The most anticipated reads of 2023

Out on 5 January 2023

The paperback edition of the amazing follow-up to A Little Life gets us off to a dazzling start. This powerful and symphonic vision of America's past and present weaves three stories together with recurring notes and deepening themes.

In 1893, New York is part of the Free States, and a gentle young member of a privileged family falls for a charismatic and impoverished music teacher. In 1993, Manhattan is being swept by the AIDS epidemic, and a young Hawaiian man with a wealthy older partner must hide his difficult family background. And in 2093, in a world where plague and totalitarian rule is rife, a young woman tries to solve the mystery of her husband's disappearance. 

Out on 26 January 2023

Vanity Fair meets Succession as Becky Sharp works her way up the journalistic greasy pole in nineties tabloid-era London. Scoop after scoop, Becky's downfall looms as she becomes more and more involved in every scandal her newspaper publishes and cares less and less about the lives she ruins in the process. A sharply intelligent and funny interrogation of how far society has really come since Thackeray's nineteenth-century Becky Sharp, just like the stories broken by The Mercury, everyone will be talking about Becky.

Out on 2 February 2023

The queen of outback noir returns with another heart-pounding read. A year after a mother disappears from a festival, abandoning her baby, Aaron Falk begins to suspect that she did not leave by choice. As he looks into the case, long-held secrets and resentments begin to come to the fore, secrets that suggest that the woman's community is not as close as it appears. . . 

Out on 2 March 2023

Pre-2012, Jo Cheetham's days were ‘filled with routine, boredom and the occasional panic attack’. She apologised to people who bumped into her on the street, and was too polite to tell a man at the pub that he’d been calling her the wrong name for two years. 

Then she joined the No More Page 3 campaign and spent three years protesting, addressing Parliament, appearing on TV and eventually triumphing over a global media empire. This David and Goliath story of everyday people doing extraordinary things is funny, incredible and true.

Out on 9 March 2023

'I am not the first woman to have a baby. But I feel like it. No one told me. No one tells us it will be like this.'

Milk is an astonishingly evocative, intimate and moving memoir charting one woman’s first year of motherhood; a confronting and often painful examination of the experience of having children in contemporary Ireland, and of the country's historical relationship with its women. A powerful and yet delicate mix of the personal and political.

Out on 23 March 2023

About to make his last stand, a soldier facing certain death at the hands of the enemy writes home to explain how he ended up there, a gentle man gradually transformed into a war criminal, committing acts he wouldn’t have thought himself capable. A profound reflection on how good people can do terrible things, this is a brave, unflinching and thought-provoking debut. 

Out on 30 March 2023

The Booker-longlisted and Desmond Elliott Prize-winner comes out in paperback.

Something gleeful and malevolent is moving in Lia’s body. A shape-shifter. A disaster tourist. And it’s spreading. This dark kaleidoscope of a book renders the disorientation that comes with your mother dying, and of being that dying mother, with endless invention. It’s a moving, daring debut that forces us to stare death in the face and refuses to let us look away.

Out on 6 April 2023

Set in contemporary Britain, Not Alone tells the story of Katie and Harry, a mother and son fighting for survival in a world devastated by a toxic storm. After years without human contact, they are terrified by the arrival of another survivor, and Katie realises she must finally undertake a previously unthinkable journey in search of the man she was supposed to marry and a new life for her son.

Out on 4 May 2023

Sparrow tells the story of Jacob, the last survivor of an abandoned British Roman town. Through meticulous research and bold imagination, Hynes brings the Roman Empire to vivid life and creates one of the most powerfully affecting and memorable characters of recent fiction. Those moved and overwhelmed by Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Emma Donoghue’s Room and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain will not want to miss Sparrow.

Out on 11 May 2023

When squash-loving eleven-year-old Gopi's mother dies, her father turns his grief into a quietly brutal training regime, taking Gopi's sporting hobby and making it her whole world. An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel is a deeply moving, taut, and enthralling exploration of grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete's struggle to transcend herself, written with exceptional style.

Out on 18 May 2023

Matt Lloyd-Rose was a primary school teacher when he decided to become a volunteer police officer and entered a parallel version of the area he thought he knew. Here, he experienced the best and worst of ordinary policing: from macho thrill-seeking and shocking misogyny to quiet moments of kindness and care. This is an intelligent, thoughtful, articulate memoir, which asks what it would mean to reframe policing as a caring, rather than enforcement, role.

Out on 25 May 2023

'Some names and details pertaining to a number of the people mentioned in this memoir have been amended to protect their privacy. Arguably I should have done more to protect my own privacy, but here we are.'

So begins Is This OK?, a "very real and very entertaining" (Bob Mortimer) account of growing up in the era of the early internet. Harriet Gibsone's extraordinarily honest and outrageously funny memoir recounts a life spent primarily feeding neuroses and insecurities with obsessive internet searching, her digital addictions eventually thrown into sharp relief by IVF, a traumatic birth and the tyrannical world of mumfluencers. 

Out on 8 June 2023

Such a Fun Age meets Sorrow and Bliss meets Normal People meets the era of Donald J Trump. When Jess first meets Josh at their Ivy League college she dislikes him immediately: an entitled guy in chinos, ready to take over the world, unable to accept that life might be easier for him because he's white, while Jess is almost always the only Black woman in their class. But as a tempestuous friendship turns into an electrifying romance that shocks them both, Jess begins to question who she is and what she’s really willing to compromise. Can love really be enough? This hugely funny and deeply moving love story offers no easy answers.

Out on 22 June 2023

Aeon is a mixed-up and mixed-race teenager from a leafy Liverpool suburb, trying to understand the Black identity foisted upon him by his friends and his community. To his growing shame, the only Black people in his life are his dad and his cousin, who he's decided don't count. Desperate to find his Black roots he travels to Jamaica. Mugged, stabbed and arrested, he's beaten unconscious in a detention centre for being the 'White Boy'. And then things really start to go wrong. . . 

Out on 6 July 2023

A darkly comic, boundary-pushing debut following an adrift Pakistani translator in London who attends a mysterious language school which boasts complete fluency in just ten days, but at a secret, sinister cost. By turns surreal and shocking, The Centre takes the reader on a journey through Karachi, London, and New Delhi, interrogating the sticky politics of language, translation, and appropriation with biting specificity, and ultimately asking: what is success really worth?