A reclusive interior designer named Paul travels from his home in Orkney to the Norwegian coastal city of Stavanger for a most unusual commission. A datacentre housing a vast internet server is located... Read more »
In the summer of 1977 a bolt of lightning struck a substation on the Hudson River, knocking out power across New York City. Two nights of darkness sparked a wave of looting... Read more »
Rose, the protagonist of Claire Vaye Watkins’s latest novel, has retreated from the world to live in Nothingness Flats, a cinder-block cabin in the Nevada desert. On indefinite leave from her job... Read more »
Author and poet Rebecca Perry has won the 2026 Waterstones debut fiction prize for May We Feed the King, praised as a “delicious and dream-like tale”. Chosen from a shortlist of six... Read more »
Almost 14% of Ireland is bog: vast swathes of moss-carpeted land, below which layers of ancient history have been compounded into mulch-black turf. Captivated by their otherworldly beauty, Seamus Heaney wrote some of his... Read more »
Amber Fan, the 22-year-old protagonist of Kit Fan’s heartfelt and elegiac second novel, is ready to say goodbye. Goodbye to her parents, who are booked on the midnight flight from London to... Read more »
It’s the year 2049 and Daniel Connelly is 75 years old. Eccentric and lonely after decades of self-imposed isolation, his existence is “spartan”, a “relentless searching, a yearning for pieces that fit... Read more »
A one-sitting read is typically the domain of the short story – a form that largely depends on a reader’s pure, unbroken attention. But there is something special about the intensity of... Read more »
Sublimation by Isabel J Kim (Picador, £18.99)This debut novel from an award-winning Korean-American short fiction writer is a fantastical reimagining of the immigrant experience. Here, anyone who crosses a border not intending... Read more »