We’re at the end of another year again! Just like every year before, we are completely blown away by the incredible fiction our publishers release each month — and every year we are faced with the challenge of having to pick just a few of our favourites from a mind-blowing list of outstanding novels.

From soul-stirring LGBTQ+ stories to exhilarating crime thrillers and razor-sharp feminist narratives, be prepared to be catapulted into some weird and wonderful worlds from this searing selection.

Jack

Girlfriends by Emily Zhou
LittlePuss Press | 9781736716847 | PB | 17th October 2023

Attending to the intimacy of Gen Z women’s lives, these stories move from the provinces to the metropolis, from chaotic student accommodation to insecure jobs, from parties to dates to the nights after, from haplessness to some kind of power. Funny and devastating, like a trans Mary McCarthy, Zhou depicts with shocking precision the choices and shifts through which we work on each other and ourselves. Tender, merciless, and gracious, Girlfriends is a breath of fresh air.

Any Other City by Hazel Jane Plante
Arsenal Pulp Press | 9781551529110 | PB | 27th July 2023

Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang. Side B finds Tracy, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city in 2019, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open. Motifs recur like musical phrases, and traces of what used to be there peek through, like a palimpsest. Any Other City is a novel about friendship and other forms of love, travelling in a body across decades, and transmuting trauma through art making and queer sex — a love letter to trans femmes and to art itself.

Audition by Pip Adam
Peninsula Press | 9781913512415 | PB | 21st September 2023

The spaceship Audition is hurtling through towards an event horizon. Squashed immobile into its rooms are three giants: Alba, Stanley, and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing. So they talk, and as they do, Alba, Stanley, and Drew recover shared memories of the injustices faced back on Earth by their former selves. Or are they constructing those selves from memoryscripts that have been implanted in them? At once speculative and grimly realistic, formally experimental and politically urgent, Audition asks how we live with each other’s violences, and what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much space.

Where Furnaces Burn by Joel Lane
Influx Press | 9781914391095 | PB | 12th October 2023

Episodes from the casebook of a police officer in the West Midlands: A young woman needs help in finding the buried pieces of her lover… so he can return to waking life. Pale-faced thieves gather by a disused railway to watch a puppet theatre of love and violence. Why do local youths keep starting fires in the ash woods around a disused mine in the Black Country? A series of inexplicable deaths uncover a secret cult of machine worship.

When a migrant worker disappears, the key suspect is a boy driven mad by memories that are not his own. Among the derelict factories and warehouses at the heart of the city, an archaic god seeks out his willing victims. Blurring the occult detective story with urban noir fiction, Where Furnaces Burn offers a glimpse of the myths and terrors buried within the industrial landscape. First published in 2012, Joel Lane’s World Fantasy Award-winning collection is a true modern classic of weird fiction that cemented his place as one of the most important and distinctive British writers of the weird.

Julia

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter
VERVE Books | 9780857308511 | PB | 15th August 2023

Between the long hours, toxic bosses and unethical projects, she struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of houseless people bathing in the bay. Startup burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets.

Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, the black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, its size changing in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever closer as the world around her unravels. When her CEO’s demands cross an illegal line and her personal life spirals towards a dismal precipice, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are worth the pain, or succumb to the black hole.

The Man in the Corduroy Suit by James Wolff
Bitter Lemon Press | 9781913394844 | PB | 18th May 2023

Leonard Flood, a British spy, is ordered to investigate the poisoning of a retired vetting officer named Willa Karlsson. After a series of recent security breaches (recounted in the first two novels in the series), British intelligence is terrified by the possibility that Willa Karlsson was in fact a Russian agent, and that Moscow poisoned her upon her retirement since she was no longer useful to them. Leonard — intense, prickly, awkward but a brilliant interrogator — throws himself into the investigation, searching Willa’s home and questioning her friends and neighbours. He discovers that she was a regular visitor to a remote countryside hotel. Accompanied by a young colleague called Franny, Leonard travels there and discovers to his surprise a long-term Russian agent (known as an illegal) living undercover as the hotel’s gardener. When Leonard discovers that he is also a suspect in the investigation and that Willa’s story is less a story of betrayal than one of friendship, he must decide whether to hand her to her masters or to help her to escape.

The Bicyclist’s Guide to the Galaxy edited by Elly Blue
Microcosm Publishing | 9781648411861 | PB | 5th December 2023

Two strangers and their bike fall through a plot hole and into a fantasy novel, an author attempts to chronicle the solar cycling trend, a 6th grader’s beloved novel is stolen by a horde of bicycling fae, an interstellar book preservationist takes a bike to fit in and gets a wilder ride than she bargained for, and more adventures are set in imagined realities not so different from our own futures, pasts, and present day lives. Take these stories for a spin and enjoy an escape from the perils of everyday sexism and fossil fuel dependence. Includes stories by Kathleen Jowitt, Christopher R. Muscato, Shelby Schwieterman, Cara Brezina, Jamie Perrault, Avery Vanderlyle, Lisa Timpf, Taru Luojola, Rose Strickman, and Elly Blue.

Sinéad

Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Tramp Press | 9781915290090 | PB | 17th August 2023

Fayne, a vast moated castle, lies to the misty southern border of Scotland, ruled by the Lord Henry Bell, Seventeenth Baron of the DC de Fayne, Peer of Her Majesty’s Realm of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In Fayne we meet a trans character coming to terms with frustratingly arbitrary dichotomies in the world. The mysterious Lord Bell keeps to his rooms by day, appearing briefly at night to dote over his beloved and peculiarly gifted child. But even with all her gifts — intelligence, wit and strength of character — can Charlotte overcome the violently strict boundaries of contemporary society and establish her own place in the world?

The Marigold by Andrew F. Sullivan
ECW Press | 9781770416642 | PB | 9th June 2023

The Marigold, a gleaming Toronto condo tower, sits a half-empty promise: a stack of scuffed rental suites and undelivered amenities that crumbles around its residents as a mysterious sludge spreads slowly through it. Public health inspector Cathy Jin investigates this toxic mold as it infests the city’s infrastructure, rotting it from within, while Sam ‘Soda’ Dalipagic stumbles on a dangerous cache of data while cruising the streets in his Camry, waiting for his next rideshare alert. On the outskirts of downtown, 13-year-old Henrietta Brakes chases a friend deep underground after he’s snatched into a sinkhole by a creature from below. All the while, construction of the city’s newest luxury tower, Marigold II, has stalled. Stanley Marigold, the struggling son of the legendary developer behind this project, decides he must tap into a hidden reserve of old power to make his dream a reality — one with a human cost. Weaving together disparate storylines and tapping into the realms of body horror, urban dystopia, and ecofiction, The Marigold explores the precarity of community and the fragile designs that bind us together.

How To Be A French Girl by Rose Cleary
Weatherglass Books | 9781739260125 | PB | 27th July 2023

She’s from Southend. She wanted to be an artist and ended up at the best art school in the country. But that didn’t work out. Now she works as a receptionist in an IT firm, where her only creative outlet is arranging the sandwiches she’s ordered in for other people s meetings. And she still lives in Southend. Outside work, soulless sex has become a symptom of her boredom. Then Gustav appears: older, perceptive, attentive. And French. He’s her way out, she thinks. But more than that, a chance to be creative again: to become someone new. How To Be A French Girl is a fierce, disturbing and funny debut novel about desire, art and what we’ll risk to change ourselves.

Em

Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt
Cipher Press | 9781739220723 | PB | 12th October 2023

When a transphobic woman bombs Frankie’s workplace, she blows up Frankie’s life with it. As the media descends like vultures, Frankie tries to cope with the carnage: binge-drinking, fucking strangers, pushing away her friends. Then, she meets Vanya. Mysterious, beautiful, terrifying Vanya. The two hit it off immediately, but as their relationship intensifies, so too does Frankie’s feeling that Vanya is hiding something from her.

When Vanya’s secrets threaten to tear them apart, Frankie starts digging, and unearths a sinister, depraved conspiracy, the roots of which go deeper than she ever imagined. Shocking, grotesque, and downright filthy, Brainwyrms confronts the creeping reality of political terror while exploring the depths of love, pain, and identity.

The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer
Peirene Press | 9781908670779 | PB | 11th July 2023

Rio de Janeiro, the 1970s. One hot Brazilian summer, Camilo meets Cosme and the two teenage boys discover a new kind of tenderness. But an act of violence will shatter their intimate world, and change the trajectory of their young lives. At once an incisive exploration of Brazilian society and a tender account of first love, first grief and revenge, The Love of Singular Men is a powerful and exhilarating novel, which sparkles with wit and playful ingenuity throughout.

Never Was by H. Gareth Gavin
Cipher Press | 9781739784966 | PB | 6th April 2023

Part hallucination, part queer bildungsroman, Never Was is a beautifully strange novel about grief, addiction and working-class masculinity, taking us from a limbo of lost dreams to a small salt-mining town and exploring the way identity is both inherited and re-invented. Daniel sits on a clifftop in the aftermath of a party at Fin’s mansion, looking out over a junky sea. Daniel’s not sure why they’re there, or who Fin is, even though Fin seems to be somebody famous. To find out, Daniel must tell Fin the story of their childhood, going back to a small salt-mining town in The North, a visit from their now-estranged cousin Crystal, and the life and losses of their salt-miner father, Mika.

Taking us from bus shelters to playgrounds to McDonalds, from the depth of a salt mine to a nightclub toilet, Daniel describes their world of soap operas, sunglasses, newspaper clippings and Princess Diana, steering Fin through the events that led up to The Great Subsidence, when their town and the mine that sustained it collapsed. As Daniel tells their story, they come to learn they’re in a place called Never Was, a limbo for lost dreams and disappointments, a landfill for things that never came to be, but also a place of change and transition. Dreamy, poignant, and revelatory, Never Was is a bold and inventive novel by an inimitable voice in literary fiction.