Spring is here and the weather isn’t the only thing heating up — so are the presses! March boasts an incredible slate of exciting new fiction titles that we can’t stop talking about. Whether you’re looking for thoughtful speculation, spine-tingling horror, or thrilling video game action, our incredible publishers have something for everyone. Here’s a list of titles that are well-worth the march to your local bookstore!
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by PatrÍcia Melo (Translated by Sophie Lewis)
9781917378086 / Indigo Press / Paperback / £9.99 / 06th March 2025
From bestselling novelist Patrícia Melo comes a masterful thriller set in the far west of Brazil that is by turns poetic, inspiring, humorous and harrowing.
To escape an overprotective family and an abusive partner, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about an epidemic of violence against women that seems beyond comprehension. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a psychological trip with a twist. It’s about the strength of individuals in the face of overwhelming violence, the problem of femicide in Brazil, and the haunting of a cold case.
Pages of Mourning by Diego Gerard Morrison
9781953387400 / Two Dollar Radio / Paperback / £13.99 / 06 March 2025
It’s 2017 and the crisis of forced disappearances has reached a tipping point after 43 docent students disappeared and are feared dead. Aureliano Más the Second is a fledgling writer at a lucrative fellowship in Mexico City chaired by his aunt, Rose. When Aureliano was very young, his mother left without reason or trace. Aureliano is attempting to write a novel that mirrors his mother’s unexplained disappearance while shattering Magical Realism as a genre in the process. It doesn’t help though, that he’s named after the protagonist of a touchstone of the Magical Realist canon, and raised in the mythical town of Comala.
Aureliano searches for insight and closure from his father and from Rose, who grappled with his mother’s disappearance through a failed novel of her own. Their stories lead back to the 1980’s and the burgeoning drug trade, as Rose and Aureliano’s mother’s journey as young runaways throughout the Mexican countryside. Meanwhile, Aureliano’s addictions and the overwhelming burden of the past threaten his tenuous position at the fellowship, just as a deadly earthquake strikes Mexico City on the exact same date as a legendary earthquake struck in 1985.
Pages of Mourning is a daring, captivating, darkly funny novel that grapples with uncertainty and loss in a land of violence and superstition, while questioning whether Magical Realism as a genre is capable of confronting the brutal dissonance of a country that awaits the return of the missing while not wholly acknowledging their death. Monumental, lyrical, and engrossing, Pages of Mourning is a towering accomplishment by one of the most exciting new writers at work today.
The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman
9780593955970 / ACE / Hardback / £26.99 / 11th March 2025
Follow Carl, Princess Donut, and Mongo as they fight their way to the next level in the USA Today bestselling Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman
New Achievement! Total, Utter Failure.
You failed a quest less than five minutes after you received it. Now that’s talent. A floating fortress occupied by warrior gnomes. A castle made of sand. A derelict submarine guarded by malfunctioning machines. A haunted crypt surrounded by lethal traps.
It was supposed to be easy. One bubble. Four castles. Fifteen days. Capture each one, and the stairwell is unlocked.
Here’s the thing. It’s never easy. Carl and his team can’t go it alone. Not this time. They must rely on the help of the low-level, I-can’t-believe-these-idiots-are-still-alive crawlers trapped in the bubble with them. But can they be trusted?
Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to the fifth floor of the dungeon.
Landscapes by Christine Lai
9781914391521 / Influx Press / Paperback / £11.99 / 13th March 2025
In the English countryside — decimated by heat and drought — Penelope archives what remains of an estate’s once notable collection. As she catalogues the library’s contents, she keeps a diary of her final months in the dilapidated country house that has been her home for two decades and a refuge for those who have been displaced by disasters. Out of necessity, Penelope and her partner, Aidan, have sold the house and its scheduled demolition, which marks the pressing deadline for completing the archive. But with it also comes the impending return of Aidan’s brother, Julian, at whose hands Penelope suffered during a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before. As Julian’s visit looms, Penelope finds herself unable to suppress the past, clinging to art as a means of understanding, of survival, and of reckoning.
Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an elegiac and spellbinding blend of narrative, essay, and diary that reinvents the country-house novel for our age of catastrophe, announcing the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.
FLUX by Jinwoo Chong
9781685891930 / Melville House / Paperback / £12.99 / 13th March 2025
Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family.
So begins Jinwoo Chong’s dazzling, time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a vast network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself. Intertwined with them is the saga of an iconic ’80s detective show, Raider, whose star actor has imploded spectacularly after revelations of long-term, concealed abuse. FLUX is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.
Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh (Translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Rosenblum)
9781911710158 / Seven Stories / Paperback / £14.99 / 13th March 2025
Ukrainian writer and military serviceman Artem Chekh’s book was the winner of the 2021 BBC News Ukraine Book of the Year Award and is a gritty and bald bildungsroman, a lilting picaresque of a life lived in the shadow of someone else’s war.
When Tymofiy is five years old, his small family in Cherkasy, Ukraine grows by one. Not with the birth of a baby sister or brother, but with the appearance of Felix — mentor and tormentor, enemy and friend — Tymofiy’s grandmother’s sometime-boyfriend. “Who are you?” Felix screams in the depths of a confused and drunken rage at all who cross his path, his memories of the Soviet-Afghan war clouding his eyes and senses. “Who are you?” Tymofiy asks himself as he drifts through the streets of his hometown, searching for love and protection, for a better, happier way of life.
A gritty, realist depiction of Ukraine and the post Soviet world, this book offers an affecting yet honest look into the life of someone suffering from PTSD. It is a story of growing up without much hope for a better future, and yet intense moments of connection and kindness persist. Just when things begin to seem insurmountably dark, a friendship begins, a kind word is said, or a hand reaches out and opens the curtains, letting in a little light.
A Person Is A Prayer by Ammar Kalia
9780857306043 / Oldcastle Books / Paperback / £10.99 / 20th March 2025
Bedi and Sushma’s marriage is arranged. When they first meet, they stumble through a faltering conversation about happiness and hope and agree to go in search of these things together. But even after their children Selena, Tara and Rohan are grown up and have their own families, Bedi and Sushma are still searching. Years later, the siblings attempt to navigate life without their parents. As they travel to the Ganges to unite their father’s ashes with the opaque water, it becomes clear that each of them has inherited the same desire to understand what makes a life happy, the same confusion about this question and the same enduring hope.
A Person is a Prayer plumbs the depths of the spaces between family members and the silence that rushes in like a flood when communication deteriorates. It is about how short a life is and how the choices we make can ripple down generations.
Available Dark by Elizabeth Hand
9781914391347 / Influx Press / Paperback / £10.99 / 20th March 2025
Following the death of reclusive photographer, Aphrodite Kamestos, the police would like to talk to Cass Neary, but before they can bring her in, Cass accepts a job offer and hops on a plane.
In Helsinki, she authenticates a series of disturbing but stunning images taken by a famous fashion photographer who has cut himself off from the violent Nordic music scene where he first made his reputation. Paid off by her shady employer, she buys a one-way ticket to Reykjavík, in search of a lover from her own dark past.
But when the fashion photographer’s mutilated corpse is discovered back in Finland, Cass finds herself sucked into a vortex of ancient myth and betrayal, vengeance and serial murder, set against a bone-splintering soundtrack of black metal and the terrifying beauty of the sunless Icelandic wilderness.
In Available Dark, the sequel to the award-winning Generation Loss, Cass Neary finds her own worst fears confirmed: it’s always darkest before it turns completely black.
A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle
9780857309075 / Verve Books / Paperback / £10.99 / 27th March 2025
A love story about the almost crossovers of our lives…
1972. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, Australia, two teenage girls must each make a choice: to act upon their desires or suppress them? To live an openly queer life or to try desperately not to?
Over the following three decades, these girls grow into women and live out their decisions, always almost crossing paths at pivotal moments. In an era that spans Australia’s first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, there is joy and grief and loss and desire for each of them — but will their lives ever collide?
A Language of Limbs is about love and how it’s policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak. A celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.
North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud
9781838171674 / New Ruins / Paperback / £10.99 / 27th March 2025
Nathan Ballingrud’s award winning debut collection is a cornerstone of contemporary horror fiction that dismantles the boundaries around genre fiction. Shattering and luminous, North American Lake Monsters explores the darker parts of the human psyche to reveal monsters, real and imagined, external and internal. They are us and we are them. What is revealed in these stories is a working class portrait of 21st century American life that is as cruel as it is fragile and as precarious as it is tenacious.
These are love stories and monster stories. Monsters who wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The people in these stories are driven to extremes by love and by desperation. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to escape.
Hunkeler’s Secret by Hansjörg Schneider (Translated by Astrid Freuler)
9781916725126 / Bitter Lemon Press / Paperback / £9.99 / 20th March 2025
The latest in the international crime series featuring Inspector Peter Hunkeler, to follow on from the success of The Murder of Anton Livius, prize-winning The Basel Killings, and Silver Pebbles.
Hunkeler, now a retired inspector of the Basel police force, is hospitalized and sharing a room with Stephan Fankhauser, an old acquaintance terminally ill with cancer. One night, a groggy Hunkeler wakes up to see a young nurse with a ruby ring on her hand administering an injection to his friend. The following day Fankhauser is found dead. Was the injection just a dream? Does the night nurse not usually wear a small diamond ring? There was no autopsy and a quick cremation. Hunkeler resolves to get to the bottom of the matter despite the objections of his ex-colleagues, who want the retired inspector to stay well clear of the investigation.
Country Landlords by Louisa Matilda Spooner
9781916821149 / Honno / Paperback / £14.99 / 27th March 2025
The young lovers Gertrude Fitzhammons and Anarawd Gwynne are caught between their fathers’ mutual antagonism. Eventually, Gertrudes’ adoptive father, the retired sea captain Ricardo Lewis, is forced to flee Britain due to the machinations of old squire Gwynne and Lewis’s mortal enemy, Lord Morlif. At the same time, Anarawd is sent abroad in the hope that he forgets his sweetheart. After several years apart, their separate fates lead them to meet again in Naples during the spring revolutions of 1848. After Lewis’s betrayal to his death on the republican barricades, a broken-hearted Gertrude returns to her Welsh home. Will Anarawd follow her or seek his fortune abroad in the British Army?
Loosely inspired by social and agricultural advancements in the district around the author’s home in Porthmadog, Country Landlords (1860) looks at the relationship between the landed gentry and ordinary country population in the early nineteenth-century.
The Evening Shades by Lee Martin
9781685891732 / Melville House / Paperback / £18.99 / 27th March 2025
One afternoon in the autumn of 1972, a lonely widow in Mt. Gilead, Illinois, offers to rent a room in her house to a socially awkward man, a stranger who has come to town. It is risky — she doesn’t know anything about him, and she hadn’t thought to take in a renter. But Edith Green can no longer bear a life lived alone.
Henry Dees, haunted by the past he carries with him from Tower Hill, Indiana, is plagued by a tremendous guilt about things he did and didn’t do that led to the death of a little girl back home. How can he face the rest of his life?
The Evening Shades is as moving and suspenseful as its predecessor, Pulitzer finalist The Bright Forever. But it is a story that stands alone: a story of love found in middle age and the joy it promises, but not without serious complications. There is the bereaved family of the little girl, who are holding their own secrets about the mysterious disappearances of both the man who killed their daughter and Henry Dees. The Evening Shades is a poignant story of accommodation, resilience, forgiveness, and love in the face of all that threatens the splendour of our ordinary lives.
Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno (Translated by Natasha Lehrer)
9781911710202 / Seven Stories / Paperback / £14.99 / 27th March 2025
Winner of multiple prizes, Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and is an international phenomenon. Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was seven years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her. At the age of fourteen or fifteen the abuse stopped. At nineteen, she decided to break the silence around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico. Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, woven together with documents and thoughts in the manner of a personal investigation, Sinno explores the different facets of memory — her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others.
Sad Tiger — the title inspired by William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” — is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.
