M is one of the most famous actors in the world, her image public property since childhood. When an unnamed writer is tasked with writing her autobiography, she begins observing M closely, trying to understand the person behind the celebrity. Rachel Cusk’s Life of M explores fame, identity and performance, and what happens when a life is lived under constant observation.

Lily Chen heads to Taipei for a summer-long language programme, hoping to improve her Mandarin and connect with a culture she inherited but never fully understood. Instead, she finds herself feeling increasingly like an outsider. When her grandfather suddenly dies, Lily is left confronting unanswered questions about her family history, identity and what it really means to belong somewhere.

David, a retired executive whose grip on the present is beginning to slip, is travelling across Europe with his assistant Cody. There will be a stop in London, dinner with his daughter and a meeting with an old friend in France. But his final destination is Zurich. As he travels, memories surface and blur, revealing a life of accomplishments, compromises and loss.

Maggie Byrd has built a life in London, far from the Australia she left behind in her early twenties. When she inherits her uncle’s rewilded land in southeast Queensland, she is drawn back to the place that shaped her adolescence and the past she tried to bury. Returning means confronting old betrayals, first love, grief and everything she left unresolved.

Róisín and Red meet as teenagers in small-town Ireland in 1982, forming an intense friendship before Red leaves for England. Years later, Róisín follows, hoping to find the closeness they once shared. But Red is increasingly difficult to reach. Spanning Ireland and London, Stations is a story of friendship, first love, loss and the choices made in youth that follow us into adulthood.

Jessica Parks is a London Crown Court Judge, balancing a demanding career with life as a wife and mother. In court, she challenges a legal system she believes needs to change. But when her eighteen-year-old son is accused of a serious crime, her professional convictions collide with her instinct to protect her family, forcing her to confront justice from the other side.

When Farah discovers her husband is having an affair, her closest friends respond by booking a trip to Mykonos. Five women, one luxury villa and a week away from their everyday lives quickly brings more than cocktails and late nights. Old tensions, difficult marriages, family problems and buried secrets surface in a funny, messy story about friendship and midlife.

Mona is supposed to be getting promoted and finally escaping her crumbling apartment building. Instead, she finds herself jobless and reluctantly stepping in as the building’s temporary super. As she gets drawn into the lives of her eccentric neighbours, Mona begins to question whether the place she’s been desperate to leave might actually offer the community and belonging she’s been missing.

Biologist Laurel Salter has fled her old life for an isolated research station in Antarctica. When a mysterious light known as the Arc appears across the ice, it draws a team of physicists, including Laurel’s former husband, Eli. Convinced the Arc could offer them a way to revisit the past, Laurel sees a chance to change the tragedy that tore their lives apart.

Following the Koh family across South Korea, Australia and the United States, American Hagwon explores the lengths families will go to in pursuit of education and a better future. Beginning around the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Min Jin Lee’s novel examines migration, ambition, class and the enormous expectations placed on children to succeed.

A body is discovered on the steps of a private villa in the Italian hills, accompanied by a threatening note from a mysterious man. Amy, Rosie and Steve take on the case, following a trail of suspects from Italy to Palm Springs and Barcelona as they pursue an elusive killer and discover that almost everyone involved is hiding something.

Los Angeles, 2031. The United States has collapsed, the city’s curfew has finally lifted and Ari Waker is newly out of prison. At a party celebrating the fragile new beginning, a doppelgänger appears and the host suddenly vanishes. Ari’s search for answers opens into fractured timelines and alternate worlds, in a story spanning civil war, surveillance, art, survival and the price of safety.

Following Want, Gillian Anderson returns with another collection of anonymous letters exploring women’s sexual fantasies. Drawn from submissions by women aged eighteen to eighty across more than fifty countries, More ventures beyond the bedroom into the many places desire exists. Candid and explicit, it explores pleasure, curiosity, kink and the freedom to fantasise without shame or restraint.

Caitlin Moran turns her attention to hope: how to find it, hold onto it and keep going when the world feels increasingly bleak. Drawing on her own life, conversations and observations, she looks at everything from politics and technology to friendship, family and ageing, making the case for optimism not as blind positivity, but as something practical we can choose and practise.

When college dropout Lee Clarke receives his draft notice during the Vietnam War, he decides he has no intention of going. Instead, he sets out across 1960s America, reconnecting with the family he has spent years avoiding as he makes his way towards Canada. Dodge City is a darkly comic road novel about family, escape and reinvention.

France, 1915. An English nurse and a German doctor, held as a prisoner of war, begin a forbidden love affair behind the lines. Their story might have disappeared entirely if not for a series of drawings discovered more than a century later, prompting a woman to uncover who the lovers were, what became of them and who captured their secret.

Immy, Khan and Haris are three British Pakistani friends heading down Manchester’s Curry Mile in a white BMW, chasing one big night out. But each is carrying something heavier beneath the bravado: heartbreak, revenge, secrets and doubts about the future. Told over one chaotic night, Wimmy Road Boyz explores masculinity, violence, friendship and love.

Korean-American Jeon-Gi is ten years old and caught between the protected world of his immigrant family and the rougher freedoms of the neighbourhood kids around him. After an act of violence sends him into the juvenile justice system, one pivotal summer forces him to confront guilt, masculinity and his own capacity to cause harm.

After her mother dies, Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera at her parents’ home and captures a strange new animal. Soon these mysterious creatures, nicknamed “mimmoths”, are appearing around the world. As Alderman navigates grief, their arrival sparks fascination, conspiracy theories and global power struggles, while she begins to wonder why she feels so connected to them.

Spanning 150 years and five generations of Māori women, Ordinary People Like Us follows one whānau from the Far North to Auckland and London. Moving between generations, Kelly Ana Morey traces the lives, loves, losses and choices that connect these women across time, creating an expansive family story about whakapapa, identity, inheritance and what we carry with us.

Rising actors Kai Laramie and Juniper Castillo land career-making roles in a buzzy Andy Warhol biopic. As the film takes off, so do their profiles, bringing fame, attention and the possibility of falling in love. Told from both perspectives, John Green’s Hollywood, Ending explores celebrity, privacy and what happens when your public life begins swallowing your private one.

After a decade in London, Xander’s modelling career is fading. When his successful actor girlfriend buys him a ticket home to New Zealand, he returns to find the family farm for sale and the life he left behind changed without him. The Long Cloud is a funny, tender story about masculinity, ageing, nostalgia and discovering you can never truly go back.

Kingston, 1988. Eight gay men answer a casting call for an openly queer play, taking an enormous risk simply by gathering together. When a mob attacks their rehearsal, one man is killed and two later disappear. As the survivors recover, they confront the violence and homophobia exposed that night while searching for the missing men and those responsible.

After her brother’s death, gifted pianist Livia Bohusz finds solace in music and the possibility of a life beyond her family’s farm. A scholarship takes her to college, where a new world begins to open up. Then an unexpected love affair changes everything. Barbara Kingsolver’s Partita is a story of grief, ambition, art, love and resilience.

Batter Gray is in his early twenties, living in New York and determined to pursue poetry while everyone around him chooses more conventional careers. When he lands a job at the prestigious, secretive and deeply dysfunctional poetry journal Peck & Peck, his life changes completely. Bonnie Garmus’s novel explores ambition, identity, truth and the enduring power of the written word.

In near-future England, Hazel Whitlock signs up to become the Starving Bride, a sideshow act displayed inside Blackpool Tower alongside a prowling lion. As thousands become captivated by her transformation, fascination turns increasingly obsessive. With the world outside growing unstable, Hazel must reckon with the spectacle she has created and just how far she is willing to go to be seen.Alba DeTamble is a time traveller, slipping unpredictably between past, present and future. She’s also in love with two people: Zach, who remains in the present when she disappears, and Oliver, who can travel through time with her. Moving through an increasingly fractured world, Alba must decide how to love and build a meaningful life when nothing stays in order.

The long-awaited sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife follows Alba DeTamble, a time traveller slipping unpredictably between past, present and future. She’s also in love with two people: Zach, who remains in the present when she disappears, and Oliver, who can travel through time with her. Alba must decide how to love and build a meaningful life when nothing stays in order.

Middle-aged sisters Susan and Vicki are both reaching breaking point. Susan’s husband has asked for an open marriage, while Vicki is increasingly consumed by fears for her teenage daughter. During a scorching Australian summer, long-suppressed rage, desire and anxiety begin to surface, forcing both women to question the roles they’ve spent their lives playing and what might happen if they finally stop.

Elif Shafak reimagines the life and work of Gustave Flaubert through the women, real and fictional, who shaped him, from his nursemaid and lovers to Madame Bovary herself. Moving through nineteenth-century France, Istanbul, Cairo, Palestine and Beirut, the novel explores who gets to tell stories, who history erases and what the silenced might have said for themselves.

In eighteenth-century Dublin, musical prodigy John Field is destined for greatness, while in French India, orphaned Adelaide Percheron sees music as her path to a different life. Their journeys take them across Europe and eventually towards each other. Inspired by real lives, Yiyun Li’s Music Against the Night explores ambition, genius, love and what must be sacrificed for success.

When fierce New York literary critic Selina Chan tears apart Parker Navarro’s latest novel, their private feud explodes into a viral spectacle, with the book world eagerly following every move. But as Selina and Parker continue to cross paths away from the online drama, their assumptions about one another begin to shift, complicating a rivalry that has become increasingly personal.

Helena and Ruthie have been best friends since high school, but approaching thirty has left their once-shared dreams looking very different. When they reunite for a glamorous forest wedding, old tensions, disappointments and younger versions of themselves come crashing together. Inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dream Girls is a funny, messy story about friendship, love and growing apart.

Tara Selter has now spent twelve years trapped in the eighteenth of November. Returning to Thomas, she discovers the years have changed her while he remains caught in the same repeating day. Rejoining her time-stranded friends, Tara travels to a community at Val Benoît, where companionship and new possibilities begin to reveal what a life beyond Thomas might look like.

Centuries from now, an orphan grows up to become a “pincher”, stealing electricity from the grid to power the underground music scene she loves. When she realises she is being followed, she is drawn into a paranoid maze that puts her friendships and identity into question, leading towards a scientific experiment that could change the fabric of reality itself.