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Clear by Carys Davies

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Clear

More than words

Winner of the Ondaatje Prize 2025, and Wales Book of the Year, the captivating Clear by Carys Davies is one of our favourite recent reads, devoured as a one-sitting treat. Set on a far-flung Scottish island in 1843, it tells the tale of John Ferguson, a man of God, sent to evict Ivar, the island’s last remaining tenant farmer. When an accident upon his arrival leaves John incapacitated, Ivar takes him in and tends him. They share no common language, life experience or world view, but in Davies’ touching story of solitude and human connection, a tentative companionship is born.

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Flesh by David Szalay

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Flesh – Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize

Rags to riches

Working-class boy, István, rises from poverty in communist Hungary to join London’s super rich in Flesh by David Szalay. The road there is far from obvious and has little to do with István’s skills or intelligence and everything to do with a series of random coincidences. The prose in Flesh by David Szalay is as sparse as István’s emotional life but as addictive as any of the drugs consumed in London’s nightclubs.

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Colony by Annika Norlin

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Colony

Disillusioned by her job and city life, and suffering from a serious case of burnout, Emelie decides to ‘check out’ for a while. She packs her tent and sleeping bag, turns off her phone, and seeks refuge in a little clearing deep in the Swedish forest. Once there, Emelie stumbles upon an unusual group of people who have taken ‘escaping it all’ to a whole new level. Curious, she befriends one of them and is drawn into a bizarre, cult-like existence. Colony by Annika Norlin, a bestseller in Sweden, is both a charming and disturbing portrait of misfits; both funny and creepy, and really enjoyable.

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After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys

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After Leaving Mr Mackenzie

Down and out in Paris and London

A curiously sad autobiographical novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys is an episode in the itinerant life of Julia Martin, a thirty-something woman leading a precarious existence in Paris and London between the wars. Hers is a life of cheap hotels, booze, and financial dependence on unsuitable men, who invariably let her down. When her ex-lover in Paris cuts off her weekly allowance, the penniless Julia decides to muster her fading magic and head back to London, in hopes of finding love, solvency, and reconnection with her estranged family.

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Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin

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Good and Evil and Other Stories

A punch in the stomach

Wow! What an incredible collection of short stories. I gobbled them up in one sitting, moved, shocked and spellbound. Parental love, grief, guilt and rejection echoes through the tales of Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin, each with a surprising, original twist. Highly recommended.

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Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov

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Death and the Gardener

A father’s legacy

A tender and contemplative work of autofiction, Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov charts the final days of an eminent writer’s beloved father. Seated by the dying man’s bedside, the writer bears witness to both his life and death, recalling his father’s marvellous storytelling, his old-school Bulgarian fathering style, and most of all, the garden he began cultivating after a long-ago cancer diagnosis. A glorious riot of fruit, vegetables and flowers, he’s given it the final years of his life and now the gardener is set to become the garden. In Gospodinov’s first offering since his International Booker Prize winning novel, Time Shelter, we find a poetic and philosophical gift.

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The Sense of an Ending

Finely chiseled masterpiece

As I’ve just discovered, it’s never too late to read the brilliant The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, Booker Prize Winner from 2011. This is a marvel of a novel about interpreting the past, suppressing memories and coming of age, which deserves to join the rank of classics. It’s a book that will make you question your own past and wonder how differently others might perceive it.

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Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

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Seascraper

A gloriously evocative Booker Longlisted read

Deservedly longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, the beautiful and evocative Seascraper by Benjamin Wood tells the story of Thomas Flett, a young man living in an English coastal community in the mid-twentieth century. His days consist of drizzle and drudgery, dragging for shrimp on the beaches, a gruelling job that is wrecking his body. Its almost succeeded in claiming his spirit too, except for one tiny flickering flame that Thomas nurtures when he sings and plays guitar. When an American movie director improbably shows up in his village, Thomas is offered a chance of reinvention, if only he can break free from the shackles of his past.

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Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq

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Heart Lamp

A vital and insightful International Booker Prize winner

Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 and the first ever short story collection to scoop the award, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq consists of twelve quietly powerful tales centred around the everyday lives of Muslim women and girls in southern India.  As a writer, lawyer, and activist, Mushtaq has had extraordinary insight into a world often typified by struggle and oppression. Here she garners the voices of those who shared their experiences and spins them into stories that, even when painful to read, glow with the love, hope and sacrifices of her female (often maternal) characters.

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Lush

Full-bodied with a lingering aftertaste

If your idea of the perfect summer holiday read calls for secrets, temptation and eyebrow-raising excess, then Lush by Rochelle Dowden-Lord deserves top billing on your TBR list. Its premise is deliciously intriguing: the elderly and charismatic owner of a French vineyard extends a wine-tasting invitation to four well-known figures from the industry. At the end of their stay, his guests will be rewarded with a sup from the last remaining bottle of one of the rarest and most valuable wines in the world. A hedonistic unravelling follows in a suitably potent commentary on ambition, prejudice and our cultural relationship with alcohol,

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