👀 First impressions:that is exactly the kind of reader Elin Anna Labba wrote this book for. Labba is a Sámi writer and journalist from the arctic region of Sweden, already celebrated for her nonfiction debut, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow, which won Sweden’s prestigious August Prize for Best Nonfiction. With The Home of the Drowned,…

👀 First impressions:I will be completely upfront: I went into The Ladie Upstairs with a healthy dose of scepticism. Jessie Elland is best known as an actress from the North East of England, famous for playing Chloe Harris in Emmerdale, and celebrity novels do not always land well. But Elland has been open about her literary…

👀 First impressions:I had high hopes for The Bright Years. A multigenerational family saga set in Texas, spanning sixty years, with secrets, addiction, and three intimate points of view? That is exactly the kind of story I tend to gravitate toward. Sarah Damoff’s debut follows Ryan and Lillian Bright, a couple who marry young and deeply in…

👀 First impressions:I picked up Those Who Disappeared by Kevin Wignall knowing him primarily as a writer of slick, fast-paced thrillers involving spies, assassins, and shadowy government dealings. His novel The Hunter’s Prayer was adapted into a film, and several of his other works have been optioned for Hollywood, so the man clearly knows how to tell a gripping story.…

👀 First impressions:I had never read anything by Andrew Hunter Murray before picking this one up. I knew he was the author behind the Sunday Times bestseller The Last Day and that he is one of the writers and researchers on the BBC show QI, which was enough to make me curious. A novelist who also works on…

👀 First impressions:If you’ve been hanging around book corners of the internet for any length of time, you’ll know that a new Lauren Groff release is a Big Deal. Three time National Book Award finalist, author of Fates and Furies, Matrix and The Vaster Wilds, owner of an indie bookshop in Gainesville called The Lynx, and…

👀 First impressions:Every so often a book lands on my radar with so much buzz that I worry it can’t possibly live up to the hype. Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson was one of those books for me. Published in September 2025 by Penguin Random House, it’s been picking up glowing endorsements from the likes of…

👀 First impressions:I picked up Actress by Anne Enright with fairly high expectations, mostly because Enright has that quiet reputation of being one of Ireland’s literary heavyweights. She won the Booker Prize for The Gathering back in 2007, and her name tends to come up in those conversations about writers who can turn an ordinary sentence into something quietly devastating.…

👀 First impressions:Lily King has been on my must-read list for years now, ever since Writers and Lovers absolutely floored me back in 2020. So when I heard that her latest, Heart the Lover, was being pitched as something of a companion piece to that book, both a prequel and a sequel of sorts, I was…