Literary Fiction

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Somewhere Soft to Land

Somewhere Soft to Land

Dzifa has spent much of her life feeling out of place. Haunted by difficult family relationships and exhausted by repeated cycles of burnout, unstable employment, and housing insecurity, she struggles to find a sense of safety and belonging. Her closest source of support is Tatiana, her charismatic best friend, whose confidence and determination often help Dzifa navigate life’s challenges. Despite their differences, the two women share a desire to live authentically and free themselves from the expectations imposed on them as Black women. Their friendship faces its greatest test when tragedy strikes Tatiana’s family. After the sudden death of Tatiana’s infant son, Luca, Dzifa returns to Boston to support her friend and help prepare for the funeral. But grief soon gives way to a bitter family conflict. Tatiana’s partner and his parents begin questioning her ability to care for her surviving daughter, Maddie, threatening to turn an already devastating loss into a custody battle. Caught between two opposing families, Dzifa must decide how far she is willing to go to protect her friend. When Tatiana asks her for an extraordinary favour, Dzifa faces an impossible choice between loyalty to someone she loves and the need to protect her own well-being. With humour, emotional honesty, and an unflinching look at complicated family relationships, Somewhere Soft to Land explores female friendship, grief, motherhood, and the burden of respectability politics. It asks whether unconditional loyalty is always an act of love—and whether true friendship sometimes requires the courage to establish boundaries.

Abundance

Set in suburban Miami, Abundance follows the Bharwani family, a Muslim Indian American family navigating ambition, faith, sacrifice, and the complicated pursuit of the American Dream. Sixty-year-old Sakeena Bharwani co-owns a Dunkin’ franchise with her husband, Ramzan. Thirty years earlier, she left Rawalpindi, Pakistan, to build a new life in the United States. Over the years, she has made difficult compromises between her religious belief in naseeb—the idea of destiny—and her desire to shape her own future. Now facing a life-threatening liver condition, Sakeena refuses a potentially life-saving transplant, believing that she should accept her fate rather than intervene in what she sees as God’s plan. Desperate to save his wife, Ramzan tries to bring their adult children together. Their eldest daughter, Fareen, is consumed by her ambitions in the competitive world of finance, while their son, Adnan, is entangled in questionable international business dealings that prevent him from returning home. Their daughter Kawal, meanwhile, must navigate her own responsibilities and family expectations. As Sakeena’s condition deteriorates, the family is forced to confront years of compromises, unspoken resentments, and conflicting ideas about what makes a life meaningful. Through their struggles, Lakhani examines the tension between individual ambition and family duty, the immigrant experience, and the question of how much control people truly have over their destinies. With a nuanced portrayal of a multigenerational immigrant family, Abundance explores the costs of success and the sacrifices people make in pursuit of security, belonging, and happiness.

United States 2026

The Squatters

Set in the affluent suburbs of Surrey, England, The Squatters follows Dalia Waheed, a second-generation immigrant who appears to have achieved the perfect life. Married to a British husband and surrounded by the comforts of an upper-middle-class community, Dalia nevertheless feels disconnected from the world she inhabits and longs to do something meaningful. While volunteering with a refugee resettlement organisation, Dalia meets Hajira, a heavily pregnant woman who has fled her home country with her husband in search of asylum in the United Kingdom. Moved by Hajira’s desperate circumstances and the inadequate accommodation provided to refugees, Dalia offers to help the couple find somewhere more suitable to live. What begins as a compassionate gesture soon spirals into a complicated conflict that threatens Dalia’s marriage, friendships, and place in her community. As tensions rise, she must confront the limits of her idealism and decide how much she is truly willing to sacrifice for another woman’s safety and dignity. Through the collision of these two families, Saba Brelvi explores displacement, belonging, motherhood, class privilege, and the moral responsibilities people have towards those seeking refuge. The novel asks difficult questions about compassion: whether it can survive when helping others threatens our own security, and what it really means to stand by our convictions.

United Kingdom 2026

On Not Climbing Mountains

On Not Climbing Mountains

A woman arrives in Geneva, beginning a train journey through Switzerland, the country where her father was born. Seeking solitude and a temporary escape from the demands of ordinary life, she hopes to exist outside the usual rhythms of time. Yet as she travels through snowy landscapes, museums, and historic towns, she becomes immersed in the stories embedded in the places she encounters. She discovers traces of writers and artists including Mary Shelley, James Baldwin, Charlie Chaplin, and Patricia Highsmith, alongside the histories of political revolutionaries, scientific pioneers, and workers who carved tunnels through the Alps. Gradually, these fragments of art, history, and human experience begin to resonate with her own memories and grief. Blending travel writing, historical reflection, and literary fiction, On Not Climbing Mountains is a contemplative novel about the connections between landscape and memory, the fragility of the natural world, and the ways art allows us to encounter lives beyond our own.

Land

Maggie O’Farrell

Ireland, 1865. On a windswept peninsula overlooking the Atlantic, Tomás and his ten-year-old son, Liam, work on the ambitious Ordnance Survey project to map the entire country. Still haunted by the devastating Great Hunger, Tomás is determined that his maps will preserve a record of the tragedy that transformed Ireland. But when an unsettling encounter in an ancient woodland disrupts his work and changes his behaviour, Liam finds himself struggling to understand his father while facing the daunting task of completing their mission. As their family’s story unfolds, buried secrets, lingering ghosts, and the enduring power of the Irish landscape reveal how the past continues to shape the present. Spanning generations and exploring the consequences of colonisation, famine, and displacement, Land is a sweeping historical novel about survival, family, and the profound connections between people and the places they call home. Maggie O’Farrell weaves Irish history with folklore and intimate human drama, creating a meditation on memory, belonging, and the ways landscapes preserve stories that history cannot erase.

My Husband and Other Rats

My Husband and Other Rats

Alison Solomon is facing a spectacular catalogue of midlife disasters. Her husband has left her for a younger woman, her elderly mother is struggling with dementia, and she has received a cancer diagnosis. As if that weren’t enough, a mysterious woman appears outside her house, and an actual rat seems to have moved into her kitchen. Encouraged by everyone around her to seek therapy, Alison embarks on a chaotic search for someone who can help her make sense of her unraveling life. With the support of sharp-witted friends, unexpected family revelations, and an eccentric rat catcher, she navigates heartbreak, grief, and the absurdities of everyday existence. Funny, tender, and refreshingly honest, My Husband and Other Rats explores the messiness of middle age, the resilience of women, and the possibility of finding laughter even when everything seems to be falling apart.

United Kingdom 2026

Main Characters

Main Characters

Clara and Seb are about to fall in love. They just don’t know it yet. When they meet in a quiet corner of London, an unexpected connection sparks a romance that captivates everyone around them. Clara dreams of becoming a film director, while Seb, an aspiring actor who has drifted between different careers, is still searching for his purpose. As their relationship deepens, Clara casts Seb in the film that could launch her career, but what should be the happiest moment of their lives ends in a devastating betrayal. Spanning two decades, Main Characters tells their love story through the eyes of the people who witness it: friends, flatmates, former lovers, rivals, and strangers. Each has a different perspective on the couple, revealing how little we can truly know about other people’s relationships. With its inventive narrative structure, this novel explores love, perception, friendship, and the complicated ways our lives intersect.

United Kingdom 2026

The Names

England, 1987. As a great storm rages outside, Cora sets out to register the birth of her son. Her controlling husband expects her to name the baby after him, continuing a family tradition passed down through generations of domineering men. But Cora hesitates. Should her son inherit a name that represents everything she fears, or should she choose a different future for him? Her decision creates three possible lives for her son: Bear, a name chosen by his older sister in the hope that he will grow up brave and kind; Julian, the name Cora believes will allow him to become his own person; or Gordon, named after his father and raised in his cruel image. Through three interwoven timelines, Florence Knapp explores how a single decision can shape an entire family, revealing the lasting effects of domestic abuse alongside the possibilities of love, resilience, and redemption. The Names is a moving novel about the power of choice, the courage to break generational cycles, and the uncertain relationship between identity and fate.

United Kingdom 2026

A Private Man

Stephanie Sy-Quia

Rome, 1953. David is a young Catholic priest who has devoted his life to God and sworn himself to celibacy. Margaret, meanwhile, is a fiercely independent woman drawn to theology and the possibility of a more progressive Church. When their lives intersect in 1960s England, an intellectual connection develops into a love that challenges everything they believe about faith, duty, and freedom. Decades later, their grandson Adrian discovers the extraordinary secret behind his family history while caring for his aging grandmother. As the past gradually emerges, the consequences of David and Margaret’s choices reveal themselves across generations. Inspired by the author’s own grandparents, A Private Man is a tender, complex exploration of forbidden love, religious devotion, and the difficult compromises between personal desire and deeply held convictions.

United Kingdom 2026

The Unwritten Path: A Modern Fable of Awakening and Transformation

The Unwritten Path: A Modern Fable of Awakening and Transformation

Kenechukwu Dumogu

What if the answers we spend our lives searching for are already within us? In this contemplative fable, Sam embarks on an inward journey through symbolic landscapes where the hidden forces shaping human existence take on physical form. Along the way, he encounters Fear, Obligation, Control, Comparison, Perfection, and Desire, each revealing how deeply our identities are shaped by expectations, attachments, and the need to prove ourselves. Rather than offering battles to win or problems to conquer, these encounters invite Sam to understand the patterns that govern his life and discover the stillness beneath them. Blending lyrical storytelling, allegory, and spiritual reflection, The Unwritten Path explores the possibility of freedom through self-awareness, surrender, and the recognition that what we seek may never have been lost.

The Comfort of Distant Stars

The Comfort of Distant Stars

Ezeani is no ordinary child. Gifted with extraordinary intelligence and troubled by visions others cannot see, he grows into a brilliant mathematician and physicist. When he leaves his family in Nigeria to study at Cornell University in the United States, he hopes to build a future shaped by reason and scientific discovery. But his most persistent vision, Anyanwu, the Igbo Sun God, follows him across continents, growing increasingly sinister and threatening his grip on reality. Blending theoretical physics, philosophy, and Igbo cosmology, I. O. Echeruo’s novel explores the fragile boundaries between belief and knowledge, the mysteries of consciousness, and the human need to find meaning in an incomprehensible universe. A haunting coming-of-age story about genius, vulnerability, and the forces that shape our understanding of reality.

Farewell Tangier

Farewell Tangier

Salma El Moumni

Growing up in Tangier, Alia is constantly subjected to the unwanted attention of men who scrutinize her body, follow her, and invade her space. Desperate to understand the gaze that makes her feel both exposed and ashamed, she begins taking intimate photographs of herself in the privacy of her bedroom. When the images appear online without her consent, Alia faces the threat of punishment and is forced to flee to Lyon, France. But leaving Morocco cannot erase the shame, fear, and cultural expectations she carries with her. Intimate and unsettling, this powerful novel examines the policing of women’s bodies, sexual identity, and the complicated search for freedom between two cultures.