The weather has been up and down but our list of fiction titles for June is as good as ever! Take a look at our stand-out selection of sharp, insightful short story collections, brilliant translated fiction and compelling Queer narratives. Happy reading!
What Now, Mr Wolf?
By Eva Vezhnavets; Translated by Ella Dingley & Jim Dingley
Bullaun Press | 9781917653022 | Paperback | £12.99 | Out Now
An epic contained in a small volume, winner of the prestigious Jerzy Giedroyc Prize 2021.
Ryna comes home from abroad to the wake of her granny Darafeya in Nauhalnaye, a village in the drained marshlands near Lipen, in a remote corner of Belarus. That night as Ryna sits alone with the coffin, Darafeya, who lived to be a hundred, tells one last story. She and her grandmother, one-eyed Maryanka, known as the “whisperers”, managed to survive several brutal regimes, feared and respected by their neighbours for their powers of healing and witchcraft.
Caustic; harrowing, yet leavened with black humour, What Now, Mr Wolf? offers an unforgettable oral testimony of the dark days of recent European history. Ryna, prisoner of her grandmother Darafeya’s memories of relentless violence, tries to make her peace with them and remake a life for herself in this troubled place. Granny could remember who was killed or simply died and where, in what part of the forest and how they were found… The old girl had lived through two wars and nine different powers-that-be, and she didn’t spare her granddaughter any of her stories.
Goodbye Chinatown
By Kit Fan
World Editions | 9781642861655 | Paperback | £14.99 | Out Now
As her native Hong Kong seethes, torn between two world powers, Amber Fan tries to build a career as a chef in London’s Chinatown.
Amber Fan, a young Oxford-educated chef, opens the first Chinese fusion joint in London’s Chinatown following the failure of her father’s traditional restaurant. When her parents decide to return to Hong Kong, taking with them their young son Bobby as well as the haunting secret surrounding his birth, Amber is left alone in London.
Set in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, Goodbye Chinatown shows a family torn between two countries. Amber throws herself into her career to escape the painful cycle of family separations and reunions. The tastes and smells spark off every page in Kit Fan’s latest novel, making for a truly multisensorial reading experience. Offering a behind-the-scenes of this suburb of London’s hospitality economy, and using food to reflect on identity, Goodbye Chinatown paints a portrait of an enterprising emigré who, faced with divided loyalties, invents her own language for home through the culinary arts.
Puck
By Samantha Allen
Zando | 9781638933410 | Paperback | £16.99 | Out Now
In this A Midsummer Night’s Dream-inspired romcom, Puck is a reality show producer and agent of chaos with a talent for bringing people together — and tearing them apart.
Meet Puck: the nonbinary, thirty-year-old mastermind behind “Homewreckers”, a dating show that puts troubled couples through hell — with a little help from their exes. Used to being the one pulling the strings, it shocks Puck when their life undergoes a plot twist of its own and their college roommate Mia announces her engagement to her ex’s best friend, Damon. Having only recently broken up with long-time boyfriend Zander, and never having had much in common with Damon (who lovesick Lena has always pined after), Mia’s news leaves her friend group reeling — and Puck’s mind whirling. When they arrive for a week of wedding festivities at an upscale resort in the Appalachian forest, Puck immediately sees that Mia’s marriage will lead to misery, and takes it upon themself to save their friends by rearranging the couples — without anyone finding out. But as Puck comes up against a type-A maid of honour hell-bent on making this wedding happen, it becomes clear that they will have to deliver the greatest stunt of their career.
Written with Samantha Allen’s signature charm, wit, and an irresistible dose of Shakespearian mischief, Puck is the ultimate romcom for our chaotic era, and a celebration of the friendships that carry us through it all.
All My Love
By Agnes Lidbeck; Translated by Nichola Smalley
Peirene Press | 9781916806221 | Paperback | £12.99 | Out Now
Agnes Lidbeck is back with another tour de force of a novel.
Petra and Johannes seem made for one another. A lawyer and a doctor. Well brought up, ambitious. Their friends Julia and Axel are different — from them, and from each other. Julia fights for her convictions. Axel manoeuvres his way to political power. Desire moves like an undertow between them all, dangerous and destabilising. Inconvenient truths are buried, but can only stay that way for so long. Meanwhile, the country around them changes. Laws tighten. Freedoms are curtailed. People begin to disappear. The personal and the political collide. It is easier, at first, to look away than to let the facts in. Until they arrive at the door.
Girls Girls Girls
By Shoshana von Blanckensee
Putnam | 9798217181988 | Paperback | £17.99 | Out Now
A vibrant queer Jewish debut about a young woman who, caught between the expectations of others and her own evolving desires, is forced to make a series of fraught, life-altering decisions.
It’s the summer of ’96 and best friends (and secret girlfriends) Hannah and Sam are driving across the country from Long Beach, New York, to the fabled queer paradise of San Francisco, free from the harsh gazes of their neighbours and the stifling demands of Hannah’s devout Orthodox Jewish mother. In San Francisco, they will finally be together as a real couple, out in the open, around other queer people… even if the move means leaving behind Hannah’s beloved Bubbe. When the financial strains of West Coast living push the girls to start stripping at The Chez Paree — yet another secret Hannah must keep from her family — Hannah feels trapped. Sam wants her at the club, but Hannah hates stripping nearly as much as she hates disappointing Sam. Then Hannah meets Chris, an older butch lesbian, who is immediately taken with her. Desperate to stay in San Francisco and away from the leering men at the club, Hannah proposes an escort arrangement. But as Hannah falls deeper into Chris’ world and Sam starts to meet new queer friends, a rift forms between them.
An achingly tender and resonant story of survival, first love, and growing up queer in the ’90s, Girls Girls Girls is a piercing exploration of the choices we make in the thrilling and often confounding search for ourselves and home.
Swell
By Son Bo-mi; Translated by Janet Hong
Two Lines Press | 9781966192008 | Paperback | £15.99 | Out Now
A short story collection revolving around different Korean lives which blend and intertwine between each other.
Each story in Swell launches from the common but pivotal moments that determine the course of everyday life, but they’re often filtered through the perspective of someone else: documentarians, novelists, storytellers, gossips. Then, as the stories build atop one another and intertwine, they begin to shift and destabilise. Characters return but their histories are changed, alternate timelines open, and no one is ever who they were. Like an optical illusion this book offers two complete pictures. Viewed as individual stories, contemporary Korean lives are rendered with sensitivity and realism-relationships tatter and bereaved loved-ones search for ways to move on. Viewed as a complete collection, though, a stranger narrative emerges, in which there is perhaps some invisible logic behind everything, incomprehensible to us. Wholly original, Swell, translated by Janet Hong, is a book full of trap doors, hidden passageways, and the unsolvable mystery behind everyday life.
A Pizza Hut, A Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut
By Hannah Levene
Cipher Press | 9781917008211 | Paperback | £11.99 | Out Now
An electric, smart, and boldly playful novel exploring queer suburbia and the radical implications ofstaying put.
Herb and Lara are busy slinging coffees in their hometown — of Watford! While Herb dreams of leaving to write big gay plays for a big gay world, Lara’s dedication to being in the here and now keeps her firmly rooted. Plus she’s fallen madly in love with Cynthia, a high-femme roboteer here to finish her PhD, teaching her way through robot post-doc hell, stamping on the brains of robo-boys as she goes. Soon Watford will use Cynthia’s inventions to reinvent itself into the communised Watford Underburg, but not yet. Meanwhile, Lazarus is back at her mum’s. Her attempt at city life didn’t exactly go to plan, and now she spends her days working on a Yiddish translation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and playing video games. With no capacity to think about her future and trying to forget her past, what will happen? Local football coach Butch Lichenstein, that’s what.
A Pizza Hut, A Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut is a wildly inventive and funny novel that counters the idea of the suburbs as a place queers leave and plays out the radical implications of staying put.
At the Edge of the Woods
By Kathryn Bromwich
Two Dollar Radio UK | 9781911710332 | Paperback | £12.99 | Out Now
Haunting, gorgeously descriptive, and spellbinding, At the Edge of the Woods is a magnificent and assured debut novel that delivers all the resonance and significance of an instant classic.
Laura lives alone in a cabin deep within the Italian Alps, making her living translating medical documents and tutoring the children of affluent locals. She spends her days climbing the mountains outside her door and exploring the woods, and when she must venture into the small, conservative town for supplies, she’s met with curious stares and wariness. Laura begins seeing a bartender, who alerts her to the villagers’ uncertainties. Then late one night there is a knock on the door, and on the other side stands someone from her past who has finally found her. In beguiling, lyrical prose, the mystery surrounding why Laura has absconded to this remote corner of the Alps comes into focus, while the villagers grow leery of the woman in the cabin and of her increasingly odd behaviour. A few decide to take matters into their own hands, to free themselves from the malevolent forces of the strega who lives amongst them.
Pink Soap
By Anju Gaston
Weatherglass Books | 9781068176661 | Paperback | £10.99 | 25/06/2026
A classic for the modern age as The Bell Jar has been for previous decades!
“I ask the internet the difference between something being too close to the bone and something being too close to home.” This funny and terrifying book is a study of what and how things mean, and don’t, in our latest machine age. In it something unforgiveable has happened. The main character, seemingly numbed but bristling with blade-sharp understanding, is only just holding things together and trying to work out how to heal. So she travels to Japan in a search for the other half of a fragmented family. Or is it the world itself that has fragmented? Shougani examines the massive everyday pressures we’re all under with real wit and style. It is pristine, brilliant, smart beyond belief.
Queerphoria
By Jenna Gordon, Demi Echezona et al.
VERVE Books | 9780857309488 | Paperback | £12.99 | 25/06/2026
The inaugural collection in the new VERVE Voices series, Queerphoria is a joyful and defiant queer-authored anthology proudly supporting Switchboard, the national LGBTQIA+ support line.
Four housemates welcome the reader into their home for a birthday party. An elderly widow visits her first queer bar, beneath the flat she shared with her husband. A couple invite a shipwrecked sailor into their isolated lighthouse on the stormy night of their thirtieth anniversary. A single woman embarks on a romantic relationship with a sex robot. A married couple secretly prepare for their baby’s arrival in a world where procreation is controlled by the Establishment. Through prose, poetry, essays, illustrations and more, twenty-one writers bring their visions of euphoria to life. These pages celebrate, subvert, expand and reimagine what joy can look like, even in uncertain times.
