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Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda

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Reservoir Bitches

A graveyard full of pink crosses

Fierce, street smart, and laced with dark humour, Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda is a literary adrenaline shot; thirteen blistering and brilliant tales of contemporary Mexican womanhood, from an activist and debut writer whose theme here is women who live with violence. With a cast of characters spanning the social scale (aging seamstress ‘spinsters’ traumatised by the degradation of their once nice neighbourhood, an impoverished young woman contemplating a lonely abortion, a wealthy narco heiress running her father’s empire), De la Cerda shows us the lengths these women will go to to survive.

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Vaim by Jon Fosse

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Vaim

A Three Sentence Miracle

One sentence books scares me. Vaim by Jon Fosse, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2024, is one of those, although to be fair, it is more like a three-sentence book, one sentence for each of its three parts. How wrong I was. In stream-of-consciousness prose Fosse hypnotises his reader with the story of invisible, middle-aged Jatgeir, his beloved wooden boat and the enigmatic Eline amongst the deep fjords of Norway’s west coast. It has an almost otherworldly feel to it this novel and a timeless, disorientating quality which is part of its magic. Ideally, this short novel should be read in one sitting. I was reading it while juggling Christmas dinners and dishwasher emptying, not the ideal context. Find yourself a quiet corner on a rainy Sunday, immerse yourself and be enthralled.

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The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

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The Wax Child

Many women, many witches

The wax child entered this world in the early 1600’s and was christened on the Danish island of Funen. We know this because it tells us so; a beeswax doll with human hair and fingernail parings, it looks like a child, longs to be a child but will never be. Now that its mistress is dead and gone, it lies face up beneath the soil, dreaming and remembering. It has stories to tell us, of witchcraft and persecution, female solidarity and betrayal. Based on historical witch trials, The Wax Child by Olga Ravn is an eerie, unsettling and oddly beautiful novel.

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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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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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The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli

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The Wizard of the Kremlin

Inside the mind of Vladimir Putin

Ever wondered what goes through Vladimir Putin’s mind? How he and his cronies see the world? We’ll never know for sure, of course, but in The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli we get a what appears to be a pretty good guess. Da Empoli worked as Italian ex-Prime Minister Renzi’s advisor and spent some time in Russia. This best-selling, Prix Goncourt nominated novel is his fictionalised account of Putin’s rise up the ranks. A must read for anyone interested in Russia and geo-politics and soon to appear as a in a cinema near you with Jude Law as Vladimir Putin.

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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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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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Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata

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Vanishing World

Love, sex, and wombs for all

In the vein of her previous gloriously odd books, Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata is one for accidental contrarians, those who don’t set out to defy convention but find themselves unable to flourish within the parameters of societal norms. Here, we meet Amane, a young Japanese woman in an era where marital sex is practically taboo, and children are conceived via artificial insemination for reasons of convenience and hygiene. Amane’s conflict arises from the shameful fact that she, herself, was conceived by the positively barbaric method of sexual intercourse. Navigating her way in this sterile world, Amane has questions to ask and experiments to conduct.

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The Evin Prison Bakers' Club by Sepideh Gholian

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The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club

Baking for the sisterhood

A unique and intriguing concept, The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club by Sepideh Gholian is both a prison memoir and recipe collection; a celebration of baking, as resistance, therapy, and heartfelt tribute to fellow detainees. Gholian, a human rights activist, is to date, still incarcerated in one of Iran’s infamously brutal prisons. Beaten and tortured, she remains unbowed, having smuggled out the contents of this book in order to tell the world about Iranian repression and to raise a beacon of hope.

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