As the nights draw in and the temperature drops, we think settling into Autumn with some seriously good books is the best way forward! Get cosy with the fantastic fiction picks we’ve put together, from some otherworldly, spooky tales, to stellar translated works and genre-bending debuts, there’s something here to keep everyone warm and happy!
You Glow In The Dark
By Liliana Colanzi, translated by Chris Andrews
Akoya Publishing | 9781836750048 | Paperback | £10.99 | Out Now
From Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi comes an unearthly collection of short fiction, radiating with power.
‘Do you glow in the dark?’ In Liliana Colanzi’s singular collection of short stories, set in a Latin America at once real and otherworldly, human vice contaminates every page. Amid eerie near-future landscapes, in communities both ordinary and uncanny, and during the very real fallout of a nuclear disaster, Colanzi’s characters must contend with a poisoned legacy. Unpredictable and vivid, You Glow In The Dark radiates in the reader’s mind long after the final page and announces a daring new voice in fiction.
What Remains
By Brais Lamela, translated by Jacob Rogers
Bullaun Press | 9781917653008 | Paperback | £12.99 | Out Now
Blending memoir, fiction, anthropology and travel writing, this investigates the traces left in the places we inhabit.
Between the stifling atmosphere of New York City and the fog-covered Galician mountains, What Remains follows a young student researching the Franco regime’s vast project of forced resettlement. In the 1950s, more than half the inhabitants of the villages in Negueira de Muniz, Galicia, were driven from their land in a brutal experiment to turn ‘backward’ country people into modern cattle farmers. As the narrator pieces together the mysterious story of a woman who disappeared from her settlement without a trace, he confronts his own temporary status in a foreign land and wonders what it means to call a place home. Intimate and dreamlike, What Remains is a meditation on the ruins of memory and an urgent exploration of identity, colonialism, and resistance.
June in the Garden
By Eleanor Wilde
Text Publishing Company | 9781923058323 | Paperback | £11.99 | 30/10/2025
A heartwarming portrait of a young woman who looks at the world differently.
June can name every flower species in the alphabet. She finds it much harder to cultivate an understanding of people. After her mother’s unexpected death, June has to leave her home. Her social worker suggests a flat with no garden – clearly, that won’t work. In search of a home where she can use her horticultural skills, she sets out to find her father, whom she’s only seen in an old photograph. When June arrives at her father’s door in Notting Hill, he panics and turns her away. With nowhere to go, June secretly moves into her father’s yellow garden shed. Now she’ll be surrounded by her beloved flowers. But when the family dog and her father’s twelve-year-old son discover June, she must choose between being seen or running away. June in the Garden lets us see the world afresh. Because thinking unconventionally might be the key to appreciating the wonder around us.
The Definitions
By Matt Greene
Dead Ink | 9781915368850 | Paperback | £10.99 | Out Now
When an oppressive regime tells them who they are, how far will they go to define themselves?
An elegant and haunting dystopian novel about a group of individuals gathered to relearn how to navigate the world after a mysterious illness strips them of their memories. Nestled in an idyllic locale beside the sea, The Centre is a place of rehabilitation and rebuilding. Students arrive nameless, their memories and sense of identity wiped by a strange illness. Each day, they attend classes that will help them relearn the right ways to speak and live; they practice the roles they’ll assume once they’ve graduated and returned to society. In their free time, they negotiate a burgeoning social hierarchy and watch old DVDs together; stories of characters whose names they adopt: Maria, Chandler, Chino, Gunther… But as shards of memories – of pets, lovers, errands, and beloved music – begin to threaten the strict curriculum of The Centre, some students start to question the definitions given to them, and explore the ways in which they might define themselves.
Capitalists Must Starve
By Park Seolyeon, translated by Anton Hur
Tilted Axis Press | 9781917126212 | Paperback | £14.99 | 21/10/2025
Winner of the 2018 Hankyoreh Literature Award.
In a Japan-occupied Korea, Kang Juryong leads a peripatetic life with her impoverished parents, moving around from Ganggye to Gando and Seoriwon. She hopes to study and become a ‘modern girl’, but reality prevents her from realising those dreams. At her parents’ suggestion, she gets married, but when her husband suddenly dies, her parents plan for her to marry again, this time to the owner of their house. Instead, Juryong leaves them, heading for Pyongyang. There, while working at a rubber factory, she joins the red trade union and accuses the factory owners of exploiting the workers. Reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, this historical fiction tells an ultimate story of ascent by leading to the female working-class hero who loved and fought through the brutal age of the early 20th Century.
Filly
By Rosamund Taylor
Banshee Press | 9781739397982 | Paperback | £14.99 | Out Now
The debut novel by award-winning poet Rosamund Taylor.
From acclaimed poet Rosamund Taylor comes a compelling, genre-bending coming of age story. Orla is discovering her sexuality in the hostile and misogynistic world of Ireland’s school system; when her friend Muireann rejects her advances, she turns to her online community for support, and her charismatic English teacher Irene Wall for a love affair both passionate and annihilating. A novel in verse telling a story of sexual awakening, masochistic love, and the transformative possibilities of communities that transcend binaries, Filly introduces two unforgettable characters in Orla and the complicated and magnetic Irene Wall. Written with Taylor’s trademark earthy lyricism, Filly is an exploration of intergenerational love and trauma, and an explosion of queer joy.
Grace Period
By Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Two Lines Press | 9781949641820 | Paperback | £13.99 | Out Now
A remarkable ‘blade-point’ of a novel by the celebrated Portuguese author Maria Judite de Carvalho, available for the first time in English.
Matea Silva is at a crossroads, but too paralysed to change direction in a life that he no longer seems to control. After 25 years away, he has returned to sell his childhood home so he can send his longtime girlfriend – whom he now realises he may have never loved – on a trip to the Acropolis before her cancer kills her. Mateo sells the home to the first bidder: his wealthy neighbour from childhood, whose wife, Graca, enchanted Mateo as a young man. It was Graca’s beauty, paired with his father’s unfaithfulness, that broke up his family. But the woman he sees now bears little resemblance to the one he remembers, and you can’t move forward by revisiting the past.
Eye of the Monkey
By Krisztina Tóth, translated by Ottilie Mulzet
Seven Stories Press UK | 9781911710240 | Paperback | £14.99 | Out Now
A stunning examination of authoritarianism, class division, and the psychological consequences of systemic violence.
Eye of the Monkey begins in the wake of a devastating civil war that led to the formation of the United Regency, an autocracy in an unnamed European country. The ravages of war are sweeping, and the populace has been divided into segregated zones, where the well-off are under mass surveillance and the poor are phantom presences, confined and ghettoised. On the verge of a nervous breakdown after being stalked for weeks by a young man, Giselle, a history professor at the New University, seeks the help of Dr. Mihaly Kreutzer, a psychiatrist who is navigating divorce and the recent death of his mother. They soon begin a torrid love affair, but everything is not what it seems. As Giselle begins to unpack her family history and the possible root of her psychological crisis, Dr. Kreutzer, who has ties to some of the most powerful people in the country, possesses ulterior motives of his own.
A Shorter Ulysses
By Anthony Burgess & James Joyce, foreword by Andrew Biswell
Galileo Publishing | 9781915530844 | Hardback | £16.99 | 16/10/2025
A shortened version of James Joyce’s seminal modernist work Ulysses, by renowned author Anthony Burgess.
A Shorter Ulysses was intended to serve as a companion volume to Burgess’s ‘A Shorter Finnegans Wake’, which he was commissioned to create in 1966. This is the first time that Burgess’s shortened version of James Joyce’s Ulysses has been published. Describing this commission in his autobiography, Burgess explains that he was asked to create a beginner’s abridged version of about 200 pages with a commentary to link the passages of Joyce’s original text and an explanatory preface. The surviving notes towards A Shorter Ulysses suggest that Burgess envisaged that A Shorter Ulysses would follow a similar format. The document was discovered in Burgess’s house in Bracciano, which was purchased in the early 1970s, and thus probably date from this period. Also included in this volume is Burgess’s Introduction to Ulysses for a 1982 Book Club Associates edition of the novel.
In a brilliant essay opening the book, Burgess manages to convey in just under 3000 words the very essence of the work. His concluding words are: ‘We are, having overcome its difficulties, at last free to appreciate its humour and humanity. Its early denouncers saw mostly filth and ugliness. We can hear its music and rejoice in its tolerance and decency and, yes, affection for fallen man’.
Sea Now
By Eva Meijer, translated by Anne Thompson Melo
Peirene Press | 9781916806061 | Paperback | £12.99 | 21/10/2025
A powerful meditation on the relationship between the human and the non-human with an eco-thriller twist, from award-winning Dutch philosopher Eva Meijer.
The country is flooding. Every day the sea claims another kilometre of land. The prime minister holds a daily press conference. Scientists try to find an explanation, without success. Sheep drown in the fields, weighed down by their waterlogged fleeces. The museums are emptied of their valuable works. Some people stay. Most leave. Once the evacuation is complete, and the rest of the world is already moving on, a climate activist, a young poet and an oceanographer voyage across the new sea. They are drawn back into the heart of a changed nation, seeking what they have lost in the deluge.
A Fictional Inquiry
By Daniele Del Giudice & Anne Milano Appel
New Vessel Press | 9781954404366 | Paperback | £13.99 | 28/10/2025
First published in 1983 and never before translated into English, a masterful and haunting noir about an enigmatic literary figure.
This haunting novel tells the story of an unnamed narrator visiting Trieste and London to retrace the footsteps of a fabled literary figure. The narrator is intrigued by the elusive, long dead man of letters whose career proved decisive to the culture of his native Italy despite his apparently never having written a line. There are encounters with those who once loved him, walks along the streets he frequented, and visits to his favoured cafes, bookstores, and a library in search of an answer. Why did he leave no written trace? In the end, as Italo Calvino wrote when this book originally appeared in Italian, who the legendary author manque actually was is beside the point.
What really matters are the questions and the disquiet running through these luminous pages, the dialectic between literature and life playing out just below the surface. Daniele Del Giudice asks is it better to represent life or to exert influence on it? To narrate or to live?
