Some snazzy looking new editions, plus my overwhelming desire to step away from the high-lit wankery that has marked my reading of late, recently sucked me back into the world of the great French thriller writer, Jean-Patrick Manchette. It’s been years since I was enthralled by The Prone Gunman and Nada, and I realised I’ve never read what many consider his 1977 masterpiece - Fatale. Alors!

Aimée Joubert is a kick-arse assassin for hire who likes to mix a bit of political activism in with her killing. After a Bond-style opening salvo in which she shoots a rich hunter in the face, Aimée sets her sights (#sorrynotsorry) on the small town of Bléville. There she hatches a Dirty Rotten Scoundrels style scheme to upend its corrupt cabal of local elites and, by playing them off against one another, make a… #stillnotsorry… killing. Of course, her plans go arse up and all hell breaks loose.

It’s an absolute blast watching the whole thing unfold, and Manchette’s clear delight in shoving it to the ruling class gives a sharply radical edge to an otherwise violent, fast-paced and tightly-plotted yarn. You’ll be grinning from ear to bloody ear when you catch your breath.

Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette (Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith)
Vintage Classics, 2026
89 pages

There have been some pretty weird narrators over the years. A pot in Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector. A gecko in José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons. Any number of inanimate object (and a colour) in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red. But none of them could prepare me for the intestinal worms lodged in the gut of a dying French bulldog that hold the microphone in The Oldest Bitch Alive. Imagine the editorial pitch meeting that green lit this!

Gelsomina is already on her last legs when the infestation hits. In death she is becoming a vessel for life. This existential juxtaposition underpins what could easily have been a cheap gimmick but turns out to be an absolutely fascinating mash-up of science, philosophy, body horror and linguistic acrobatics. It’s also a rather sweet treatise on our relationship with the animals we welcome into our families.

Granted this isn’t a book for everyone. Day’s ventriloquism veers into the outright absurd, with some of the weirdest poetic flourishes and thought dumps I’ve encountered. But if you’re willing to get on board, it’s an absolute trip. And, who knows. Maybe this is exactly how a worm talks.

The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day
Astra House, 2026
192 pages

For someone so singularly obsessed with novellas as me, it beggars belief that I’d never read what is considered to be one of the GOATs of the form. In some ways I’m glad because The Invention of Morel seems to have grown more prescient with time, and reading it in the era of AI and deep fakes is a delightfully creepy reward unto itself.

This celebrated story of a lone fugitive washing up on a seemingly deserted island only to fall in love with a visiting tourist who completely ignores his presence is about as mind bending as you could possibly hope. And, without resorting to spoilers, its sci-fi meets philosophy meets romance meets horror twist presages some of the greatest technological/ethical conundrums of our time. Think Val Kilmer in As Deep As The Grave or Peter Cushing in Rogue One.

In the gorgeous Letter to D., André Gorz famously wrote of his wife, “We’ve often said to ourselves that if, by some miracle, we were to have a second life, we’d like to live it together.” Casares concocts a reality in which this is very much possible. It is -alas - heaven, purgatory and hell in one.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (Tr. Ruth L.C. Simms)
NYRB Classics, 2003 (First pub. 1940)
103 pages

There are those surreal mindf*%$ novels that announce themselves from the outset and spend the entirety of their narrative playing ping pong with your brain. Then there are books like My Death; so deftly nested and subtle that you have no idea what’s going on until the rug is pulled out from under you and you go full Wile E. Coyote hurtling down the cliff face. The setup here is cosy and gentle. An unnamed, aging writer decides to return for one last hurrah. While chatting with her agent she decides it will be a biography of a minor, but to her very important, writer, Helen Ralston.

Long since gone to ground, Ralston (likely modelled on Silvina Ocampo) was lover and muse to a literary great, while also a novelist and artist in her own right. The narrator is surprised to learn Ralston is still alive (albeit 95). They meet. They chat. And Ralston begins dropping details of the narrator’s life into their conversation. What. The. Actual…

Time and space shift, realities collide and bounce off one another. And yet, you can’t help but feel you’re still reading this lovely, warm tale of women, aging, art and erasure. Just superb!

My Death by Lisa Tuttle
Vintage Classics, 2023
105 pages

Few books wield the moral force of revelation. There’s the usual suspects: Beloved, The Jungle, Disgrace, The Grapes of Wrath. To those I’d add some lesser known works: Knowledge of Angels, The Erl King, Schoepenhauer’s Telescope. I don’t think I’m taking too great a liberty by adding Tahmima Anam’s latest book to the pantheon of greats. This is a book that can change lives.

From its opening passage, Uprising will rip out your heart. Set on a small island off the coast of Bangladesh, it tells the story of a community of women who were kidnapped, tricked or sold by their families into a life of forced prostitution. In the face of unimaginable horrors, these women maintain their dignity and protect the children borne to them of their “clients”. When fresh-faced Kusum Khan arrives, their lives are thrown into turmoil. They fear her beauty and her youth. But Kusum is different. She talks of revolution. She wants them to unite and fight back. What follows is a battle of bodies, minds and weather that had me scraping my jaw from the floor.

Unsparing in its detail and ferocious in its moral rage, Uprising is a modern masterpiece and future classic.

Uprising by Tahmima Anam
Canongate, 2026
197 pages

Spanish poet Federico Lorca seems an unlikely touchpoint for a novel that interrogates the legacies of violence and deprivation, but it is the aching beauty of Lorca’s work that offsets the brutality in Neil Rollinson’s excellent debut.

Frank tracks down his brother Gordon in a remote Spanish town to let him know their father is dead. The three men have history, and not the good kind. Dear ol’ dad was a brutal tyrant who roped his young sons into his criminal capers. Robberies, murder, you name it. Frank was left broken. Gordon turned into a monster then ran off with Frank’s love, Carol.

The Dead Don’t Bleed flits effortlessly between time and place, giving us snapshot glimpses into lives of sustained trauma. It is damned bleak, but crackling with propulsive energy. There’s almost a biblical ferocity at play - Frank and Gordon are a Cain and Abel for our times. Rollinson doesn’t offer twee morality or satisfying resolution. Frank frequently quotes Lorca, a reminder that there is beauty to be found in hell. That words can be a salve. But, then again, Lorca was summarily shot and dumped in a ditch. That says it all, really.

The Dead Don’t Bleed by Neil Rollinson
Jonathan Cape, 2026
177 pages

The embers of totalitarianism glow long in this absolute gut punch of a book. Back in 1967, Hans and Katrin prepare to welcome their fist child. Even the weight of East German life can’t dampen their excitement. When the baby is born, it is quickly whisked away by doctors. They are then told it died, and to get on with life. Hans begins to mourn. Katrin insists their son is alive, goes mad and dies young. That alone would have made for a tough read. But fast forward forty years, and Hans - now an old man - receives an unlikely call. It’s from a guy called Martin, who has done an ancestry test. Hans is his father.

Any dream Hans had of a happy reunion is quickly shattered. Martin grew up in a loving family, fed the official lie that his birth parents - drunken petty criminals - gave him away. It makes for an emotionally complex showdown, as Jügler navigates each man’s grief, anger, trauma and hope. For the most part it’s a deeply sad (albeit riveting) affair. I wasn’t entirely convinced by its final turn to the promise of reconciliation, but otherwise Mayfly Season is utterly astounding.

Mayfly Season by Matthias Jügler (Tr. Jo Heinrich)
Indigo Press, 2026
143 pages

It’s easy to forget those Irish writers who did the hard yards between Joyce and, say, Enright or Mooney. Among them, Maeve Brennan is a name seemingly lost to time. She mostly wrote short stories and criticism, but if her only novel, The Visitor, is anything to go by, she was a vital piece of connective tissue between the generations. Much like The Gathering, this book does the unpleasant job of excavating the ruins of family to devastating effect.

Anastasia returns from Paris to Dublin to see her grandmother. It’s been a long time coming. Her parents split, she chose to follow her deeply damaged mum, and dad was left at home crying over his broken life. He died young and miserable. Grandma never forgave mum, or Anastasia. The meeting is predictably cataclysmic, recounted with stunning clarity in Brennan’s perfect prose. I frequently gasped - at a turn of phrase here or a petty humiliation there.

Written in the 40s but only published posthumously, The Visitor sets fire to the complex power dynamics of family, class and friendships like few books I’ve read. It throws trauma - new and inherited - in your face. And it’s downright stunning.

The Visitor by Maeve Brennan
Peninsula Press, 2025 (first pub. 2000)
107 pages

Never let it be said that I won’t go the extra mile for you. The moment I finished reading Exit 8, I downloaded the game from which it was adapted and spent the next hour wandering that single, sterile Japanese subway corridor looking for the way out. I never found it. And gave up. I suck. But it gave me some interesting insight into the nature of loose adaptations when it comes to what I feel has become one of the strongest vehicles for kick-arse narrative delivery: video games.

Exit 8 isn’t a direct port, so to speak. It can’t be. The game consists of little more than walking a single strip looking for anomalies that might help you find the exit. Some are mundane. Some are proper scary. The novel, then, is a horror of sorts but tries to shoehorn a kind of allegory for parenthood, as well as some weird moral element that feels vaguely preachy. It makes for a decent enough story, and I liked that Kawamura tried to make it something more than its source material. But when that material is basically just a PT Mod, I’m not convinced there was ever enough to mine.

Exit 8 by Genki Kawamura (Tr. Sameeha Anwar)
Ithaka Press, 2026
101 pages

By now you’ve probably heard the triumphant tale of Woody Brown, the first non-verbal autistic person to graduate with an MFA from Columbia, and his novel, Upward Bound. Set in a facility for adults who have aged out of the youth disability system and for whom there is no real care infrastructure or hope for independent living, it’s an Own Voice novel from a genuinely new voice. It was the toast of the lit world until an article in The Atlantic cast doubt on Brown’s means of communication and, ergo, authorship. Instead, it points to his English professor mum as the driving force.

Tackling the novel in its wake presents an ethical challenge, not the least because I don’t feel Upward Bound is that great. Sure, it has its moments. It can feel insightful and warm. It refuses to hide uncomfortable realities about disability from public view. And there is an undertone of earnest, honest good will in its telling. But it’s also unnecessarily expository and defensive, pre-empting criticism and doubt. It doth protest too much. And so, here I am, feeling guilty about writing this. Is the hoopla patronising or justified? I dare not hazard a guess.

Upward Bound by Woody Brown
Jonathan Cape, 2026
186 pages

You know that saying about the 60s? If you remember them you weren’t there. So too the 90s. Not about remembering them but something rather more asinine. If you weren’t wholly consumed by reality tv, you were not there. Over the last thirty years, we’ve seen the most idiotic form of entertainment morph, warp and otherwise metastasise into an infinite number of ridiculous incarnations. Enter Miyee Lee, bestselling author of the enchanting DallerGut Dream Department Store. In what is something of an unexpected turn, she tries her hand at cultural satire and, well, it kind of works.

Break Room is the story of a reality show where a bunch of annoying worker bees, named for their most painful water-cooler behaviours, are shoved in a simulation office/home and forced to “work” together while trying to unmask the mole. It’s Big Brother meets Survivor meets The Office with a dash of Severance. The various characters are relatably obnoxious, and their interactions range from petty to sweet to funny to downright annoying. Lee wields the satirical scythe with glee. But the problem lies with the underlying source material. Reality TV is tired and kind of pointless. Ergo…

Break Room by Miyee Lee (Tr. Sandy Joesun Lee)
Wildfire, 2026
144 pages

A foggy memory: It’s day two of ninth grade high school camp. We’re woken by the leaders (dressed in Russian military uniforms), yelled at, made to line up for food (cold porridge and water), and told we need to find a way out of Russia. The rest of the day is spent in bureaucratic and militaristic hell. We don’t get out.

It was called the Refusenik Game, simulating life as a Jew in the 80s, and holy hell it sucked. I’d have remembered it more clearly had it not been eclipsed by the elderly campsite manager having a psychotic break and setting his German Shepards on us the following day. Police were involved. The camp was shut down.

Tarantula treads similar ground, but Halfon’s camp stepped it up. Over a summer’s week in Guatemala, the kids were subjected to life in Nazi Germany. It involved much worse, even violent treatment. Halfon’s presumably auto-fictional tale makes for a brilliant reckoning with the legacies of violence, and the way trauma can metastasise into cruelty in the name of self-defence. Many years down the track Halfon meets up with the head counsellor and it’s a psychological showdown for the ages.

Absolutely astounding.

Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon (Tr. Daniel Hahn)
Penguin, 2026
177 pages

Be honest. How often have you skimmed your bookshelves thinking, I really feel like some human-crustacean hardcore erotica right now? Well, you can rest easy knowing next time you can just reach for Guillaume Lecasble’s bonkers (emphasis on the bonk) novel, Lobster and have all your carnal reading desires sated.

We first meet the amorous arthropod aboard the Titanic, when it is thrown from the simmering pot at the fateful moment of impact. Somehow, it ends up in the hands of lovelorn Angelina and, let’s just say, over the subsequent few hours, the ship isn’t the only thing that goes down.

The two are soon separated DiCaprio/Winslet style and, for the rest of the book search for one another through the streets and waterways of Paris. Somewhere along the line, Lobster takes becomes a god of pinchy things and chums up with Jules, a drunken sailor cum tattooist (emphasis on the cum) who, surprise surprise, tattoos a lobster on Angelina’s pubis. By the time we find Lobster’s sloughed shell fused to Jules’s throbbing member I was laughing so so hard (emphasis on… you get the point) that I was struggling to breathe.

Intentional or not, this book is an absolute riot.

Lobster by Guillaume Lecasble (Tr. Polly McLean)
Dedalus, 2023
110 pages

Though she is best known for her diaries, reportage and incendiary early novels, I’ve always thought Helen Garner’s finest work is one of her later, quieter books, The Spare Room. In it, Garner fictionalises the time she spent caring for a dying friend and if I’ve ever read a more beautifully evocative portrayal of devotion and grief - with all the conflicting emotions that entails - I couldn’t name it. In many ways, Debra Adelaide’s latest immediately put me in mind of Garner’s book, even if the two are poles apart in intention and execution.

When I Am Sixty-Four is Adelaide’s reckoning with the suicide of her friend, fellow writer Gabrielle Carey. She charts their friendship, the courses of their careers, and of course the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of Carey’s death at age sixty-four. To read it is to get caught up in a great inhalation of grief; it is scattered and fragmentary, drawing episodically from moment to moment, thought to thought. It is often beautiful, but just as often exasperating. In making sense of her loss, Adelaide is trying to make sense of herself.

A deeply relatable work of considerable grace and dignity.

When I Am Sixty-Four by Debra Adelaide
UQP, 2026
178 pages

Of all the artistic burdens a writer might be forced to bear, I often think the weight of expectation is the heaviest. Quiara Alegría Hudes comes to the table with a Pulitzer for her play Water By The Spoonful as well as a Tony for In The Heights which, of course, she co-wrote with Lin-Manuel Miranda. It will come as little surprise, then, that I picked up The White Hot with a fair whack of excitement. Did it pay off? Kind of.

Those familiar with Hudes’s work will immediately recognise the world she wants her readers to inhabit: gritty, challenging and often unpleasant. Here, a woman writes to the daughter she abandoned, trying to explain - if not justify - what she did. It’s a story of teen pregnancy, cultural fractures, lost opportunities and the conflicting feelings of guilt and freedom. And it hits hard.

Hudes doesn’t write to make you feel good. The White Hot is a tough book, though it brims with energy and life. In its refusal to judge, and its barely perceptible undertone of hope, this is a book that presents life as it is, not as we might want it to be.

The White Hot by Quiara Alegría Hudes
One World, 2025
164 pages

Like almost everyone one earth with even a fleeting interest in sci-fi, I fell in love with the Murderbot series about two pages into All Systems Red. I mean, who doesn’t love a wisecracking sentient killing machine that can’t be arsed doing their job? Little did I know that it would be the gateway to a world of short, fun, cosy and often queer futures. For someone who grew up on Stanislaw Lem, this was less Solaris and more the natural evolution of Pirx or Ijon Tichy.

An online comparison to Becky Chambers had me pick up Olivia Waite’s Murder by Memory and, while I can’t claim to understand the science, I definitely adored the fiction. Aboard a sentient ship, where reincarnation is a mechanical cycle, a detective wakes up in a stranger’s body only to hear of a murder on board. The investigation leads her through some cool time/space mechanics, Georgette Heyer-esque mystery and the rather ingenious idea of storing people’s souls in books that are shelved in a vast library of consciousnesses.

Needless to say, I didn’t pick the killer, though I imagine one could if, say, you’d paid enough attention in science class. Sorry Miss Malligan.

Murder By Memory by Olivia Waite
Tordotcom, 2025
100 pages

Does this sound familiar? You rock up to a work meeting five minutes late. You stand at the door, scared to step inside. What sort of hellish arse-kicking will your boss serve up in front of all your colleagues? You reach for the doorknob and time stands still.

In Jacques Sternberg’s 1958 absurdist workplace masterpiece, that frozen moment stretches across an infinite loop of personal horrors, from childhood trauma to any number of absolutely bonkers job crises. Not that you’ll follow half of it. Sternberg delivers his unnamed narrator’s complete psychological unravelling through a rapid fire deluge of comic non sequiturs. To be honest, I rarely had any idea what was going on but often caught myself laughing at the sheer audaciousness (and sometimes abject silliness) of the whole caper.

Seventy years after it was first published, The Employee still feels fresh and relevant which, come to think of it, is deeply depressing. To read it is to wander the halls of The Stanley Parable (IYKYK), feeling the hamster wheel spin beneath your feet, questioning what the hell you’re doing and wondering if it’s all going to end with a mocking boom tish.

The Employee by Jacques Sternberg (Tr. Matt Seidel)
Wakefield Press, 2025
134 pages

It’s not often that I’ll review a book I puffed on Ants but, every now and again, one will come along that is so bloody good, from a writer who has flown a little under the radar, and published by one of my favourite local indie publishers that I just need to shout about it from the rooftops. The Cross Thieves is, to put it mildly, an absolute balls-to-the wall wild ride of a novel.

Two brothers, living on the margins in small town Western Australia, set out to take revenge on a member of the local crime family who has murdered their friend. When they rock up to his house, they find out he’s already dead - killed in a road accident. So, they do the only thing they can think of - steal his roadside memorial. What follows is a desperate attempt to escape one very pissed off family.

For pace and thrills alone, this is a cracker. But it’s the complex moral dimension, and the insightful social commentary that really lift it. Poverty, religion, Starship’s We Built This City. It’s all here. Think Tarantino or Guy Ritchie by way of Upton Sinclair or John Steinbeck. Incredible.

The Cross Thieves by Alan Fyfe
Transit Lounge, 2026
197 pages

If you ever want to spend a few hours tying yourself up in mental knots, try explaining the plot of an Isabel Waidner novel. I mean, you might get by with a superficial approximation of what the heck is going on, but there are so many layers of roller-coaster nuttiness to excavate, so much wildly imaginative bravura that you’ll just end up looking like a fool. Waidner is the kind of writer you pick up for the sake of pure exhilaration, because you want your books to make as little sense as the world we live in.

In As If, Waidner once again hits it out of the park, this time examining identity, performing arts, and the importance of making peace with the multiple versions of yourself. At its most basic (yes, I’m a fool): two men - effectively doppelgängers, though maybe the one man - trade lives in the lead up to a big audition. One’s a washed-up actor. The other has always dreamed of acting. Sure, it’s more insular than something like Corey Fah (an absolute riot of a book), and there’s a quietness that might suggest some kind of maturity, but it’s still completely, joyously bonkers.

As If by Isabel Waidner
Hamish Hamilton, 2026
175 pages

Reading Vigdis Hjorth is a prickly undertaking. There’s something about her particular brand of thinly-veiled autofiction that, while pointedly self-reflexive, feels decidedly relatable and universal. It’s not that we, as readers, bear the psychological wounds of her lived experience, but it’s hard to ignore the faint whooping of alarm bells that make us want to search for (and pick at) the scabs of our own buried trauma.

On its surface, Repetition concerns the most mundane of teenage rites. A writer recalls her college boyfriend and the night she sort of has sex for the first time. It’s a disaster, of course. The boy thinks he’s “made her a woman”. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him there was no penetration. But she writes a fantasy of the tryst in her diary, which is read by her parents. The dad is simmering but ineffectual. The mum, already an overbearing, abusive horror, doubles down. Shit meet fan.

This all leads to the writer, in old age, reflecting on the embellishing of her life through fiction and the toll it takes on those around her. It’s a brilliant flipping of the script, once again proving Hjorth’s mastery of her craft.

Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth (Tr. Charlotte Barslund)
Verso, 2026
134 pages