The novel is set in 2045, in an unnamed European state that has become increasingly authoritarian, nationalist and violently anti-immigration. The book opens with an official news bulletin concerning Paul Beauchêne, the editor of the literary periodical Modern Poetry & Thought. Paul has been convicted of sedition and crimes against the State because his magazine […]
Mortal Passions is a dark-academia vampire novel centred on Laura Wyck, a twenty-six-year-old English PhD student at the unnamed University of ———, a beautiful but financially collapsing old institution to which she has devoted almost her entire adult life. Laura is intelligent, romantic, self-dramatising and chronically uncertain about what is good for her, and the […]
The novel opens briefly in 1977 at the Troubadour Club in London, where Seth Hardanger meets Eliza, a charismatic young folk singer considering him as a support act. Eliza is fascinated by his Yorkshire surname, joking that “Hardanger” sounds like “Hard Anger,” while Seth is immediately overwhelmed by her beauty and force of personality. Their […]
Julia Kelly’s Painted Horses is a historical novel about a mother and daughter living under false names in a Victorian seaside town after rescuing a disabled child from an abusive institution. Alongside the family drama, it follows the growing love between two young women divided by class but united by their desire to escape the […]
Luke Kennard’s Black Bag is narrated by an unnamed thirty-seven-year-old actor whose failing career, unstable finances, intrusive thoughts and hunger for recognition make him unusually susceptible to the strangest role he has ever been offered. The novel is told in an intensely digressive present tense, with the narrator repeatedly addressing the reader, interrupting his own […]
The Shadow of the Object is a reflective, image-heavy novel about Flora, a Mexican-British woman in her early forties whose accidental encounter with an elderly collector changes the direction of her life. Its central story is comparatively simple—an injury, a hospital friendship, a death and Flora’s growing relationship with the dead woman’s son—but the narrative […]
The novel follows Charlotte Cap and Esmé Polignac through their first two years at the fictional University of Montrose on the Scottish coast, from 2007 to 2009. Told through alternating first-person chapters, it charts an intense female friendship formed amid class anxiety, sexual violence, romantic obsession and the social cruelty of an elite university. Charlotte […]
Stu Hennigan’s Keshed follows Sean Molloy, a working-class Yorkshireman whose life is shaped by inherited alcoholism, mental illness, class shame, fatherhood and an almost total inability to express pain except through intoxication and self-destruction. The narrative alternates between “THEN,” which reconstructs Sean’s relationship with Amanda and the birth of their daughter, and “NOW,” in which […]
Anna Richmond’s Tide is narrated by Imogen, a London museum curator whose seven-year-old son, Thomas, vanishes in the River Thames under horrifying and mysterious circumstances. The novel follows the immediate disappearance, the destruction of Imogen’s marriage, the uncertainty surrounding what she witnessed, and the long aftermath of a tragedy that is never conventionally resolved. The […]
The Children is a state-school catastrophe novel about a high-performing London academy, a murdered teacher, a radicalized student, and the adults who keep insisting that systems, values, lessons, routines, and “high expectations” can save children from the chaos outside and inside them. It wants to be a thriller, an institutional satire, a post-Covid state-of-the-nation novel, […]