Wood writes Thomas Flett's world — the horse and cart, the shrimp trawling, the grey tides of Longferry — with such atmospheric precision that you feel you're watching a way of life disappear in real time, and the beauty is that he never announces the elegy, he just lets you live inside it.
*LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO BOOK AWARDS 2025*
'A huge talent' HILARY MANTEL
'A magnificent writer' DOUGLAS STUART
'One of the finest novelists of his generation' THE TIMES
Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa's trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach to scrape for shrimp; spending the rest of the day selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At…
Hjorth does what she always does — takes the thing a family buried and makes you sit with it for 144 pages until you understand that repression isn't silence, it's a force that shapes everything it touches, decades later.
Ingalls wrote the truest book about marriage and loneliness I've read this year by giving her protagonist a six-foot amphibian lover, which shouldn't work but does because the surrealism is more honest than realism would have been.
In the quiet suburbs, while Dorothy is doing chores and waiting for her husband to come home from work, not in the least anticipating romance, she hears a strange radio announcement about a monster who has just escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research... Reviewers have compared Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban to King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe's stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., Richard Yates's domestic realism, B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter-how such a short novel could contain all of these disparate elements is a testament to…
In The Unknowable Body, Lisa Jean Moore explores the profound disconnect between how we experience our bodies and how the medical world interprets them. Drawing on her own journey through DCIS diagnosis, mastectomy, and reconstruction – alongside her family's navigation of her ex-partner's brain tumour – Moore investigates various unsettling dimensions of bodily uncertainty that emerge when illness enters our lives.
As scans revealed secrets that human perception failed to, and while navigating a queer family system that didn't fit institutional categories, the author found herself in territory few roadmaps could chart. This book weaves candid humour and poetic personal narrative and analytical vision to examine how bodies resist complete knowing – medically, emotionally, in time, and through gender and identity. It offers new ways of thinking about embodiment in an age of increasing medical surveillance, technological intervention, and economically profitable uncertainty.
