Happy New Year, book lovers! January is here, and it’s bringing a whole new slate of exciting fiction to dive into. Whether you’re craving thrilling mysteries, touching stories, or captivating new worlds, this month’s releases have something to keep every fiction reader hooked. January is packed with fresh stories to kick off your reading year with a bang! Check out our top picks and get ready to add some unforgettable books to your shelf.
Runaway Horses by Carlo Fruttero & Franco Lucentini
Bitter Lemon Press | 9781916725034 | PB | £9.99 | 23rd January 2025
Siena, one of Italy’s most beautiful cities, is feverishly preparing for the Palio, a horse race dating back to the Middle Ages, held every summer in the centre of the town. Tempers flare, rivalries between the competing neighbourhoods intensify. Milanese lawyer Enzo Maggione and his wife Valeria are unwittingly caught up in the death of a jockey and a maelstrom of plots, counterplots and bribes surrounding the race. What begins as a listless excursion to a medieval equestrian competition turns into a hallucinatory nightmare for Maggione and his wife, awakening their dormant libido, for each other but, more dangerously, for others in their entourage.
The Visitor by Maeve Brennan
Peninsula Press | 9781913512637 | PB | £10.99 | 30th January 2025
Following the death of her mother, twenty-two-year-old Anastasia King leaves Paris to return to Dublin. In the time that she has been away, her estranged father has died. On arriving to her family home, Anastasia is met by her paternal grandmother, who, filled with bitterness and spite, has determined never to forgive Anastasia for fleeing with her mother to Paris. As her days fill up with little humiliations, it becomes clear that, while Anastasia thinks she has come home to stay, for the vengeful Mrs King she is an unwelcome visitor. Written while Brennan was still in her twenties, this novella is a masterpiece of compression, a terse and haunting account of the personal and political factors that impinge on a young woman’s freedom. Presented here with a new introduction by Lynne Tillman, The Visitor seals Maeve Brennan’s reputation as one of the twentieth century’s finest writers, and one of the most unflinching documentarians of the human heart.
The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter
Verve Books | 9780857309037 | PB | £10.99 | 10th January 2025
The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents — with the surreal — rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats — Cassie’s realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.
A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo
Verve Books | 9780857309013 | PB | £12.99 | 28th January 2025
A one-eyed chicken, a chimpanzee forgotten in a cage, babies with hydra heads squished into pulp. Everday madness and monsters are explored against the backdrop of an indifferent Lagos in Uche Okonkwo’s dynamic debut collection. Across ten evocative stories, A Kind of Madness dips in and out of the lives of Nigerians, weaving through their lunacy and longing, unravelling the tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, best friends, siblings and more. Brimming with vitality, these bites of mundane madness mark the arrival of an extraordinary new talent in fiction and will leave you hungering for more.
Dancing on Knives by Joanne Rush
Honno Welsh Women’s Press | 9781916821125 | PB | £9.99 | 30th January 2025
Laura, a brilliant young Bosnian refugee, must confront her harrowing past when she falls in love with British diplomat Adam, whose job takes them to Serbia — the country that once invaded her own. With Adam preoccupied in his pursuit of war criminal General Ratko Mladic, Laura is troubled by familiar ghostly figures whose reminiscences about the city she once fled hold a dangerous allure. Can they help her? Or is she losing her mind? As Laura grapples with these hidden secrets, she uncovers a defiant power within herself. Poised on the edge of magic realism, this is a story for our time, about the dark legacy of war and the unexpected roads that lead to redemption.
Mother River by Can Xue
Translated by Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping
Open Letter | 9781960385314 | PB | £16.99 | 21st January 2025
The thirteen stories in this collection are vintage Can Xue. Similar to her novels (The Last Lover, Frontier) and other collections (Vertical Motion) the focus is less on what happens and more on the experience of reading. Mother River is a short bildungsroman of a young man who decides to become a fisherman (and crafter of spherical maps) and discovers that performing the role itself is more important than the number of fish they catch. Surreal, provocative, and unique, Mother River reinforces Can Xue’s status as one of the most rewarding and complex writers working today — and a perennial favourite to win the Nobel Prize.
To Save the Man by John Sayles
Melville House Publishing | 9781685891411 | HB | £25 | 23rd January 2025
In September of 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle school — a military-style boarding school for Indians run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt’s motto, ‘Kill the Indian, Save the Man’ is enforced in the classroom as well as the dorm rooms: speak English, forget your own language and customs, learn to be white. While the students navigate survival, they hear rumours of a sweeping tribal lands reservations in the west — the ‘ghost dance,’ whereby desperate Native Americans engaged in frenzied dancing and chanting hoping it will cause the buffalo to return, the Indian dead to rise, and the white people to disappear. Local whites panic, and the government sends in troops to keep the reservations under control. When legendary medicine man Sitting Bull is killed by native police working for the government troops, each Carlisle resident is faced with the question: Whose side are you on? And what will you risk to gain your freedom?
