be embedded suddenly into new warzones again and again? What if you’re transported to the wrong place, or you suspect you’re being sent to places other than the one detailed in your mission? People are talking about this book in the same way they do about absolute classic works of science fiction.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2020

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“This book is what we might call a ‘planetary romance’ in that it’s set on a single alien planet. An alien world gives you the opportunity to explore both this strange new planet and, also, humanity. From that point of view, it’s absolutely harking back to the classics of science fiction. It’s also playing with a younger cast in terms of its characters, which is very important for what you were saying about the new science fiction fandoms. This is not a YA book, but YA is a category that could be applied.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2020

Tom Hunter, Journalist

“It’s the story of old money running out, people who are land rich and cash poor, you know? So again, it’s a familiar… well, to British people, anyway: the story of the aristocracy falling apart. What does it mean for someone who’s had all that privilege, to lose it? What does that look like?” Read more...

The Funniest Books of 2020

Pippa Evans, Comedians & Humorist

“It’s a really nice book. If I say it’s an ‘easy read,’ that makes it sound like it’s a simple book, but more than that, it’s a very comfortable, comforting book. I know this style, but it’s still got freshness to it.” Read more...

The Funniest Books of 2020

Pippa Evans, Comedians & Humorist

“It’s a situation comedy, where the situation – visiting – changes location. It’s about a gardener, May, rekindling friendships. It’s got a kind of gentle humour, it’s cosy and comfortable and familiar… yet still fresh.” Read more...

The Funniest Books of 2020

Pippa Evans, Comedians & Humorist

“It’s beautifully written insult comedy. It’s funny in a very dark way. There’s the horror of humanity is in there. But when it’s that far away from you, in such a different time zone, you can laugh at it – because it’s not now. And by laughing at it over there, we can perhaps deal with it over here.” Read more...

The Funniest Books of 2020

Pippa Evans, Comedians & Humorist

“I used to work with this theatre director called Ken Campbell, and he used to say that the secret of comedy is silly plus sensible equals funny, while silly plus silly equals stupid. Flake, for me, is the ultimate silly plus sensible equals funny. Because it’s ice cream trucks warring about whose space is whose, who should be selling ice cream on what land, that kind of stuff. Territory war, essentially. There’s so much heart in it.” Read more...

The Funniest Books of 2020

Pippa Evans, Comedians & Humorist

“Glowingly endorsed by Bernardine Evaristo and Marlon James, Rainbow Milk unfolds in two parts, the first episode focused upon Norman, a Jamaican ex-boxer who emigrates to 1950s Britain; the second follows Jesse, a young, gay, black man as he is disfellowshipped by his community of Jehovah’s Witnesses and starts working in London as a sex worker. As with the Wyld book, these paired experiences illustrate the way trauma and violence reverberate through society over decades. Jesse’s story in particular is raw and powerful, offering unflinching descriptions of sex and desire, and it will make you feel alive.” Read more...

Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Summer 2020

Cal Flyn, Journalist