Summer readin’, happens so fast… We cannot believe it’s June already as we fly through 2025, but there’s always a silver lining, as it means you can finally read all the phenomenal fiction that is coming out this month! Don’t wait any longer, scroll down to discover the perfect titles to spread out and read in this gorgeous summer weather!
Make a Home of Me
By Vanessa Santos
Dead Ink Books | 9781915368829 | PB | £10.99 | 12th June 2025
Haunting stories of unwelcoming homes…
Peer through the keyhole and you’ll see a mysterious dinner party with a sickening twist; a woman’s intense new relationship with a single father and his strangely shy daughter; the rediscovered journals of a famous artist with a singular obsession who disappeared in suspicious circumstances; a family driven to desperation by the impossible appearance of nonsensical notes; and a seemingly happily married couple driven to the edge of despair by a neighbour’s crying baby. Set in houses that should provide protection but instead turn on their inhabitants, places of safety invaded without warning, and familiar landscapes that gradually change beyond recognition, Make a Home of Me is about all the ways in which our sanctuaries can turn into foreign places, casting us as strangers as we roam the halls. The stories in Make a Home of Me are unsettling and distinct, introducing a fresh new voice in the horror landscape. Lock up when you’re done…
Paradise Garden
By Elena Fischer, translated by Alexandra Roesch
The Indigo Press | 9781911648956 | PB | £12.99 | 5th June 2025
The beginning was the last day before the summer holidays. The beginning was a song on the radio. The beginning was big plans.
Fourteen-year-old Billie rarely crosses the boundaries of her high-rise housing estate. By the end of the month their money just about stretches to pasta with ketchup, but her mother, Marika, lights up Billie’s world with her imagination and big heart. One day they receive an unwelcome visit from her Hungarian grandmother, and Billie loses much more than the colourful everyday life she shared with her mother. No longer able to ask Marika questions, Billie sets off alone in their old Nissan — determined to meet the father she never knew and find out why she keeps dreaming about the sea, even though she’s never been there. Longlisted for the German Book Prize 2023, Paradise Garden is a spellbinding journey and a deeply affecting story of class, resilience and belonging.
A Foreign Country is the Past
By Fernando Sdrigotti
Influx Press | 9781914391569 | PB | £10.99 | 5th June 2025
A new short fiction collection from an Edge Hill Prize Longlisted author!
At a secluded weekend home, a girl becomes entranced by the sound of the cicadas, as she grapples with the stifling summer heat, and her mother’s recent death. Overwhelmed by a sense of foreboding, a young man seeks solace in a privatised cathedral, comically navigating religious bureaucracy, economic crisis, and existential angst. A journey to scatter his grandparents’ ashes turns into a tragicomedy, as an unnamed man explores the changes in the city he left behind. A Foreign Country is the Past is the sensorial new collection from the acclaimed author of Jolts. Centering on identity and memory, viewed through a distinctive Argentine lens, these fifteen tales are a profound exploration of the spaces between places and the echoes of time.
The Verifiers
By Jane Pek
VERVE Books | 9780857309204 | PB | £10.99 | 30th June 2025
Part literary mystery, part family story, The Verifiers is a clever and incisive examination of how technology shapes our choices and the nature of romantic love in the digital age.
Claudia Lin is used to disregarding her fractious family’s model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy. She’s also used to keeping secrets from them, such as that she prefers girls — and that she’s just been stealth —recruited by Veracity, a referrals-only online-dating detective agency. A lifelong mystery reader who wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, Claudia believes she’s landed her ideal job. But when a client vanishes, Claudia breaks protocol to investigate — and uncovers a maelstrom of personal and corporate deceit.
The Maiden Faust
By Conor Farrington
Galileo Publishers | 9781915530851 | PB | £12.99 | 27th June 2025
A new and startlingly original take on the Faust legend using contemporary voices, with a focus on technology, gender, and mental health: a feminist Faust for our times.
This unputdownable novel is set against a richly authentic backdrop of 1840s Cambridge. The Maiden Faust presents a new and startlingly original take on the Faust legend made famous by Marlowe, Goethe and Mann. The retelling, which uses contemporary voices, updates their preoccupations with a focus on technology, gender, and mental health: a feminist Faust for our times. In this forceful female-centred narrative the ageing scholar of the Gothic myth is replaced by Philippa Austen, a Cambridge undergraduate in an alternative Victorian England where alchemy holds sway. After Philippa encounters the unearthly Martha Stowfell (Mephistopheles), she strikes a bargain to unpick the threads of her dark history — but at what cost?
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies
By Harriet Armstrong
Les Fugitives | 9781739778361 | PB | £14.99 | 5th June 2025
A debut novel from a voice as unique as it is relatable!
In her final year of a degree in psychology, and struggling to relate to the world around her and find her place within it, a young woman drifts from lectures on gifts, vision, the history of global warming, and study groups discussing babies manipulating objects. Yet nothing seems to bring her closer to the great insight she’s been promised — except, perhaps, for her interest in a student named Luke, a postgraduate in computer sciences. But a chasm between them that grows and shrinks unexpectedly calls into question whether he might be as incomprehensible as the world around her. Set in an unnamed campus in England in the early 2020s, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies queries the nature of one’s experience, mapping the disintegration of a young woman’s sense of self and her struggle to keep a grip on reality. From a voice as unique as it is relatable, and in prose that is keenly observant, delightfully wry, and utterly despairing, the anonymous narrator of this unconventional coming-of-age novel is as brave as she is unforgettable.
The Future Was Color
By Patrick Nathan
Counterpoint | 9781640096998 | PB | £15.99 | 10th June 2025
A dazzling novel about the inextricable link between the personal and the political set against the decadence of Hollywood and postwar Los Angeles…
As a Hungarian immigrant working as a studio hack writing monster movies in 1950s Hollywood, George Curtis must navigate the McCarthy-era studio system filled with possible communists and spies, the life of closeted men along Sunset Boulevard, and the inability of the era to cleave love from persecution and guilt. But when Madeline, a famous actress, offers George a writing residency at her estate in Malibu to work on the political writing he cares most deeply about, his world is blown open. Soon Madeline is carrying George into a class of postwar L.A. society ordinarily hidden from men like him. What this lifestyle hides behind, aside from the monsters on the screen, are the monsters dwelling closer to home: this bacchanalia covers a gnawing hole shelled wide by the horror of the war they thought they’d left behind and the glimpse of an atomic future. It’s here that George understands he can never escape his past as Gyorgy, the queer Jew who fled Budapest before the war and landed in New York. The Future Was Color is an immaculately written exploration of postwar American decadence, reinventing the self through art, and the psychosis that lingers in a world that’s seen the bomb.
If Wishes Were Retail
By Auston Habershaw
Tachyon Publications | 9781616964344 | PB | £14.99 | 17th June 2025
An enterprising teen and a clueless genie join forces to make a living in this delightfully cosy fantasy.
A pop-up at the local mall meets Alladin in this cosy, chaotic, and deeply funny debut novel where an enterprising young woman and a clueless genie just try to make a living. Alex Delmore needs a miracle. She wants out of her dead-end suburban town, but her parents are broke and NYU seems like a distant dream. Good thing there’s a genie in town — and he’s hiring at the Wellspring Mall. It’d help if the Jinn-formerly-of-the-Ring-of-Khorad knew even one thing about 21st-century America. It’d help if he weren’t at least as stubborn as Alex. It’d really help if her brother didn’t sell her out to her conspiracy theory-loving, gnome-hating dad. When Alex and the genie set up their wishing kiosk, they face seemingly-endless setbacks. The mall is failing and management will not stop interfering on behalf of their big-box tenants. But when the wishing biz might start working, the biggest problem of all remains: People are really terrible at wishing.
Winging It with You
By Chip Pons
Putnam | 9780593853504 | PB | £14.99 | 10th June 2025
A laugh-out-loud, slow-burn romance that’s ideal for a weekend getaway!
Asher Bennett thought his relationship was just fine. Until he’s unceremoniously dumped at the Boston airport ahead of the world-wide travel competition reality show, The Epic Trek. Armed with only a ticket and righteous indignation, Asher finds the closest solace he can: a mimosa and mozzarella sticks combo at an airport TGI Fridays. Still, Asher is determined to find a new partner and luckily, right in front of him is a smooth-talking airline pilot ready for take-off. Theo Fernandez has been grounded. He’s the only pilot that has never taken a vacation and the edict has been passed down: prove you’re prioritizing a work-life balance or say goodbye to your wings. As he struggles to bask in his new downtime, without reconnecting with his family, he stumbles upon the perfect opportunity. The handsome guy who ‘stole’ his mozzarella sticks at his favourite terminal eatery has a sudden opening for a partner… on a nationally televised reality show. Theo and Asher buckle up to fake date for the cameras, but as they do the undercurrents of attraction make them wonder if their on-screen chemistry hints at something bigger. Do they have the courage to leave behind their baggage, and wing it together for another chance at love?
The Adventures of Mary Darling
By Pat Murphy
Tachyon Publications | 9781616964382 | PB | £16.99 | 5th June 2025
Neverland and Sherlock Holmes collide when Mary Darling becomes the greatest detective’s prime suspect in the disappearance of her three children.
Mary Darling is a pretty wife whose boring husband is befuddled by her independent ways. But one fateful night, Mary becomes the distraught mother whose three children have gone missing from their beds. After her well-meaning uncle John Watson contacts the greatest detective of his era (but not that great), Mary is Sherlock Holmes’s prime suspect in her children’s disappearance. To save her family, Mary must escape an attempt to have her locked away as mad, and to travel halfway around the world. Along the way, her allies include a Solomon Islander whose village was destroyed by Western civilization; a Malagasy woman on an island that is run by women; Captain Hook and the crew of the Jolly Roger; and of course, Nana, the faithful dog and nursemaid. This witty and adventurous new novel from Pat Murphy will delight fans of classic Victorian tales, as well as those who are looking for a radical new take on the British Empire.
State of Emergency
By Jeremy Tiang
World Editions | 9781642861549 | PB | £15.99 | 3rd June 2025
From the winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2018 comes a compelling historical novel of Singapore society and family sagas.
Siew Li leaves her husband and young children to fight for freedom in the jungles of Malaya. Decades later, a Malaysian journalist returns to her homeland to uncover the truth of a massacre committed during the Emergency, while Siew Li’s son uncovers the truth of his family’s past. Informed by years of painstaking research, Jeremy Tiang’s debut novel dives into the tumultuous days of leftist movements and political detentions in Singapore and Malaysia. It follows an extended family from the 1940s to the present day as they navigate the choppy political currents of the region. State of Emergency questions whether we can grasp the truth after the fact. And yet, in the very telling of its interlocking stories, it reaffirms the importance of trying.
22 Fictions: New Writing from Desperate Literature & Brick Lane Bookshop
Edited by Kate Ellis and Robert Loyko-Greer
Cheerio Publishing | 9781917283069 | PB | £15 | 19th June 2025
A selection of works from two industry-leading short story writing programmes that have helped foster the next generation of truly interesting literary writers.
A curated selection drawn from the first five years of two indie bookseller-run projects — Madrid’s Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize and London’s Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize — these 22 Fictions feature Purim celebrations, multiple Stuart Halls, a kidnapping, gender injustice, an aeroplane fleeing a volcano, gender injustice, a chicken shop menu, climate change, a shaved horse, activism, and much besides, all the while roaming from a Cornish farming village to a Paris basement, a hotel bar, a location deep within the internet, and further. Proudly internationalist and profoundly imaginative, the 22 stories in this vital anthology are wild, innovative, funny, sad, harrowing and tender. Together they celebrate the energy and diversity of short fiction writing today, pushing the boundaries of the form into new territory and bringing together a radical new generation of writers from across the globe. Featuring work from: Shola von Reinhold, Leeor Ohayon, Tom Benn, Alice Haworth-Booth, N G F Clark, Danielle Giles, Francesca Reece, Melody Razak, Mariana Roa Oliva, Giovanna Iozzi, Suey Kweon, K. Lockwood Jefford, Katie Hale, Max Lury, Jay Gao, Aoife Inman, Andrea Mason, Aisha Phoenix, Isha Karki, Jack Houston, Siri Katinka Valdez, Rajasree Variyar.
Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon
By Annie Mare
Putnam | 9780593817483 | PB | £16.99 | 3rd June 2025
Two women fall in love despite living in parallel worlds 5 months apart in this debut multiverse novel!
Tressa Fay Robeson has never been shy, which is how she’s made a name for herself as an in-demand hairstylist and social media star. So she can admit that spending her days at her hair salon and her nights with her tight-knit group of friends (and one grumpy cat) is not the kind of exciting life she’d hoped for. When a misdirected text from a stranger leads to a flirty exchange, she surprises herself by suggesting an impulsive meetup. But the woman, Meryl, never shows. Tressa Fay brushes it off — until Meryl’s sister and friend show up at the salon demanding to know what’s going on. Because, you see, there’s no way Meryl could have texted her. Meryl has been missing for a month. Tressa Fay and her tight-knit group of friends soon discover they aren’t dealing with a catfish, but a temporal paradox. As they come to terms with the idea of parallel universes, they realise how many times their paths have crossed like this before. But even as they understand the multiverse more and more, nothing keeps Meryl from vanishing. As it draws closer to the moment of Meryl’s disappearance, there’s only one question left: Have they done enough to change the outcome, or have they done so much that none of them will make it past that fateful day in September?
