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2026 BOOK RECS
21
items Books i have read so far this year and you should too!!! Recommends spanning many genres and different stories so there is something for everyone! Pick from short story collection, LGBTQ+ centred books and feminist novels. There is also a range of bo...
Sections
3
LGBTQ+
SHORT STORIES
OTHERS
LGBTQ+
Poland, 1980. Shy, anxious Ludwik has been sent along with the rest of his university class to an agricultural camp. Here he meets Janusz – and together they spend a dreamlike summer falling in love.
But with summer over, the two are sent back to W...
Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski
Baldwin's haunting and controversial second novel is his most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds...
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
The new novel from the bestselling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift—a vivid and immersive tale of one woman’s reckless mission to make sense of the events that shattered her childhood, and made her who she is
Summer, 1989: ten-year-...
Hot Wax by M.L. Rio
A woman in her mid-twenties moves back home to live with her parents, where her listlessness fuels an obsession with cleaning, and sets in motion a series of events that lead to her posing as a model in a nude gallery where she encounters a woman who...
Cleaner by Jess Shannon
Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in a hyper-masculine world. They are caught between two of Glasgow's housing estates, where young working-class men divide themselves along sectarian lines, and fight territorial ba...
Young Mungo: The No. 1 Sunday Times Bestseller, from the Booker Prize- ...
Fixed Ideas is the story of Espen and Emilie. He is a literary critic, she is a young, promising culture journalist, both for the same paper. They sleep with each other after a work party and from there, we follow the two of them and hear the relatio...
Fixed Ideas by Eline Lund Fjaeron
A novel of lesbian identity and motherhood, and the societal pressures that place them in opposition.
The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime Minister, a model, and a journalist, Constance Debré abandoned he...
Books - Love Me Tender
SHORT STORIES
There’s something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories, something almost dangerous while also being delightful – and often even weirdly hilarious. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet; all yearning for connection and betterment...
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiralling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The narrator of these interlinked stories is ...
Jesus' Son: Denis Johnson
DESCRIPTION
Visceral, speculative body horror from Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts and Penance – the first collection from this major voice in British fiction
A teenager longs for perfect skin. A scientist tends to fragile alien flora. A young man...
She's Always Hungry by Eliza Clark | Books & Shop
OTHERS
Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Forceful. Hurting. Perceptive. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all: Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the ...
Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy
In a burned-out America, a father and his young son walk under a darkened sky, heading slowly for the coast. They have no idea what, if anything, awaits them there. The landscape is destroyed, nothing moves save the ash on the wind and cruel, lawless...
The Road : McCarthy, Cormac - Books
Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vis...
“The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway
Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him b...
No Longer Human (New Directions Book)
For readers drawn to stark, blood-soaked meditations on humanity’s appetite for brutality—philosophical western noir stripped of heroes. Ideal if you crave slow, hypnotic prose, biblical cadence, and savage landscapes that scar the mind more than the...
Blood Meridian: Mccarthy Cormac
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Indepen...
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
California's fertile Salinas Valley is home to two families whose destinies are fruitfully, and fatally, intertwined. Over the generations, between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of the First World War, the Trasks and the Hamilton...
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Cheri has been living with cancer for many years. Now, she is dying. As she navigates the final weeks of her life, and takes charge of the manner of her death, she is flooded with childhood memories, and returns to the present with a renewed apprecia...
Cheri by Jo Ann Beard
There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine
Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cook...
Butter: THE No. 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING SENSATION
Eriko really wouldn't mind being savaged, if it was her best friend doing the savaging …
Eriko's life appears perfect – devoted parents, spotless apartment and a job in the seafood division of one of Japan's largest trading companies. Her latest pro...
Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, Polly Barton
Slag. Noun. A promiscuous woman, of cheap or questionable character. Mostly derogatory. Sometimes affectionate.
Takes one to know one...
Sisters Sarah and Juliette are going on a whisky-fuelled campervan road-trip across Scotland to celebrate Julie...
Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth review