Hauntingly beautiful, Mat Osman’s The Ghost Theatre is a unique blend of history and fantasy set against the backdrop of Elizabethan London.

The story follows Shay, a messenger-girl and hawk trainer who sees the future in the patterns of birds, and Nonesuch, the dark star of the city's fabled child theatre scene. Drawn together by their shared love of art, they create The Ghost Theatre, an underground troupe that performs fantastical plays in the city's hidden corners. As their performances incite rebellion among the city's outcasts, the pair's relationship sparks and burns against a backdrop of the plague and a London in flames.

Osman’s evocative prose brings Elizabethan London to life with vivid detail, seamlessly merging fact and fiction with fantastical brushstrokes, creating a world that is both familiar and completely new. Thrilling and thought-provoking, Osman’s unique creation will leave readers pondering its mysteries long after the final page.

Writer-illustrator Ed Vere returns with another beautifully illustrated children’s book, celebrating what it means to be an artist.

A classic children’s story about creativity and building self-esteem, The Artist follows a brightly coloured dinosaur as she sets out to turn her imagination full of colours, feelings, moods and dreams into art that brings joy to a colourless city. But when she accidentally slips outside the lines, The Artist feels so embarrassed that she gives up painting altogether. But how important is it to stay inside the lines? A simple but uplifting story for any child who loves to draw.

A fresh, laugh-out-loud take on 21st Century high-functioning anxiety, Morris’s honest and easy-to-read debut is a joy from the first page to the last. A zeitgeist novel for our times, exposing just how normal it is to feel abnormal. Told through a series of hilarious personal anecdotes, Hayley both normalises and offers guidance on how to manage anxiety and overthinking in all of life’s situations. From puberty and first dates, to break-ups, bad sex and grief. Hayley’s insightful narrative to modern life feels like confessing to a best friend.

For lovers of Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, Hayley Morris is most definitely an author to watch.

In true Easton Ellis style, the renowned author of American Psycho returns with a newly disturbing, semi-autobiographical tale dripping with red herrings, doubts and melodrama.

Narrated by an adolescent version of himself, Ellis details the supposed events of his senior year in 1980s Los Angeles, when a serial killer began targeting a group of his friends. But all is not as it seems. Being young, deceitful – and often high on drugs, alcohol or a pairing of the two – our narrator’s story, though aggressive in its presenting of ‘fact’, doesn’t always appear so between the lines. Who is The Trawler, how does he choose his victims and how can we tell the difference between truth and fiction?

A fantastically chilling novel that will stop you falling asleep, and haunt your days in much the same way as The Trawler haunted Bret. An absolute must read for January 2023. Warning: R rated.

A compelling story of toxic female friendship, obsession, grief and class divides. Agnès and Fabienne grow up in each other’s pockets in a rural French burg, though one is always more dominant than the other. Easily led and infatuated by her friend’s reckless energy, Agnès is forever the follower, while Fabienne sits aloof upon the pedestal Agnès builds her. But in the end, it is not Fabienne who will have the chance at fame and fortune, for Agnès is the prodigy and it her who will have the chance to leave the French countryside for a private English education.
 
Told entirely in retrospect, at the start of the novel Fabienne is already dead. Now in her 20s, Agnès must filter back through her memory and come to terms with all that their friendship was – and all that is wasn’t. A beguiling coming-of-age story and perfect book-club read.

A direct, if at times self-justified, collection of essays that sets out to highlight the inherited truths and assumptions made by writers, directors and philosophers when they set out to tell a story. How to Read Now bravely exposes what Costello identifies as elitist, colonialist and cisgendered privilege in a range of classical and popular literature and film, including writing from Henry James, Joan Didion and J.K. Rowling.
 
Well written and passionately argued, I found this book both thought provoking and problematic, sitting somewhere between educated literary criticism and bitter rant. Costello’s writing is brash and occasionally arrogant, though does succeed at least to a degree in making you question your own reading choices and the motives behind publishing in general. If you can put up with the argumentative style, you will no doubt come away with a more critical eye and more honest understanding of your own inherited truths.

Amy and Lan are practically twins, growing up in a commune-style farm as they navigate from childhood to early adolescence. A gentle but engaging read, Sadie captures the beautiful simplicity and enduring hardships of farm-life, painting a timely portrait of agricultural life in a capitalist society. But this is also a family portrait. Through the innocent eyes of Amy and Lan, we experience the intimacies between the families, their struggles, disloyalties and domestic disagreements – though these are not always understood by the children.

While beautifully written, this not Jone’s best work. Characters are often hard to differentiate – even the voices of Amy and Lan can be hard to tell apart at times. It is a novel to be read quickly, or else abandoned halfway through. Though even if you do make it to the end, you may still be left wondering, what was it all about anyway?

The long awaited second novel from an International Booker Prize winning author, The Bitter Orange Tree brings a lot of familiar themes, examining love in all its forms across multiple generations of one Omani family.

Zuhur is struggling to settle into University in England while grieving the loss of her Grandmother back in Oman. Bint Amir has been a central figure in Zuhur’s life, and it is her story, not Zuhur’s, that will be central to the narrative.

Flitting back and forth in time, we learn about Bint Amir’s childhood, her struggles, losses, withheld romances and eventual role as matriarch in a family to whom she is not related, but who will grieve her after she’s gone.

Told from the disjointed mind of a grieving granddaughter, Alharthi artfully conveys the pain, both physical and emotional, that comes from mourning missed opportunity and a time to which we can never return.

If approaching this collection expecting a feminist critique of the music industry, readers will be surprised but not necessarily disappointed to find a series of nostalgic ruminations from critics, essayists and industry professionals about the personal significance of music in their lives. This eclectic collection invites you to indulge in the fandom, influence and experiences (good and bad) brought about by the artists each contributor most admires.

A tip for readers – don’t read in order. You won’t know all of the artists and many are hard to track down on streaming libraries. This might be off-putting for some, and makes certain chapters more difficult to relate to – but if you can find them, listening to the artist as you read gives the collection a whole new level of immersion. Who knows, maybe future editions will be published with a mixtape.

Set in the author’s native Mexico, Paradais is a short but relentless read about a pair of dispossessed youths, whose all-consuming fury at their place within the social system leads them down a sinister path.

Polo, a 16-year-old dropout is forced to work as a cleaner on the upper-class estate, Paradais. Here, he meets Franco, a rich but deplorable outcast, who Polo uses for free booze and cigarettes, while being forced to listen to Franco’s benign sexual fantasies about his middle-aged neighbour. As the weeks pass, Franco becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea that he can conquer his neighbour, and Polo cannot resist tagging along for the ride.

Written in an all-consuming, modernist style, Paradais immerses the reader in Polo’s thoughts, taking you with him down a spiral of loneliness that can only be filled with alcohol, rebellion, and a bitter nostalgia for his dead grandfather.

An urgent and timely historical review charting the years between the election of New Labour and the aftermath of the pandemic. In his latest novel, Cowley explores the evolution of ‘Englishness’ through a series of highly politicised stories that readers will recognise from the news, though perhaps never have considered as having a lasting impact on their idea of English nationality and culture.

From the Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in Morecombe Bay and the Bethnal Green girls who fled to Islamic State, to Gareth Southgate’s transformative influence on British football and the Lancashire woman who publicly challenged Gordon Brown on his supposedly people-centric policies. Cowley powerfully demonstrates how these vivid, half-forgotten stories contributed to a fragmented England, and offers a vision for how we can embrace the lessons learnt as a means of building a bright new future.

Penelope Lively’s latest treasure trove is a compilation of previously published stories, bookmarked by two new lengthier tales. Together, they map her journey as a friend, parent and lover, but most importantly as a writer, asking - what does it all amount to?

A Booker Prize winning author, Lively has mastered the art of her craft with each story encapsulating its own vividly imagined universe, and leaving the reader with a sometimes sombre, often challenging moral sentiment, all of which can be perfectly allegorised by the elephants foot in her opening story.

From Devonshire countryside to an Egyptian airport, a bus ride through central London and a journey back to ancient Rome. Metamorphosis covers a wide range of locations, characters and styles with ease and elegance. A witty and grounding collection of 26 stories that will inspire you to embrace all that life teaches and all that we leave behind.

A strange, thoughtful book. The Book of Form and Emptiness is both a deeply moving story of family, loss and love, and a provocative lesson in mindfulness and the art of mastering inner peace.

After his father’s death, Benny Oh starts hearing voices. At first the voice is his father’s. But then he starts to hear the voices of other things: chairs, mouldy cheese, half-eaten cartons of yoghurt, and even books. His mother, Annabelle, is also grieving. Empty in her own way, she pulls inward and becomes a hoarder. Alone and haunted by the voices around him, Benny retreats to the library where he discovers another kind of family in the colourful characters who gather there, including a homeless poet and a silver-haired girl trying to be a street artist. It is here among the books, that Benny must find his own voice.

‘There was a planet that couldn’t figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.’

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist whose career has been spent searching the skies for life beyond the cosmos. He’s also a recent widow and only father fighting to protect his 9-year-old from a system that wants him labelled with Asperger’s. When Robin is threatened with expulsion from school, Theo whisks him away to camp under the stars, painting new potential planets in the sky as he tries to convince them both that life can thrive under even the most impossible circumstances. When they get home, Theo signs Robin up for an experimental neurofeedback therapy using recordings of his dead mother’s brain activity to help stabilise his emotions.

Richard Power’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel is both brutal and heart-warming, intimate and profound. A masterfully curated story of love, grief and loneliness, that quietly builds to an inevitable and devastating close.

Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won and the Trojan women are theirs for the taking.

Picking up after The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker’s re-imagined tale of the aftermath of the Trojan war captures the brutality and horror of this iconic Greek myth in fresh, contemporary detail. Told from the perspective of Briseis - once the war prize of Achilles – Barker immerses us in the lives of the women who survived the siege at Troy as they assume their role as slaves to the Greek men.

This second instalment of Barker’s feminist retelling is just as provocative as the first. Though perhaps not as historically accurate, the lesser recorded timeframe grants Barker greater creative freedom, giving her women more complex and rounded characters that take an active role the plot. A worthy sequel and fascinating feminist study – the question now lies, will there be a third?

‘The Paper Palace’ is a constant backdrop in Elle’s life. A run down holiday home resting on the shore of one of Cape Cod’s unspoilt ponds, it is where she spent her summers growing up. Where she had her first kiss, found her first love and where she now takes her own children in the summer months. But there is something darker lurking in the waters of Elle’s past. Something that tore her life apart, but that even after years of burying her guilt and shame, she still cannot share, not even with her husband.

Over 24 hours we watch Elle’s life unfold, as she prepares for a decision that could change her life forever. The decision to take back what she lost, or to keep living the beautiful lie she spent so long constructing.

A family drama, a forbidden love story, a childhood tragedy. The Paper Palace is stunning literary debut that will eat you up and leave you reeling. I didn’t want it to end.

Following his acclaimed debut, The Silent Patient, Michaelides strikes again with another compulsive summer thriller.

Still reeling after her fiancé’s tragic death, group therapist Mariana Andros rushes to Cambridge University after receiving a frightened call from her niece, Zoe. One of Zoe’s friends has been murdered, and she seems to know who did it. Following Zoe’s suspicions, Mariana begins to investigate the charismatic Greek Tragedy professor, Edward Fosca and his secret society of female students known as The Maidens. Digging deeper, Mariana soon finds herself caught up in a toxic web of jealousy, desire and bloodlust – but who is the real orchestrator of this tragedy?

My first impression of The Maidens was that it’s clearly written for adaptation – you can almost hear the advert breaks. The chapters are short, each ending on a thirst-inducing hook that makes it almost impossible not to devour in one read. Our ‘hero’, Mariana, is immediately complex and reserved. An unwilling protagonist in her own story, which, while making her easy to sympathise with, can leave the reader feeling somewhat alone in the plot. Michaelides puts a lot of energy into diverting the reader’s attention; introducing multiple possible culprits at varying stages. This was perhaps my biggest bug-bear. Not because I don’t want to be led astray, but because each of these distractions was painted in such substantial detail that they felt intrinsically important, and yet never really achieved a sense of conclusion. They were devices, but nothing more. And as a critical reader who likes see real motive in each character, this felt like a grave disservice.

In conclusion, if you like a good thriller The Maiden’s ticks a lot of boxes – fast pace, lots of misdirection, intriguing back-story and a damaged protagonist. That said, this is definitely one you have to enjoy for the ride rather than the conclusion. If I had to describe this book in one line, I’d say Maidens is the book-club version of Donna Tarrt’s The Secret History – a compelling campus thriller that keeps you on your toes, but which lacks the depth and follow through of a literary read.

For lovers of The Great Gatsby comes an ambitious imagining of one of literatures’ most elusive narrators. Michael Farris Smith finally gives readers a| chance to unlock the true identity of Nick Carraway and understand how he came to be but an outsider in F Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic tale. From the trenches of WW1, right up to Nick’s arrival in West Egg, Smith takes us on an emotional journey defined by trauma, heartbreak, love and loss that will eventually leave us with that damaged narrator who until now, has only ever existed in the background.

While the writing is vivid, the book, rather unfortunately held none of Gatsby’s glamour or allure. Covering off themes of war, mental illness and childhood neglect, there are a number of sections that are difficult to get through. Perhaps there is a reason Fitzgerald left Nick in the dark?

When a mother brings her 10-month-old baby into A&E with a skull fracture, surely it’s right to raise questions? But what if the mother was your friend? A friend you have always thought of as a model parent–even trusted with your own children. And yet, something is telling you, her story doesn’t add up…

Sarah Vaughan’s latest novel markets itself as a psychological thriller, but is more of an exploration of the intensity of motherhood, asking the reader to question the delicate line between maternal love and sanity. Thought provoking and delicately executed, this beautifully written character drama paints a cautionary portrait of motherhood with recognisable characters you’ll want to rally with and reprimand throughout.

An introspective work of autobiographical fiction, Bouraoui’s narrative shifts seamlessly between a confused 18-year-old in 1980s Paris and the narrator’s childhood in Algiers, Algeria, which became independent from France in 1962. Offering disjointed snapshots of a life torn between two competing identities, All Men Want to Know is a deeply personal exploration of cultural and personal identity, sexuality and belonging.

Written in a dreamy, lyrical style, the narrative gives a sense of unravelling as much as it does coming together. Raw and sensual, readers must expect to become enraptured by the narrator’s intense evocations of guilt, desire and longing delivered in passages of beautiful, erotic poetry disguised as prose.