Books from United Kingdom

What does it mean to return home when the place you left has become a stranger—and the past you are returning to is full of unanswered questions? In Prodigal, award-winning poet Kayo Chingonyi traces the journey from a childhood shaped by loss to an adult reckoning with his Zambian heritage. In 1993, following his father’s death, six-year-old Kayo is sent from Zambia to Newcastle, England. Growing up in Britain, he gradually learns the circumstances surrounding his parents’ deaths from HIV-related illnesses. The stigma surrounding their deaths leaves him carrying grief, shame, and questions about a family history he struggles to understand. Nearly twenty-five years later, a message from a cousin in Zambia prompts Chingonyi to reconsider the distance separating him from his birthplace. His return becomes an opportunity to piece together fragments of memory, confront the silences surrounding his childhood, and reconsider what he has inherited from the people he lost. Moving between Zambia and Britain, Chingonyi explores migration, bereavement, cultural belonging, and the complicated process of making peace with one’s past. Music, poetry, and family memories become ways of reconnecting with what has been lost. Prodigal is an intimate memoir about discovering that returning home is not simply about retracing your steps—it is about learning to understand the person you have become.

Lena is consumed by a hunger she can no longer control. Alone in her luxury apartment, she gorges herself on everything from loaves of bread to cat food, while doctors dismiss her growing distress. When Joan, a glamorous actress on the brink of stardom, moves upstairs, Lena is drawn into a world of beauty, wealth, and privilege she has always desired. But as her appetite becomes increasingly grotesque, Lena’s carefully constructed identity begins to unravel. A disturbing, darkly comic body-horror novel about invisible illness, class inequality, loneliness, and the impossible expectations placed on women.

When sisters Mara and Nell watched their parents’ marriage fall apart, they made a pact: no husbands, no babies, and no repeating their family’s mistakes. For years, their bond was the one thing they could count on. But when Mara unexpectedly falls in love and becomes a mother, the sisters find themselves on opposite sides of a life-changing divide. While Mara struggles with the overwhelming contradictions of motherhood, Nell throws herself into a relationship that threatens the independence she has fought to protect. Meanwhile, their absent mother and their aunt Jean hold the key to family secrets that refuse to stay buried. An intimate, sharply observed novel about sisterhood, motherhood, and the complicated inheritance of family, Mothersick asks whether love can survive when the lives we choose lead us in different directions.

London, 1969. Trapped in a loveless marriage and the monotony of suburban motherhood, Mitzy Barlow discovers an unexpected escape: writing steamy stories inspired by classic novels. When she begins secretly distributing them inside Tupperware containers at her parties, her private passion becomes a sensation among local housewives. Writing under the pseudonym Queen B, Mitzy sparks a quiet revolution in female desire, friendship, and freedom. But as rumours threaten her family’s reputation and livelihood, she must decide how much she is willing to risk to rewrite her own story.

London, 1938. After a music hall performance, Richard Hadley encounters the mysterious Miss Lambert, a woman who seems to have attracted the attention of dangerous forces. Intrigued and determined to protect her, Richard follows her to a secretive gathering in the English countryside and eventually boards a train bound for Scotland. As old acquaintances, political figures, and suspicious strangers enter the picture, he finds himself caught up in a puzzling adventure whose true stakes he can barely comprehend. Blending espionage, eccentric characters, music, and understated humour, Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro delivers a playful period mystery in which nothing is quite as it seems.

The world has descended into chaos, and humanity can no longer deny that gods walk among them. After months abroad, clairvoyant Paige Mahoney is ready to reunite with Arcturus and continue their fight against the oppressive Republic of Scion. But an invitation to Iceland, where the Ranthen are choosing a new leader, ends in violence, forcing Paige and her allies into a dangerous flight across Europe. As she races to protect the revolution, Paige must uncover the truth about her own existence and the origins of clairvoyance. The sixth and penultimate instalment of The Bone Season series promises political intrigue, ancient revelations, and hard-won love.

In a small Irish town in 1982, Róisín and Red form an intense bond as two sharp-minded teenagers who feel out of place in their own lives. Red is rebellious and troubled, while Róisín carries the pain of growing up with an absent father and a difficult home life. When Red’s encounter with the law forces him to leave Ireland for England, their connection survives across distance, becoming a fragile thread linking them through the years. Eventually, Róisín travels to London to visit her estranged father and finds Red again, moving into his squat in Pimlico. But the life he has chosen is darker and more complicated than she imagined, and the pair gradually drift apart. Even as their paths diverge, Róisín remains haunted by her unfulfilled passion for him. Moving between Ireland and London over decades, Stations explores first love, addiction, friendship, and the lasting consequences of youthful choices. It asks whether we can release the people who shaped us—and whether learning to love someone else begins with learning to love ourselves.

Max Radinsky believes he has found the perfect life in Athens, Greece, until his girlfriend, Yasmine, is forced to flee the city. Joining her on the run, Max becomes caught in a dangerous international pursuit. Neither is trained for espionage, and as rival intelligence agencies close in, their desperate journey across Greece turns into a fight for survival. Meanwhile, Lachlan Kite, head of the covert intelligence service BOX 88, receives an unexpected plea for help from Martha Raine, a former lover he has not seen in more than twenty years. Her son Max has disappeared, and Kite finds himself drawn back into fieldwork to locate the young couple. What he uncovers is far more dangerous than a missing-person case: Yasmine holds a secret that could destabilise the Middle East for a generation, and Israeli intelligence operatives have orders to kill her on sight. The fourth novel in Cumming’s BOX 88 series, Icarus 17 combines a high-stakes international chase with the personal consequences of a spy’s past. Moving between Greece and the world of covert intelligence, it explores loyalty, betrayal, and the devastating cost of secrets that powerful institutions will do anything to protect.

Waiting for the Eurostar in Paris, Mark is travelling home to London with his four-year-old daughter, Molly, and teenage stepdaughter, Freya. During a game of “Eye Spy,” Molly suddenly identifies a stranger as a “Bad Man.” Mark initially dismisses her words as a child’s imagination, but when he spots the same man boarding their train with a suspicious-looking suitcase, unease turns to fear. As the train speeds through the Channel Tunnel, Mark begins to suspect that the stranger poses a genuine threat. Trapped in a confined space with hundreds of passengers and no easy way to escape, he must work out who the man is and what he wants. But as unsettling connections to Mark’s past emerge, the danger becomes increasingly personal, and protecting his daughters becomes a race against time. Unfolding over a tense train journey, Eye Spy combines claustrophobic suspense with an emotional story about parenthood, trust, and the lengths someone will go to protect their family. C. M. Ewan transforms an ordinary trip into a terrifying ordeal where a child’s innocent observation could be the only warning that matters.

Mark Wolfe was once one of Britain’s greatest spies. Now working behind a desk at MI6 headquarters in London, he has settled into a quiet life as a civil servant, keeping his dangerous past hidden from his family. His routine changes when he discovers that his daughter, Jody, shares his ambition to join the intelligence service. But MI6 has recruited her without his knowledge, and Mark soon begins to suspect that something is wrong. When Jody disappears during a mission in Afghanistan, the intelligence service appears unwilling to help. Worse, officials suggest that she may have betrayed her country. Refusing to accept their explanation, Mark returns to the world of espionage he thought he had left behind. With limited support and enemies he cannot easily identify, he sets out to find his daughter and uncover the truth. Moving between London and Afghanistan, A Spy in the Blood explores the cost of secrecy, the fragile bonds between parents and children, and the moral compromises of intelligence work. Paul Warner combines the tension of a contemporary spy thriller with a deeply personal story about how far a father will go to protect his family.

On the Greek island of Vidos, just off the coast of Corfu, a secluded community of former MI6 officers lives in enforced retirement. These men and women have been exiled from the intelligence service—some too damaged by their past, others too compromised to be trusted. Surrounded by the beauty of the Ionian Sea, they attempt to settle old grudges, rekindle lost relationships, and forget the dangerous lives they once led. But their fragile peace collapses when one of the residents is found dead. As suspicion spreads through the community, former allies begin questioning one another, and buried secrets from decades of espionage threaten to surface. The island becomes a trap for people who have spent their lives deceiving others, where old betrayals carry deadly consequences and nobody’s version of the past can be trusted. Inspired by the hidden history of British intelligence, A Stranger in Corfu combines an atmospheric Mediterranean setting with the moral ambiguity of Cold War espionage. Alex Preston explores loyalty, betrayal, and the difficulty of escaping one’s past, asking what remains of people whose entire lives have been built around secrets.

The head of British Intelligence, Sir William Rentoul, is only six months away from retirement when an anonymous complaint threatens to expose a disastrous covert operation. Already struggling with an increasingly unreliable memory, he must now contend with parliamentary scrutiny, a trail of assassinations, and secrets that could bring the intelligence establishment to its knees. Enter Aphra McQueen, a sharp and unconventional parliamentary researcher tasked with investigating the complaint. Her inquiry leads her into a covert operation involving CASPIAN, an elusive assassin responsible for killing Iranian dissidents across Europe. As the investigation unfolds, Aphra discovers that the case is far more complicated than it first appears—and that she herself may be concealing crucial information. With intelligence agencies scrambling to contain the fallout, an unsuspecting British-Syrian dentist becomes entangled in a dangerous international conspiracy. Told in part through the sardonic voice of an almost omniscient narrator known as the “spirit of spying,” Spies and Other Gods combines espionage, dark humour, and institutional satire. James Wolff examines the uneasy relationship between secrecy and accountability, revealing the human weaknesses and moral compromises behind the machinery of intelligence.