01 of 05

The Pretender

Jo Harkin

Bloomsbury

Jo Harkin’s dazzling debut historical novel follows John Collan — a farmer’s son from Oxfordshire whose quiet rural life is upended when a stranger arrives and informs him he is not who he thinks he is. Apparently the son of the Duke of Clarence, he is bundled away across Europe and transformed, willingly or not, into Lambert Simnel: pretender to the throne of Henry VII.

A gloriously propulsive story of conspiracy, adventure, and betrayal, written with tremendous energy and wit. Critics have called it filthy, clever, and immersive — and we couldn’t agree more.

02 of 05

The Matchbox Girl

Alice Jolly

Bloomsbury

One of the most quietly devastating novels we have read in years. Adelheid Brunner is a young girl in Vienna who does not speak — she writes and draws instead, and her great ambition is to own one thousand matchboxes. She hides in cupboards with her pet rat, Franz Joseph, listening to conversations she can’t quite understand. Then she meets Dr Asperger, a man who sees that Adelheid’s way of moving through the world has its own extraordinary logic.

The year is 1938. The Nazis are marching in. The clinic’s children begin to disappear. Through Adelheid’s watchful, sideways perspective, Jolly gives us one of the most original and morally searching accounts of fascism we’ve encountered — tender, unsettling, and utterly unforgettable.

03 of 05

Benbecula

Graeme Macrae Burnet

Polygon

The Booker Prize-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project returns to the dark, brooding territory he does so magnificently well. On 9th July 1857, on the Hebridean island of Benbecula, Angus MacPhee murdered his father, mother, and aunt. Found criminally insane, his story is now told by his older brother Malcolm — a narrative of isolation, shame, and mounting dread.

Burnet is one of Scotland’s finest literary voices, and Benbecula showcases everything that makes his work so arresting: spare, haunting prose; the slow accumulation of unease; landscape becoming character. An unmissable novel.

04 of 05

Once the Deed Is Done

Rachel Seiffert

Virago

Rachel Seiffert returns to Germany with this subtle, morally complex masterwork. Winter, 1945: a boy named Benno watches forced labourers flee across frozen heathland. When peace arrives, the adults close ranks and Benno keeps a secret. When British Red Cross officer Ruth arrives to document displaced persons, she begins asking questions the town would rather not answer.

The Financial Times called it “a crime novel in the sense that To Kill a Mockingbird is a crime novel — one in which a whole community is culpable.” Quiet, precise, and deeply compassionate.

05 of 05

Seascraper

Benjamin Wood

Viking

Already longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and winner of the Nero Book Award for Fiction, Seascraper is the kind of novel that gets under your skin and stays there. In the fog-lit coastal town of Longferry, twenty-one-year-old Thomas Lett rises before dawn to scrape shrimp from the shore with his horse and cart — an inherited trade, a quiet life, and hidden dreams of music, love, and a different future.

Wood’s prose is luminous and atmospheric. The judges called it “utterly immersive” — and this portrait of a small Lancashire coastal community is one of the warmest, most richly imagined things we have read in recent memory.