The SL Team Picks Their Favourite New Reads

My friend has read a preview of this debut novel and has been raving about it. It's a dark yet funny take on the 'trad wife' life, focusing on one such woman who wakes up in the past. Expect frighteningly accurate parallels and new perspectives on where we are as a society today compared to 50 or 100 years ago. It's definitely made an impression pre-release – Anne Hathaway has bagged the film rights.

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When I want something sharp, funny and just a little bit chaotic, Emma Jane Unsworth is always a safe bet. I loved Adults and Slags similarly delivers. I tore through it in a matter of days. There’s something about Unsworth’s writing that feels so alive – it’s quick, biting and full of messy, real emotion, but never loses its sense of humour. At its heart, this is a story about female friendship and sisterhood, identity and the labels we carry (and sometimes reclaim). It follows women navigating life, love and all the complications in between, with plenty of wit and honesty along the way. It's sweet and complex, heartwarming and heartbreaking all on one page.

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In Heart the Lover, Lily King captures the rush of first love – and the shadow it leaves behind. In her final year of university, a sharp-eyed narrator is swept into the orbit of Sam and Yash, whose intoxicating mix of intellect, intensity and late-night rituals blurs the lines between friendship and something far messier. Years on, with a life carefully assembled, the past resurfaces – forcing her to confront the choices (and lies) she once let slide. Elegant, intimate and cutting, it’s a story that has lingered with me.

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In his first novel for eight years, Booker-longlisted John Lanchester asks: what if the year's most talked about TV show was all about your marriage? Kate, 30 years into her marriage, has a seemingly idyllic life in metropolitan north London. Phoebe, a young screenwriter, is the creator of the year's hit TV show, Cheating. When Kate's world takes a darker turn, she thinks she sees details and intimacies in the show that only she and her husband Jack could possibly have known. But who has betrayed whom? And who gets to tell whose story? A black comedy of resentment and entitlement, Look What You Made Me Do is the story of two very different women from two very different generations, heading towards a battle only one of them can win. 

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From the Baillie Gifford prize-winning and Sunday Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing comes this stunning story of corruption and tragedy. In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac’s parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night – and how a teenager’s world of make-believe drew him into the city’s terrifying underworld. London Falling is at once a devastating family tragedy, a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all. 

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As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her 16th birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange. It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events be comprehended. In Repetition, award-winning novelist Vigdis Hjorth explores, through fiction, the parts of childhood that echo through the decades. 

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This is the latest book from the International Booker-shortlisted author of Heaven and Breasts and Eggs. Hana has nothing, but she’s hopeful. She’s 15 years old. She lives in a tiny apartment in a Tokyo suburb with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears. Kimiko is older, a bright light in Hana’s dark world. Together they set up Lemon, a bar that, despite its shabby setting and seedy clientele, becomes a haven for Hana. Suddenly, Hana has a job she loves, friends to share her days with, and the glittering promise of money. She feels like a normal girl. But in the narrow alleys of Sangenjaya, nothing is as it seems. Soon, all of Hana’s hope, her optimism and her drive will be tested to the limit. Twenty years later, Kimiko is on trial. Now Hana must wrestle with her own actions, and face their devastating consequences… 

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