Recent Books

No Straight Road Takes You There

By Rebecca Solnit

November 4, 2025

This book’s title, No Straight Road Takes You There, is an evocation and a declaration. Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places, or the landscape is cleared away – logged, graded, levelled, tunnelled through – but to stick to these roads is to miss what else is out there. In her writing and activism, Rebecca Solnit has sought the pathless places in order to celebrate indirect and unpredictable consequences, and to embrace slowness and imperfection, which, she argues, are key to understanding the possibilities of change.

Everyone in this Bank is a Thief

By Benjamin Stevenson

November 4, 2025

I’ve spent the last few years solving murders. But a bank heist is a new one, even for me. I’ve never been a hostage before.

The doors are chained shut. No one in or out. Which means that when someone in the bank is murdered, hostages become suspects.

THE BANK ROBBER
THE MANAGER
THE SECURITY GUARD
THE KID
THE FILM PRODUCER
THE PRIEST
THE RECEPTIONIST
THE PATIENT
THE CARER
ME

Turns out, more than one person planned to rob the bank today. You can steal more from a bank than just money.

Who is stealing what? And are they willing to kill for it?

Carrion Crow

By Heather Parry

November 4, 2025

Marguerite Périgord is locked in the attic of her family home, a towering Chelsea house overlooking the stinking Thames. For company she has a sewing machine, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and a carrion crow who has come to nest in the rafters. Restless, she spends her waning energies on the fascinations of her own body, memorising Mrs Beeton’s advice and longing for her life outside.

Cécile Périgord has confined her daughter Marguerite for her own good. Cécile is concerned that Marguerite’s engagement to a much older, near-penniless solicitor, will drag the family name – her husband’s name, that is – into disrepute. And for Cécile, who has worked hard at her own betterment, this simply won’t do. Cécile’s life has taught her that no matter how high a woman climbs she can just as readily fall.

Of course, both have their secrets, intentions and histories to hide. As Marguerite’s patience turns into rage, the boundaries of her mind and body start to fray. And neither woman can recognise what the other is becoming.

All Her Lives

By Ingrid Horrocks

November 4, 2025

All Her Lives follows women across generations as they resist, nurture and transform. These are lives shaped by love and politics, motherhood and memory, constraint and defiance.

From girls raised in the garden of Plunket founder Truby King, to a queer university student at a mid-2000s Berlin rave, to a mother facing the cost of her son’s climate rebellion, the women of All Her Lives are complex, resilient and deeply human. Shadowing their stories is the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose journey of grief and revolution will become a vessel for what endures – and for finding hope.

Vast and intimate, All Her Lives explores the layered selfhood of women – all that they inherit, sacrifice, imagine and carry forward – and the power found in unravelling and reweaving those selves on their own terms.

Boleyn Traitor

By Philippa Gregory

November 3, 2025

Jane Boleyn watches from the shadows of the Tudor court. Where nothing is more powerful than a secret. And power rests on the edge of a tyrant King’s sword.

She wears many masks – loving wife, devoted sister, and obedient spy. It’s what a woman must do to survive.

The only weapon she has is her voice.

They say Jane’s whispers sealed the fate of two queens. They called her a liar and a traitor.

But the truth is far more dangerous…

Gravity let Me Go

By Trent Dalton

October 6, 2025

How will you ever know how the story ends, if you let the story go?

Noah Cork has just published the scoop of a lifetime: a white-hot true-crime book about the cold-blooded killer who slipped an unfolding murder mystery into his mailbox. But if this is his moment of triumph, then why is the tin roof being ripped from the walls of his reality? Why are skeletons standing upright in his closet? Why do people want to run him over in the street? And why does his wife keep writing a cryptic message across the bathroom mirror? As a severe storm heads towards Brisbane, Noah is hurtling headfirst into a swirling storm of secrets. He must now cling for dear life to the only story that ever really mattered. He must hold on to the truth. He must hold on to the story. He must hold on to love.

We Do Not Part

By Han Kang

October 6, 2025

One morning in December, Kyungha is called to her friend Inseon’s hospital bedside. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation following a wood-chopping accident, Inseon is bedridden and begs Kyungha to take the first plane to her home on Jeju Island to feed her pet bird, who will quickly die unless it receives food.

Unfortunately, as Kyungha arrives a snowstorm hits. Lost in a world of snow, she begins to wonder if she will arrive in time to save the bird – or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. But she doesn’t yet suspect the darkness which awaits her at her friend’s house.

There, the long-buried story of Inseon’s family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in a painstakingly assembled archive, documenting the terrible massacre seventy years before that saw 30,000 Jeju civilians murdered.

Hiding Places

By Lynley Edmeades

October 6, 2025

Hiding Places is a compelling and beautifully written meditation on early motherhood and creativity. Told through a series of fragments that range from raw and troubled to delightful and hilarious, this remarkable book responds to the unexpected shocks and discoveries of becoming a mother, drawing on excerpts from family letters and secretive medical records, and advice contained in Truby King’s 1913 tract, Feeding and Care of Baby.

Partly a slowly unfurling unsent love letter to an admired writer, partly a ‘book of essays that is a notebook about trying to write a book of essays’, and partly an attempt to simply hang on through tumultuous times, Hiding Places deftly blends personal reflection with family history, social critique and literary analysis. The result is a fresh, funny and deeply moving look at what it means to care and to create – at what gets lost or hidden in the process, and what is found or revealed. ‘It’s not what she says,’ writes Edmeades, ‘but how she says it that reveals what hides beneath.’

Resonant with, yet distinct from, the works of writers like Maggie Nelson, Kate Zambreno, Olga Ravn and Chris Kraus, Hiding Places is an inspiring read for anyone interested in the dangerous yet fruitful zones where life and art overlap.

What We Can know

By Ian McEwan

October 6, 2025

2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.

2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.

Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.

When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.

A quest, a literary thriller and a love story, What We Can Know is a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.

The Impossible Fortune

By Richard Osman

October 2, 2025

Who’s got time to think about murder when there’s a wedding to plan?

It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favourite criminal.

But when Elizabeth meets a wedding guest who fears for their life, the thrill of the chase is ignited once again. A villain wants access to an uncrackable code and will stop at nothing to get it. Plunged back into their most explosive investigation yet, can the gang solve the puzzle and a murder in time?