Need a new book? These are this year’s must-reads

While the subject matter is weighty, the stories are comical too, something Radojevic wasn’t expecting. “The thing that surprises me when people read the collection is they say it’s funny. I’ve discovered that I’m a deeply entertaining woman, even when I’m trying to be serious.” Since winning the Merky prize — something that gave her “permission to take my writing and my ambitions seriously” — Radojevic has also finished her debut novel. Her favourite places to write are “in cafés and on trains — anywhere where life happens around me but not directly to me”.
A Beautiful Lack of Consequence by Monika Radojevic (#Merky Books £16.99) is published on March 30

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

How do you prepare to write one of the funniest novels of 2025? For Nussaibah Younis, the 38-year-old author of Fundamentally, it was doing a stand-up comedy course. “I was determined to write a properly entertaining, laugh-out-loud novel,” she says, “so I tested out the material on stage in front of my stand-up classmates and noted down the biggest laughs.”

Younis’s method has worked, though the plot isn’t one you would necessarily associate with comedy. Fundamentally tells the story of Nadia, an academic who, after a break-up and being disowned by her puritanical mother, accepts a UN job rehabilitating Isis brides in Iraq. Yet the book is packed with snort-worthy moments and witty dialogue. “It was critically important to me to make the book funny,” says Younis, who grew up in Leeds and Manchester and based the novel on her previous career advising the Iraqi government — in 2019, she was tasked with designing a deradicalisation programme for Isis women.

“When I visited a refugee camp to meet some of those women, I had an intense realisation — I could have ended up in their place,” she says. “I hope the novel’s visibility will attract a wide audience for a renewed debate about the Isis brides issue, and the role of foreign aid more broadly. But I also hope the book makes readers laugh. Who wants to read a misery fest about Isis brides? Life is sad enough. A novel has to be a good time.”
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (W&N £16.99) is published on February 25

All the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman

A failed pop career, a set of snobby Notting Hill mums and the mystery of a missing child are at the heart of this humorous novel from the former NBC News journalist Sarah Harman. “I’ve always loved stories about women behaving badly, like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Thelma & Louise,” says the 38-year-old, who is from Maryland and moved to the UK in 2018. “I wanted to bring that ‘bad girl’ energy to the classic format of a mystery and explore whether it’s possible to be a bad person and a good mother simultaneously.”

In ATOMHM, the single mother and former girl band member Florence — “a hot mess who’s making lots of questionable decisions” — is moping around west London, broke, unfulfilled and with only one thing to be proud of: her ten-year-old son, Dylan. But when his class rival Alfie mysteriously vanishes on a school trip, Dylan becomes a prime suspect — and Florence has to get her act together. “It’s a mystery novel for people who don’t usually like to read mystery novels,” Harman says. “It’s about waking up on the wrong side of 30 and realising life hasn’t worked out like you planned. It was inspired by my own feelings of failure.”

If the school WhatsApp group gives you nightmares, Harman can relate: much of the book is set around the school gates, shaped by her own experience of “not fitting in, particularly as an American trying to navigate the English school system. I still haven’t figured it out.” Writing the novel was “the thrill of a lifetime”, and she’s only just getting started: Harman is now working with Chris Storer, creator of The Bear, on a pilot for the television adaptation.
All the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman (4th Estate £16.99) is published on April 10

Sunstruck by William Rayfet Hunter

Say hello to this summer’s hottest read — think Saltburn but in the south of France. Sunstruck centres on the wealthy Blake siblings — Lily, Dot and the handsome, charismatic Felix — and a summer they spend in their family’s luxury mansion. When a friend joins them for the holidays, he’s seduced by the family’s world of money and power — and by Felix.

“The inspiration for the book came from a question that beats in my heart after every failed fling — what if?” says its 31-year-old author, William Rayfet Hunter. “I think this book peels back the veil we project on to people and asks what happens when the competing forces of race, class, shame and desire are allowed to battle it out.”

Hunter won the #Merky Books New Writers’ prize in 2023 and has been writing ever since. “Before winning I was a dissatisfied and burnt-out junior doctor who had been working in A&E for six years and was looking for a way out of medicine. I felt like I was failing at something I had worked so hard for. I couldn’t see a route to doing something that I actually found fulfilling.”

The one thing Hunter hopes people will get from the novel? “When you come across a sentence or turn of phrase that exactly encapsulates a feeling that you thought only you had felt — that moment that makes you think, ‘Yes, that’s exactly it.’”
Sunstruck by William Rayfet Hunter (#Merky Books £16.99) is published on May 15

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘I hope my novel makes people feel something’

In the biggest book news of recent years, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is back with Dream Count, which has been ten years in the making. “I didn’t want a new novel to take ten years but life interrupted,” says the 47-year-old Nigerian author, who splits her time between Lagos and the US. “The writing process was much more difficult than my previous novels because my life was very different. The devastation of losing both my parents in a short time hung like a shadow over the process. I’m a much slower writer now — fiction feels more hard worn and hard fought. And even more precious.”

In Dream Count, Adichie tells the story of four women — Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer living in America; her best friend Zikora, a successful but broken-hearted lawyer; Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold financial powerhouse of a cousin; and Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper — as they navigate love, longing and pain. The inspiration for the novel came to Adichie in one line many years ago: “I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being.”

“I knew right away that I wanted to write a novel about it,” she says. “I hope it will make a reader think and, once in a while, laugh. Most of all I hope this makes people feel something.”

Adichie has a loyal following of fans: she won the Women’s Prize for Fiction’s Best of the Best award in 2020 for her 2007 novel Half of a Yellow Sun, while Americanah (2013) won the National Book Critics Circle award. Her collection of essays (We Should All Be Feminists, 2014) and musings on grief after the death of her father (Notes on Grief, 2021) received critical acclaim.

Still, that people get something out of her books is a source of awe to her. “I know I’m widely read and I’m still in happy disbelief about that— the best compliment for a writer is an engaged reader,” Adichie says. “I haven’t lost my sense of wonder whenever I hear about my novels being meaningful to a reader, and I hope I never do.”
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4th Estate £20) is published on March 4

Curtis Sittenfeld: ‘I wanted to write about ageing’

Get ready for a short story collection with characters so real, you’ll feel like you know them, as Curtis Sittenfeld — the American writer behind the novels Rodham, Romantic Comedy and American Wife — takes on marriage, fame and female friendship in the 12 tales of Show Don’t Tell. “The inspiration for them is varied,” she says. “Sometimes it was a pop cultural phenomenon that I felt preoccupied with, sometimes it was an anecdote someone told me, sometimes it was just a what-if scenario I wanted to explore.”

In some ways this book has been 20 years in the making, with one story, Lost But Not Forgotten, a sequel to Sittenfeld’s first novel, Prep, published in 2005. “I want to grapple with the narrative around ageing, especially for women. I don’t buy into the idea that ageing is all bad,” says Sittenfeld, who is 49. “Yes, there are painful parts, but there’s also such rich wisdom and closeness with others. My goal in my short stories is to give the reader the feeling of going for a walk and having a long, juicy conversation with a close friend.”

Sittenfeld has honed her writing routine over the years, working earlier in the day, “before my brain has become completely saturated by current events and daily obligations”, she explains. Her one ritual is keeping recycled envelopes on her desk, on which, before she starts writing, she notes the date, time and word count to track her progress. “It’s a reminder that progress is incremental but it’s happening.”
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (Doubleday £16.99) is published on February 27

Get ready for the new romantics

This is the year of romance — with an edge. First up, there’s a new read from the Call Me by Your Name author, André Aciman. In Room on the Sea (Faber & Faber £12.99, April 10), a couple meet on a jury in New York and begin a flirtation over cappuccinos and gallery trips. But when it turns into something deeper, they must choose whether to act on their feelings or go back to their normal lives.

There are also rom-coms with political twists: see Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley (Hutchinson Heinemann £16.99, May 8), a story of losing your identity in a relationship set against a backdrop of Brexit, Covid and political turmoil. Meanwhile, in How to Sleep at Night by Elizabeth Harris (Borough Press £16.99, January 16), a happily married couple’s suburban bliss becomes stretched when they drift to opposite ends of the political spectrum. And in Katabasis, by the Yellowface author Rebecca F Kuang (HarperVoyager £22, August 28) — a classic will-they-won’t-they set-up with a fantasy spin — two academic rivals travel to hell to rescue their professor’s soul and realise (gasp!) they’re actually in love with each other.

Rise of quarter-life lit

For the generation whose life is an endless stream of dead-end Hinge dates, a host of new fiction takes on the “quarter-life crisis”. In her coming-of-age novel The Book of George (Atlantic Books £16.99, January 30), Kate Greathead confronts the distant, noncommittal men we all keep seeing potential in.

While in Soft Core by Brittany Newell (4th Estate £16.99, March 13) one woman’s search for her missing ex-boyfriend sends her on a wild quest through dive bars, bus depots and a BDSM dungeon. In Disappoint Me, from the Bellies author Nicola Dinan (Doubleday £16.99, January 23), a 30-year-old overpaid legal counsel’s attempt at a “normal relationship” confronts the complexities of modern love.

And if you’re dreading a year of baby showers, you may find solace in Holly Bourne’s So Thrilled for You (Hodder & Stoughton £16.99, January 16), which follows four friends reunited for one as they explore their complex feelings about motherhood. Finally, in Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June (Chatto & Windus £14.99, February 13), a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates her way through the days of her daughter’s wedding.

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