San Clemente

Intervals has been praised by The Guardian, the Observer, Publisher’s Weekly, Elinor Cleghorn (author of Unwell Women) and Prospect Magazine. It was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. 

Marianne Brooker is based in Bristol, where she works for a charity campaigning on climate and social justice. She has a PhD from Birkbeck and a background in arts research and teaching. She won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for Intervals, her first book. 

Get the book here or at your local bookshop. 

What makes a good death? A good daughter? In 2009, with her forties and a harsh wave of austerity on the horizon, Marianne Brooker’s mother was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. She made a workshop of herself and her surroundings, combining creativity and activism in inventive ways. But over time, her ability to work, to move and to live without pain diminished drastically. Determined to die in her own home, on her own terms, she stopped eating and drinking in 2019. In Intervals, Brooker reckons with heartbreak, weaving her first and final memories with a study of doulas, living wills and the precarious economics of social, hospice and funeral care. Blending memoir, polemic and feminist philosophy, Brooker joins writers such as Anne Boyer, Maggie Nelson, Donald Winnicott and Lola Olufemi to raise essential questions about choice and interdependence and, ultimately, to imagine care otherwise.

Santanu Bhattacharya grew up in India, and studied at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore. He won the Desmond Elliott Prize Residency in 2023, and the Mo Siewcharran and Life Writing Prizes in 2021. His first novel, One Small Voice, was an Observer best debut novel of 2023, and was shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award and the Society of Authors’ Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize. He now lives in London.

Deviants has been praised by The Guardian, The i Paper and The Financial Times. Santanu’s first book One Small Voice has been celebrated by Max Porter, Nikesh Shukla, Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Irish Times and The Guardian. 

Get the book here or at your local bookshop. 

Vivaan, a teenager in India’s silicon plateau, has discovered love on his smartphone. Intoxicating, boundary-breaking love. His parents know he is gay, and their support is something Vivaan can count on, but they don’t know what exactly their son gets up to in the online world.

For his uncle, born thirty years earlier, things were very different. Mambro’s life changed forever when he fell for a male classmate at a time, and in a country, where the persecution of gay people was rife under a colonial-era law criminalising homosexuality.

And before that was Mambro’s uncle Sukumar, a young man hopelessly in love with another young man, but forced by social taboos to keep their relationship a secret at all costs. Sukumar would never live the life he yearned for, but his story would ignite and inspire his nephew and grand-nephew after him.

Bold and bracing, intimate and heartbreaking, Deviants examines the histories we inherit and the legacies we leave behind.

The Artist has been praised by The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, Yael van der Wouden (The Safekeep), Sarah Perry (Essex Serpent) and is a Best Book of 2025 for Good Housekeeping and Stylist. It’s longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. 

Lucy Steeds is a novelist and a graduate of the Faber Academy and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. She has a BA in English Literature and a Masters in World Literatures from the University of Oxford. She has lived in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Singapore.

The Artist is her first novel.

Get the book here or at your local bookshop. 

PROVENCE, 1920

Ettie moves through the remote farmhouse, silently creating the conditions that make her uncle's artistic genius possible. Joseph, an aspiring journalist, has been invited to the house. He believes he'll make his name by interviewing the reclusive painter, the great Edouard Tartuffe. But everyone has their secrets. And, under the cover of darkness, Ettie has spent years cultivating hers. Over this sweltering summer, everyone's true colours will be revealed. Because Ettie is ready to be seen. Even if it means setting her world on fire.

Jennifer Daiches, daughter of the Scottish critic and biographer David Daiches, was born in Chicago, educated in the US and in England, before moving to Scotland in 1971.

From 1978 to 2001 she worked at the National Museums of Scotland in various capacities, including Head of Publications and script co-ordinator for exhibitions. She is a freelance writer and lecturer, writing on literary and historical subjects as Jenni Calder (having been married to the poet Angus Calder until 1982) and fiction and poetry as Jenni Daiches. An area of special interest has been Scottish emigration, particularly to North America, and questions of identity. Other key interests include Scottish literature and women writers.

Jenni is also a biographer, writing book on Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell and Naomi Mitchison. See her full bibliography here. 

Somewhere Else has been longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Miriam Margolyes is among its fans, saying “I wept and laughed and wished I had written it.” 

Get the book here or at your local bookshop. 

Rosa Roshkin is five years old when her family are murdered in a pogrom and she is forced to leave behind everything she knows with only a suitcase of clothes and her father’s violin.

An epic generational novel about womanhood and Judaeo-Scottish experience across two World Wars, the creation of Israel and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jenni Daiches’s  Somewhere Else explores today’s most difficult and urgent questions, not least of which: how to find identity in displacement.

Hansal Mehta 

Winner of the National Award for Best Direction in 2014, Hansal Mehta talks about his Netflix drama starring Bollywood’s beloved Kareena Kapoor, Buckingham Murders. 

He’s best known for Shahid (2013), Citylights (2014), Aligarh (2016), Omertà (2018), Scoop (2023), Modern Love Mumbai (2022) and Scam 1992 (2020). He is known for films that depict social and political realities in deeply polarised and troubled times. 

His films are remarkable for their understanding of characters and their worlds, while telling important stories. His films Shahid (2013) and Omertà(2018) premiered as official selections at different editions of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Aligarh (2016) a moving tale about a professor suspended by university for being gay premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2015. 

His films have traveled to festivals around the world and have been extensively written about and discussed in both international and local forums. 

Watch the Buckingham Murders on Netflix. 

When a teen boy’s murder rattles a quiet English town, a grieving detective uncovers the hidden hostilities beneath its idyllic surface…

Luna Carmoon talks about her film, Hoard, starring Joseph Quinn (Gladiator II, Stranger Things). Now Hoard is out, premiering at the 80th Venice Film Festival, Luna’s nominated for the 2025 BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer. This makes her a member of BAFTA Breakthrough and she’s already Sundance Ignite Fellow. Luna is also a regular director of music videos for Fontaines DC. 

Hoard has been praised by The Guardian, The Times, Time Out and the BFI. It has a 94% Rotten Tomatoes rating. 

Watch Hoard on MUBI here. 

The story follows Maria - a teenager whose mother used to be a hoarder. Now (set in the 90s) she lives in a foster home where a previous resident Michael inspires her to revisit her childhood memories and passions that she has repressed.

Benjamin Markovits grew up mostly in Texas. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics – an experience he wrote about in Playing Days, a novel.

Since then he has taught high school English, worked at a left-wing cultural magazine, and written essays, stories and reviews for, among other publications, The New York Times, Granta, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and The Paris Review.

He has published seven novels, including Either Side of Winter, about a New York private school, and a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron: Imposture, A Quiet Adjustment and Childish Loves.

In 2009 he won a Pushcart Prize for his short story Another Sad, Bizarre Chapter in Human History. Granta selected him as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 2013.

Markovits lives in London and is married, with a daughter and a son. He teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

His latest novel, The Rest of Our Lives, has been praised by Sarah Hall, Clare Chambers, Lucy Caldwell, The Guardian, the Observer, TLS and many more.

Get the book here or at your local bookshop.

What’s left when your kids grow up and leave home? 

When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest daughter turned eighteen. Twelve years later, while driving her to Pittsburgh to start university, he remembers his pact.

He is also on the run from his own health issues, and the fact that he’s been put on leave at work after students complained about the politics of his law class – something he hasn’t yet told his wife.

So, after dropping Miriam off, he keeps driving, with the vague plan of visiting various people from his past – an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son – on route, maybe, to his father’s grave in California.

Rosanna Pike became an instant Sunday Times Bestseller with her debut novel, A Little Trickerie. It’s been longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and has been praised by the Guardian, the Telegraph, Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry) and Ferdia Lennon (Glorious Exploits). Rosanna studied English literature at Exeter University. She is a graduate of Curtis Brown Creative and the Faber Academy. She lives in south-west London with her family.

Get the book here or at your local bookshop. 

Born a vagabond, Tibb Ingleby has never had a roof of her own. Her mother has taught her that if you’re not too bound by the Big Man’s rules, there are many ways a woman can find shelter in this world. But now her ma is gone.

As she journeys through the fields and forests of medieval England, Tibb discovers that there are people who will care for her, as well as those who mean her harm. And there are a great many others who are prepared to believe just about anything…

Rowe is one of the Observer's Best Debut Novelists of 2025. She's an artist and writer who has been praised for Lifecycle of a Moth by Lucy Rose, Molly Aitken and Gabrielle Griffiths.

Get the book here or at your local bookshop.

An itchy feeling.
A wrinkle in the forest.
A cracking twig.
A coming sound.
Myma, do you hear it?
Myma, do you hear?
Myma?
Maya and Daughter live in complete isolation in a secluded woodland, their days aligned with the light and changing seasons, a complex pattern of routine and ritual. Daughter has never questioned the life her mother has chosen for them; the life that has meant she's never met another soul, or known anywhere except their forest home.
But one day, when Daughter is almost sixteen, a red-haired stranger steps into the confines of their territory. Where there was always two, suddenly there are three - and the carefully constructed world that Maya has built to keep her daughter safe may not survive it.
Urgent, haunting and thrillingly alive, Life Cycle of a Moth explores both the tenderness and ferocity of maternal love, asking what we might find ourselves capable of - and willing to sacrifice - in order to shelter those we hold dear.

Dr Karen Jennings is longlisted for this year's Women's Prize with her novel Crooked Seeds. Her book An Island was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2022. Crooked Seeds was described by the Guardian as "a perfectly realised fictional creation." It's a book of the year for the Guardian, Irish Times and CrimeReads. It's also been praised by the Observer, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Get the book here or at your local seller.

Deidre is a victim, of her family, her society, her history. That is how she sees herself, and so she feels free of all obligations, moral and practical. Until the police take her back to her family home…

In a Cape Town where water is rationed and has to be collected from trucks each day, with the consequences of apartheid and the ending of it still evident, Deidre lives from day to day in squalor – largely created by herself – borrowing, persuading, cadging her way from the water trucks to the bar, testing the tolerance and pity of everyone she knows. Then she is contacted by the police, and taken by a respectful constable to the house where she grew up and where she lost her leg in a shattering explosion while still young. Faced with what is found there, she has to accept the truth of her past, and of her older brother, her parents’ golden boy. Then she must confront herself and her responsibility, and what it truly is to be a victim.