AK LARKWOOD The Unspoken Name and The Thousand Eyes: Books 1 and 2 of The Serpent Gates. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley
AK Larkwood’s debut fantasy series combines a death cult, magical artefacts, and an accomplished assassin. ‘Only I am without end, for desolation is my watchword. Yet nothing is to be forgotten that belongs to me. All things that are lost come into my keeping.’...
SD HINTON The Brothers. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
SD Hinton’s debut novel uses the structure of a thriller to explore myriad responses to trauma. Jake Harlow is a decorated Special Forces veteran, returned from a tour in Afghanistan that went horribly wrong for him. Captured by the Taliban, he was mentally and...
DOMINIC SMITH Return to Valetto. Reviewed by Ann Skea
The new novel from the author of The Electric Hotel uncovers wartime secrets in an Italian village. Hugh Fraser is an American academic whose Italian mother, Hazel, used to take him to her home village in Italy for their summer holidays. He has fond memories of...
REBECCA MAKKAI I Have Some Questions for You. Reviewed by Robert Goodman
Rebecca Makkai’s fourth novel examines our obsession with true crime – and where that can lead. True crime and true crime podcasts are having a moment, not only in the real world but also in fiction. However, in fiction, writers can start to get behind the...
GREGORY DAY The Bell of the World. Reviewed by Paul Anderson
Gregory Day’s new novel explores the sublime through the life of a young woman in his beloved Otways. In the essay ‘Otway Taenarum’ in his previous book, Words are Eagles (2022), Day recounts how, at a formative age, he looked for ‘imaginative texts...
ASHLEY KALAGIAN BLUNT Dark Mode. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
This fierce, unflinching thriller asks timely questions about threatening behaviour. Why don’t we recognise it? Stop it? Dark Mode is a novel, as the note at the beginning makes clear: While the characters and their precise circumstances are fictitious, the...
ELEANOR CATTON Birnam Wood. Reviewed by Ann Skea
New Zealand guerilla gardeners meet a US doomsday prepper in this new novel from Booker-winner Eleanor Catton. Twenty-nine-year-old horticulturalist Mira Bunting is looking for some under-utilised land that she and the activist Birnam Wood collective can quietly...
NIKKI MOTTRAM Crows Nest. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
This latest offering of Australian rural noir contrasts urban and small-town sensibilities from the perspective of a child protection officer. Readers of Crows Nest will not be surprised to learn that author Nikki Mottram has an extensive background in child...
LEIGH BARDUGO Hell Bent. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley
Leigh Bardugo’s Alex Stern continues her adventures among Yale’s elite societies, picking up where Ninth House left off. ‘… This is what your magic is for, isn’t it? This is what it does. Props up the people in power, lets the people with everything take a...
KATIE KITAMURA Intimacies. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
Within the layers of Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel are questions of agency, identity and interpretation. This exquisite novel charts many different intimacies, both physical and metaphorical – intimacies of confidences and private rituals, of eating and touching, and...
SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN Seven Empty Houses. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for her novel Fever Dream, Argentine writer Samantha Schweblin has a talent for unsettling stories. These stories are weird and wonderful, and, given the strange behaviour of people that we hear about every day, completely...
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