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Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha (4th Estate)
Barely 30 years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current assault on Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed his house, pulverising a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives.
Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid and lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges and his daughter’s joy in eating them. Here are poems to introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us.
Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely liveable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination — even as it is watched live. This is an extraordinary and arrestingly whimsical book, that brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.
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Mosab Abu Toha, Forest of Noise (4th Estate)
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short story writer and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his Letter from Gaza columns for The New Yorker. [Photo Credit: Mohamed Mahdy]
X: @MosabAbuToha | Instagram: @mosab_abutoha
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Mrs Jekyll by Emma Glass (CHEERIO Publishing)
By turns tender and devastating, Mrs Jekyll contorts Stevenson's gothic classic in a sumptuous and shocking account of modern womanhood.
Schoolteacher Rosy Winter is dying.
Her husband Charlie offers all the relief he can. Rosy's sister-in-law, Sally, offers none.
But Rosy feels something growing in her. A hard knot in her chest.
Beyond the homeopathic remedies, the dinner party obligations, the snatched whispers on wards and in staffrooms, a force - murderous, feminine, feverish - is stirring within her...
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Emma Glass, Mrs Jekyll (CHEERIO Publishing)
Emma Glass was born in Wales and is now based in London, where she writes and works as a children’s nurse.
Her debut novel Peach was published by Bloomsbury in 2018, has been translated into seven languages and was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second novel Rest and Be Thankful was published by Bloomsbury in 2020, and was optioned for film that year. Mrs Jekyll,a retelling of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, was published by CHEERIO in June 2024. [Photo Credit: Sarah Lee]
Instagram: @emmas_window
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The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya (Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Orion))
What happens when we stop idolising the generations above us? Stop idolising our own parents?
What happens when we become frightened of the generations below us? Frightened of our own children?
The Aeolian islands, 2010. Sophia, on the cusp of adulthood, spends a long hot summer with her father in Sicily. There she falls in love for the first time. There she works as her father’s amanuensis, typing the novel he dictates, a story about sex and gender divides. There, their relationship fractures.
London, Summer 2020. Sophia’s father, a 61-year-old novelist who does not feel himself to be a bad or outdated person sits in a large theatre, surrounded by strangers, watching his daughter’s first play. A play that takes that Sicilian holiday is its subject. A play that will force him to watch his purported crimes play out in front of him.
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Jo Hamya, The Hypocrite (Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Orion))
Jo Hamya was born in London in 1997. She is the author of Three Rooms and The Hypocrite, which was shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards 2024. She has written for the New York Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian, among others, and served as co-host of the Booker Prize Podcast. She is also the recipient of a Harold Moody doctoral studentship at King's College London, where her research focuses around building on 20th century western literary sociology and critique to create a viable school of literary criticism for a 21st century digitised landscape. [Photo credit: Sophie Davidson]
X: @jo_hamya
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Rapture’s Road by Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape (Vintage, Penguin Random House))
In this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland
'Points to a bright future for Irish poetry' SUNDAY TIMES
'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet' MAX PORTER
As the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters.
Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature.
A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture’s Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.
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Seán Hewitt, Rapture’s Road (Jonathan Cape (Vintage, Penguin Random House))
Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
X: @seanehewitt | Instagram: @seanehewitt
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Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Fig Tree, Penguin Random House)
Ancient Sicily. Enter GELON: visionary, dreamer, theatre lover. Enter LAMPO: lovesick, jobless, in need of a distraction.
Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads.
They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food.
And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry.
It’s audacious. It might even be dangerous. But like all the best things in life – love, friendship, art itself – it will reveal the very worst, and the very best, of what humans are capable of.
What could possibly go wrong?
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Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits (Fig Tree, Penguin Random House)
Ferdia Lennon was born and raised in Dublin. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. Glorious Exploits is his first novel. A Sunday Times bestseller, it was adapted for BBC Radio 4 and was the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son. [Photo credit: Conor Horgan]
Instagram: @ferdialennon
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Pity by Andrew McMillan (Canongate Books)
The town was once a hub of industry. A place where men toiled underground in darkness, picking and shovelling in the dust and the sleck. It was dangerous and back-breaking work but it meant something. Once, the town provided, it was important; it had purpose. But what is it now?
Brothers Alex and Brian have spent their whole life in the town where their father lived and his father, too. Now in his middle age and still reeling from the collapse of his personal life, Alex must reckon with a part of his identity he has long tried to conceal. His only child Simon has no memory of the mines. Now in his twenties and working in a call centre, he derives passion from his side hustle in sex work and his weekly drag gigs.
Set across three generations of South Yorkshire mining family, Andrew McMillan’s magnificent debut novel is a lament for a lost way of life as well as a celebration of resilience and the possibility for change.
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Andrew McMillan, Pity (Canongate Books)
Andrew McMillan was born in Barnsley in 1988. His debut collection of poetry, physical, was the only poetry book to ever win the Guardian First Book Award; it was also awarded a Somerset Maugham award, an Eric Gregory Award, and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection, playtime, won the inaugural Polari Prize. A third collection, pandemonium, was published in 2021 and in 2022 he co-edited the acclaimed anthology 100 Queer Poems, which was shortlisted in the British Book Awards. He is professor of contemporary writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [Photo credit: Sophie Davidson]
X: @AMcMillanPoet | Instagram: @andrewpoetry
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Monstrum by Lottie Mills (Oneworld (Oneworld Publications))
From Lottie Mills, the winner of the BBC Young Writers’ Award in 2020, comes this beautifully crafted collection of stories.
A father and daughter build a life for themselves on an isolated beach. But the outside world is pressing in. It’s only a matter of time before their secret refuge is discovered.
A young disabled woman opts to receive a perfect, pain-free body. Soon, however, she finds herself haunted by the one she cast off.
A travelling circus master discovers the ideal addition to his cabinet of curiosities: ‘damaged’, ‘grotesque’, gifted. He plans to make her the star of his show; she plans to take her revenge.
Monstrum captures the experience of characters excluded by a society that cannot accept their difference. Eerie, fantastical and hugely ambitious, this collection announces the arrival of an outstanding new literary voice.
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Lottie Mills, Monstrum (Oneworld (Oneworld Publications))
Lottie Mills was born in Hampshire and grew up in West Sussex, Hertfordshire, and Essex. She studied English at Newnham College, Cambridge, and in 2020, was awarded the BBC Young Writers’ Award for her short story ‘The Changeling’. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4, and she has appeared on programmes including Woman’s Hour to discuss her writing. Monstrum is her debut story collection. [Photo credit: Jojo Barlow]
Instagram: @lottiemillsauthor
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The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao (Oneworld (Oneworld Publications))
Vijaya and Sree are the daughters of the wealthy, landowning Deshmukh family, whose social status and power are absolute in the tiny village of Irumi. Krishna and Ranga are the sons of a widowed servant who works in the Deshmukh household.
The four children should never have spoken, let alone forged a friendship. But the bonds they form are intense – and dangerous. When they are caught up in a devastating accident, the consequences ripple through their lives and send them scattering to different corners of India.
Years later, when violent uprisings tear across the countryside, Vijaya and Krishna find themselves irresistibly drawn back to one another, despite the differences in their class and background. But this is not the India they once knew. Their country is changing, burning from the inside out. Irumi is no longer safe.
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Ruthvika Rao, The Fertile Earth (Oneworld (Oneworld Publications))
Ruthvika Rao is a 2022 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and recipient of the Henfield Prize in fiction and the Stanley fellowship for international research. She was born in Warangal district, Telangana, and grew up in Hyderabad. Her short fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, New Letters, StoryQuarterly, the Antioch Review, Chicago Review and elsewhere.
X: @ruthvikarao | Instagram: @ruthvikarao
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The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Viking, Penguin Random House)
It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother's country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep - as a guest, there to stay for the season…
In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known.
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Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep (Viking, Penguin Random House UK)
Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher. She currently lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, "On (Not) Reading Anne Frank", has received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018. The Safekeep is her debut novel and was acquired in hotly-contested nine-way auctions in both the UK and the US. Rights have sold in a further twelve countries. The Safekeep is shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024. [Photo credit: Roosmarijn Broersen]
Instagram: @yaelwouden | Website: www.yaelvanderwouden.com
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I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson (Faber & Faber)
It was a peace offering, I knew that
you don’t appear on someone’s doorstep uninvited, saying Alright
unless you want to make amends
It’s been six years since Rosa last saw her brother. Six years since they last spoke. Six years since they last fought. Six years since she gave up on the idea of having a brother.
She’s spent that time carefully not thinking about him. Not remembering their childhood. Not mentioning those stories, even to the people she loves.
Now the distance she had so carefully put between them has collapsed. Can she find a way to make peace – to forgive, to be forgiven – when the past she’s worked so hard to contain threatens to spill over into the present?
From the acclaimed author of little scratch, this is a moving, powerfully honest novel about how we love, how we grieve and how we forgive.
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Rebecca Watson, I Will Crash (Faber & Faber)
Rebecca Watson is the author of little scratch, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize. She is one of the Observer's 10 best debut novelists of 2021. Her work has been published in the TLS, the Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize. She works part-time as Assistant Arts Editor at the Financial Times and lives in London. [Photo credit: Alice Zoo]
X: @rebeccawhatsun | Instagram: @rebeccawhatsun
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Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams (4th Estate)
Granta Best Young British novelist and acclaimed author of Attrib. and other stories, Eley Williams returns with a thrilling collection of short stories exploring the nature of relationships both intimate and transient – from the easy gamesmanship of contagious yawns to the horror of a smile fixed for just a second too long.
A courtroom sketch artist delights in committing portraits of their lover to paper but their need to capture likenesses forever is revealed to have darker, more complex intentions. A child’s schoolyard crush on a saint marks a confrontation with the reality of a teenage body in flux. Elsewhere, an editor of canned laughter loses their confidence and seeks divine intervention, and an essayist annotates their thoughts on Keats by way of internet-gleaned sex tips.
Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good hums with fossicking language and ingenious experiments in form and considers notions of playfulness, authenticity and care as it holds relationships to account: their sweet misunderstandings, soured reflections, queer wish fulfilments and shared, held breaths.
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Eley Williams, Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good (4th Estate)
Eley Williams' collection Attrib. and Other Stories (2017) was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her novel The Liar's Dictionary won a 2021 Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and listed as a Guardian Book of the Year. In 2023, she was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Her writing is published in several journals and anthologies, with stories and serialised fiction also commissioned by Radio 4. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [Photo credit: Alice Zoo]
Instagram: @eleywilliams
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The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Footnote Press)
A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman’s unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind.
The Coin‘s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.
In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags.
But America is stifling her – her wilfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness and the narrator unravels spectacularly.
In enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilisation, beauty and justice, class and belonging – all while resisting easy moralising. Provocative, wry and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.
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Yasmin Zaher, The Coin (Footnote Press)
Yasmin Zaher is a Palestinian journalist and writer born in 1991 in Jerusalem. The Coin is her first novel. [Photo credit: Willy Somma]