Matt Giles, the thirtysomething protagonist of The Long Shoe, is having a run of bad luck. Shortly after losing his job as a bathroom salesman, he learns that he and his girlfriend... Read more »
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Canongate, £9.99)The award-winning Australian writer’s third adult novel begins with a lone woman, Rowan, washed up on a remote island between Tasmania and Antarctica. Shearwater is... Read more »
The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery; The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr; The Good Nazi by Samir Machado de Machado; Bluff by Francine Toon; The Token by Sharon Bolton The... Read more »
Quantum of Menace by Vaseem Khan (Zaffre, £20)Dismissed from his role as a back-room boffin in the British secret service, Major Boothroyd, AKA Q, returns to his market-town roots in Khan’s excellent... Read more »
The Predicament by William Boyd (Viking, £20) A second adventure for amateur spy Gabriel Dax, first seen in Boyd’s 2024 novel Gabriel’s Moon. It’s early 1963, and Dax, a travel writer, is... Read more »
Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson (Michael Joseph, £20)The bestselling YA author’s first novel for adults has an intriguing premise: thanks to the combination of a blow to the head by... Read more »
“No good opera plot can be sensible,” admitted W. H. Auden—a man with five opera libretti to his name—“for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.” It is true that... Read more »
Fox by Joyce Carol Oates (4th Estate, £18.99)In this hefty, immersive study of gullibility, complicity and betrayal, English teacher Francis Fox is a predator, all the more dangerous for being charming enough... Read more »
The actor Dwayne Johnson, who began his career as wrestler The Rock, is to co-author a nonfiction book about a Hawaii crime syndicate in the 1960s and 1970s. Writing on Instagram, Johnson... Read more »