Spring has well and truly sprung, and with it comes a bloom of new fiction books that are sure to appeal to every readers taste. Whether you’re hunting a unique literary mystery, an anti-landlord revenge fantasy, or an algorithmically-challenged romance, we’ve gathered a selection of funny, timely, and convention defying novels that are bound to be some of your new favourite reads!
The Paper House
By Carlos María Domínguez
9781068209734 | Thousand Horsemen Press | PB | £10.99 | OUT NOW
On a spring day in 1998, literature professor Bluma Lennon buys a used copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems from a Soho bookshop. Moments after she starts reading it, she’s struck by a car on a street corner and killed. After her funeral, one of her colleagues — the book’s narrator — receives a package addressed to Bluma: a broken-spined old copy of Conrad’s The Shadow-Line, inscribed with her own dedication. Intrigued, he sets off on a quest that leads him to Buenos Aires, searching for clues about Carlos Brauer, a devoted book collector, and his mysterious connection to Bluma. Already a worldwide classic in its genre, The Paper House is a venture beyond our shadow lines, and what we fear to leave behind to cross them.
Off-White
By Astrid Roemer
9781917126090 | Tilted Axis | PB | £16.99 | OUT NOW
In 1966 Suriname, the Vanta family, an intricate blend of Creole, Maroon, French, Indian, Indigenous, British, and Jewish heritage, is led by Grandma Bee, a proud, cigar-smoking matriarch facing her final days. As she reflects on her scattered family and the loss of her favourite granddaughter, Heli, exiled to the Netherlands for an affair with her white teacher, Bee grapples with one question: What truly binds a family? Off-White offers a moving exploration of Bee’s legacy amid themes of male violence, colonialism, and the dismantling of racial identity, marking the return of a celebrated Surinamese author after two decades.
Field Notes From An Extinction
By Eoghan Walls
9781911710288 | Seven Stories | PB | £12.99 | OUT NOW
Fast-paced and funny. Scientific and tender. A literary thriller featuring Auks. As if Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien met Robinson Crusoe, here is a story of one man’s growing humanity amidst famine and extinction.
“A vividly realized world, impeccably rendered in the vocabulary of the day… A unique and richly imagined novel.”
— Graeme Macrae Burnet (Booker finalist), New York Times Book Review
“Vividly told, original in form, ambitious in scope and completely winning in its characterisation of the unlikely pair at its centre […] a stark and compelling tale. Eoghan Walls has immaculate comic timing and the heart of a tragedian who knows how to bide his time – and land his gut-punches.”
— Lucy Caldwell, winner of the BBC Short Story Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature
“A compelling and convincing story of survival and apocalypse.”
— Nial Hegarty, The Irish Times
Paradise
By Ben Tufnell
9781914391583 | Influx Press | PB | £11.99 | OUT NOW
Recruited by a mysterious organisation, Nash thinks things are finally going his way. But when a job goes badly wrong, he is taken to an isolated location to await a decision on his fate.
Paradise is a crumbling cottage deep in a forest; Nash is free to leave the house but must not leave the woods. It is winter, and this wild and remote place is unknowable and terrifying. He attempts to map his surroundings to find a way out, but they resist him, the land seemingly shifting and changing. Moreover, he begins to suspect that his employers’ intentions may be much darker than anticipated.
Forming an unlikely friendship, Nash finally begins to understand the consoling power of the place that has become his home. Brigid is sure of herself and at home in the natural world, while he is urban, lost. But she longs for his world, and he longs for hers. Now the wheel of the year is turning. As winter gives way to spring Nash’s fate has been decided, and they are coming to deliver their verdict…
Paradise is the brilliant new novel from Ben Tufnell, an uncategorizable Kafkaesque eco-thriller combining elements of noir, folk horror and nature writing, addressing the most urgent of contemporary issues.
Things That Go Unspoken
By Antonella Lattanzi
9781836750024 | Akoya Publishing | PB | £12.99 | OUT NOW
‘I’ve learned that hope is like when you look at the sun for too long. First there’s light, then the light becomes too much and burns your retina: everything goes black.’
She has never told anyone about her previous pregnancies or abortions. Not even her doctors. But after four years struggling to conceive end in the loss of three babies at once, Antonella Lattanzi finally decides to share her story.
With extraordinary narrative force, Lattanzi explores abortion, infertility, assisted conception, a ferocious rage towards the world and a desire that will stop at nothing. Things That Go Unspoken is a novel that will resonate with anyone who has ever asked: Why is it easy for everyone else to get pregnant but me? Will I have to abandon my dreams to have a child? Do I even want to be a mother?
Medium Rare
By A. Natasha Joukovsky
9781685892470 | Melville House | PB | £14.99 | OUT NOW
Phil is ordinary. A mid-level Washington lobbyist for a decidedly unsexy organization, unhappy in the way all mildly successful, minimally influential men are. That is until the spring of 2019, when Phil’s picks for the NCAA March Madness Tournament start panning out, and heads begin to turn his way. He really may do it: predict a perfect bracket, for a billion-dollar prize.
At first, Cassandra is just along for Phil’s soaring rise—she had foreseen it happening, after all. Despite moving in different circles since their shared university days and Cassandra never much liking him, she recognizes in Phil the making of a legend worthy of the highest art. What Cassandra fails to predict, though, is just how much she’d grow to care about Phil’s wife, Raleigh—and that the grandest narrative arcs sometimes unfold at the steepest of personal costs.
Dazzling in its absurd comedy, Medium Rare is not only a gambol through the upper echelon, but also a shrewd examination of madness, desire, and credibility—why don’t we listen when prophetic women speak? A. Natasha Joukovsky delivers a story as layered and incisive as it is high-flying fun.
Mirrorstage
By Peter Scalpello
9781917008198 | Cipher Press | PB | £11.99 | OUT NOW
A raw and profound novel in verse about mental health, addiction, queerness and shame that explores ideas of hybridity and identity.
Following their discharge from hospital, Mirrorstage follows its narrator on a road trip through the grey, liminal landscapes of modern Britain. As they pass graffitied bus shelters, construction sites and flooded motorways, factories and high-rises, the narrator’s internal and external journeys begin to converge, leading them down paths they have been trying to avoid: the mental illness and substance use that led them to the inpatient ward, the uneasy balance of their own gender identity, their troubled relationship with their estranged father, the perils and pleasures of the queer scene, and the shame that has haunted them throughout their life.
Woven around the psychoanalytic concept of its title, Mirrorstage is an experimental fable exploring the boundaries of selfhood and literary forms, told in fragments of prose and verse that are equal parts heartbreaking, sexy, and witty.
Wilderness Of Mirrors
By Olufemi Terry
9781068433856 | Les Fugitives | PB | £14.99 | OUT NOW
To satisfy his father’s request that he rescue his drifting cousin, Emil—a young Creole from a wealthy background—sets aside his medical studies to move in with his working-class relatives in the unfamiliar city of Stadmutter —the mother city. Among his indifferent kin Emil is first disquieted by days of aimlessness and then diverted by his sexual and intellectual encounters with Bolling, a rich, Haitian-German autodidact with preternatural charisma. Emil begins an ambiguous relationship with Tamsin, a graduate student obsessed with Sigmund Freud’s theories and with her place in a society with shifting cultural hierarchies.
Beneath its veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. Through his relationships with Bolling and Tamsin, Emil is pulled into the orbit of Braeem Shaka—the leader of a Creole movement that is threatening the country’s fragile racial progress with its demands for reparations—and ever further from the possibility of a return to his earlier life as a promising neurosurgeon.
Under The Hammer
By Samantha Dooey-Miles
9780857309389 | Verve Books | PB | £10.99 | OUT NOW
Jemma would kill to end the housing crisis – one landlord at a time…
Jemma has lost everything… Well, the very little she had. Her toxic boyfriend has run off with her best friend, leaving Jemma alone in their flat, and she can’t afford the extortionate rent on her own. She’s aimless, depressed and, above all, furious. Slowly but surely, her fury finds its focus: landlords. If only something could be done about them…
When Jemma’s landlord has a fatal accident while carrying out a property repair, she stumbles across her life’s mission: to punish as many landlords as possible. She begins targeting landlords who have appeared on her favourite binge-watch, a home-improvement TV show where their greed is laid bare. It’s a messy job, but someone’s got to do it.
Governed by her own rules, Jemma is convinced her actions are just – but how long before this vigilante turns villain?
The Cipher
By Kathe Koja
9781068349737 | New Ruins | PB | £10.99 | OUT NOW
Winner of the Bram Stoker Award 1992
Winner of the Locus Award 1992
Shortlisted for the Phillip K. Dick Award
Nicholas is a would-be poet and video-store clerk with a weeping hole in his hand – weeping not blood, but a plasma of tears…
It began with Nakota and her crooked grin. She had to see the dark hole in the storage room down the hall. She had to make love to Nicholas beside it, and stare into its secretive, promising depths. Then Nakota began her experiments:
First, she put an insect into the hole. Then a mouse… Now from down the hall, the black hole calls out to Nicholas every day and every night. And he will go to it. Because it has already seared his flesh, infected his soul, and started him on a journey of obsession – through its soothing, blank darkness into the blinding core of terror…
Kathe Koja is a writer, director and independent producer of live and immersive events. Her titles include The Cipher, Skin, Buddha Boy and The Blue Mirror. Her work crosses and combine genres, from historical to contemporary to YA to horror, and has won awards, been translated into many languages, and optioned for fi lm and performance.
Mrs. Jekyll
By Emma Glass
9781917283106 | Cheerio | PB | £9.99 | OUT NOW
Atmospheric and lusciously told, Mrs Jekyll reframes Stevenson’s classic story of human duality in the present day, as one woman contends with a terminal diagnosis and unearths the effervescence of a life suppressed.
Schoolteacher Rosy Winter is dying. But, beyond the homeopathic remedies, the dinner party obligations, the snatched whispers on wards and in staffrooms, a force murderous, feminine, feverish is stirring within her. A story of power and powerlessness, light and dark, life and death, Mrs Jekyll embraces the paradoxes and paroxysms of modern womanhood, in a story every bit as gripping as the original.
Emma Glass’s debut novel Peach was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Rest and Be Thankful, her second novel, was optioned for film in Mrs Jekyll will be published alongside Union Square’s American hardback edition in April, both sharing the same cover design.
Enemy Of My Enemy: A Daredevil Marvel Crime Novel
By Alex Segura
9781368095365 | Hyperion Avenue | PB | £25.00 | OUT NOW
When reports come in that the Kingpin and a police officer have been killed and that Frank Castle (aka the Punisher) has turned himself in for it, Matt Murdock senses holes in the narratives the media and the streets are quick to run with.
Both criminals have been Matt’s nemeses when he dons the cowl of the Daredevil, and there’s no denying that New York is better off without its Kingpin and with the Punisher behind bars. And yet… while the Punisher is a murderous vigilante, he doesn’t kill cops. And he doesn’t turn himself in.
Castle certainly deserves prison for all of the other crimes he has committed in the past. However, Matt’s indominable sense of justice insists that nobody should be locked away for crimes they didn’t actually commit. Representing the vigilante in court, Matt enters a contest of wills and guile with Castle to try and uncover the game beneath the game. And when Matt’s girlfriend takes the stand and complicates matters, there’s truly no rest for the wicked or the just. As the Kingpin’s absence causes passion and and ambitions to run hot in Hell’s Kitchen, Matt must decide if justice means the letter of the law, what’s best for the citizen on the streets, or where his heart leading him. ENEMY OF MY ENEMY continues the Marvel Crime series that began with Lisa Jewell’s Breaking the Dark, and brings fans into a grittier, street-level side of the Marvel Universe. Marvel Crime novels build on one another but do not require in-depth familiarity with Marvel or the other books in the series.
Love Is An Algorithm
By Laura Brooke Robson
9781923058804 | Text Publishing | PB | £11.99 | 31st March 2026
A timely, funny novel about making art, outsourcing our emotions to technology, and writing our own love stories.
Eve wants to make music that’s fuelled by love, passion, and rage (feelings!). She trusts her gut and her friends and in no way wants to rely on technology, let alone AI, to tell her how she feels. Danny is anxious—about his dad, his dating life, his coffee order (why is it twelve dollars?), and about Pattern, the dating app he helped create, which seems determined to serve him terrible matches.
When Eve and Danny start dating, it feels like the solution to all of Danny’s worries—except when it doesn’t. Is she happy? Should he be doing more? Or less? His anxieties inspire him to create a revolutionary new version of Pattern that promises to quantify relationship health and potential, helping users understand what’s really going on.
As Pattern and Bug, the ever-so-friendly AI assistant, catch fire, users everywhere begin outsourcing major life decisions to Danny’s algorithms. But as Danny reckons with his newfound success, Eve — whose career relies on her ability to write her emotions into song — grows increasingly sceptical of the app’s impact on genuine connection. Their relationship becomes the ultimate modern experiment: how do you fall and stay in love in the digital age?
