The White Desert by Luis López Carrasco, translated by Rosalind Harvey (Granta, £14.99)
This unpredictable book, comprising five linked stories about a Spanish couple, opens with the end of the world and gets weirder from there. A balloon debate about a post-apocalyptic scenario turns nasty when one participant pulls a knife, or thinks he does. A plane crash-lands on an island. “Can [we] go and get our luggage … Lots of people have, you know, soiled themselves.” What links the scenes is a sense of disconnection in our connected world, but the book subverts expectations: when a group of people celebrating New Year’s Eve go missing, it turns out to be a game of hide and seek. Footnotes peppered throughout suggest we’re viewing all this from the future (“Emirates was a well-known passenger airline …”), and discovering what the white desert is turns everything on its head. For readers who like to do their own joining up, and who want a playful, original take on our precarious lives, this is a thought-provoking treat.

The Home of the Drowned by Elin Anna Labba, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel (Harvill, £16.99)
“You could have waited, you bastards.” In 1942 Lapland, a village occupied by the semi-nomadic Sámi people is flooded by a new hydroelectric plant’s dam. One family watch as their goahti (peat-covered hut) disappears under the water. “It wasn’t the nicest goahti,” says Ánne. “No, but it was mine,” says her sister Rávdná. When Rávdná wants to build a house to replace it, the authorities refuse permission: the Sámi way of life has been rejected but alternatives are not permitted. A local newspaper half-heartedly offers to publicise their case, but “we receive a lot of angry letters if we use any foreign words”. When the government tells local people the new dam “will lift us out of poverty and injustice”, the words reek with irony. This intimate story of infuriating discrimination is, Labba says, based on real events in Sweden.

Witch Light by Zohra Nabi, S&S, £7.99
Dispatched to a bleak boarding school by her uncle, Cassia Thorne soon detects sinister undercurrents at Ravening Hall. Why are the prefects so unnaturally perfect – and is there any truth to local stories about a witch who eats children’s hearts? Teaming up with misfit Martha Torrent, Cassia must investigate another supernatural conspiracy in this superb 9+ sequel to Deep Dark, rooted in the history of the Pendle witch trials.

Tadpole Summer by Catherine Bruton, Nosy Crow, £7.99
Frog has been Frog since her baby brother Tad was born, smaller and weaker than his sister, but indomitable. As summer begins and Tad’s illness progresses, though, Frog must contemplate an unthinkable future. With Tad in hospital, Frog begins camping in the garden – but how long can she stay there? A beautiful, poignant, magical book for 9+, filled with love, grief and the natural world’s power to nurture hope.

Quite Ugly One Evening by Chris Brookmyre (Abacus, £22)
Thirty years after Brookmyre’s debut, his latest novel to feature journalist Jack Parlabane makes a tonal return to his earlier, more irreverent style. Now 60, Jack feels increasingly like a “Boomer Ambassador” to the younger colleagues who are snapping at his heels. With his job on the line, he agrees to investigate a cold case: the death, 40 years earlier, of an MI5 operative. It’s thought to be connected to the Maskyn family, creators of much-loved but now contentious Thunderbirds-style TV series The Imaginators, and Parlabane finds himself on the transatlantic cruise liner hosting the 60th anniversary convention as “several hundred emotionally stunted fanboy incels alongside an over-remunerated family of nepo babies, trust fund pukes and outright fascists” duke it out over The Imaginators’ legacy. Masterfully plotted and scalpel-sharp, this is a riotously good read that uses a Golden Age set-up to take aim at the culture wars, while also providing a thoroughly satisfying mystery.

The Rainshadow Orphans by Naomi Ishiguro (Solstice, £20)
The first volume of a trilogy inspired by Japanese pop culture is set in bustling, crowded Rainshadow City, where hi-tech wealth and a corrupt emperor exist alongside magic, poverty and criminality. Toshiko, Jun and Mei are the Kawakamis, haphazardly seeking revenge on the Lucky Crow gang for the murder of their adoptive Aunt. When Toshiko almost accidentally steals a precious dragon pearl from a powerful gangster, they’re plunged into a fast-moving adventure involving a conspiracy to deport all the city’s illegal immigrants to certain death, and replace low-paid workers with attractive female robots. Various plot strands see characters discovering magical powers, a mother dragon desperate to save her baby’s life, and a strangely helpful cat. Trope-heavy, entertaining fun, with a cartoonish vibe.

Mer de Glace by Małgorzata Lebda, translated by Mira Rosenthal (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Much as they have in prose, Fitzcarraldo are awakening British poetry publishing to the glamour of braininess. Mer de Glace is named for a dying French glacier, but the sequence is set on the 1,047km-long Polish river Vistula, along which Lebda ran in 2021. Images of fires and firesides recur: we are all of us out in a wild, vulnerable world. This is ecopoetry at its most profound and informal, challenging and pleasurable. Rosenthal’s quietly fluent translations give us “books that help us close the mouth of night”, light as “Baltic mercury” and, as the runner nears the end of her journey, a “pelvis tilting / towards the open sea”.

The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith (Bloodaxe, £14.99)
It’s not surprising this has won an American National Book award. Smith’s passionate voice is incandescent with all that’s grotesque and cruel in American Black experience, but also with a deeply sexy lyricism: in Your Man, “I wait for his mouth, the mercy circle”. This New and Selected Poems embraces contemporary urban life, from addicts’ needles to church deacons. But elsewhere the infamous photo of Emmett Till in his casket is evoked alongside actual photos of enslaved women, which frame a sequence giving them voice. And female experience is everywhere, right from the famous opener, What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t).

Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak by Rishi Dastidar (Nine Arches, £11.99)
Dastidar is a poet of energy and presence. This fourth collection is thematically eclectic; anything can be the occasion for poetry, from “bullshit jobs” to Tory nationalism, jukeboxes to “funk dancing”. As Dastidar spins us from topic to topic, we find ourselves believing, with he, that this proves the vitality of the genre. Besides, his writing itself – which includes sonnets, ghazals, even an alphabet poem – often glitters. It does so especially in the title poem, a sonnet celebrating all that’s accelerated: city life, dating, “being kissed brimful … under the cherry blossom every Saturday night”.

Dark Night: Poems and Selected Prose by St John of the Cross, translated by Martha Sprackland (Penguin Classics, £12.99)
Every generation makes key texts its own. Sprackland’s new translation of the poetry and meditative prose of the 16th-century mystic John of the Cross is both provocative and timely. A contextualising introduction by Colin Thompson, himself an earlier translator, is followed by Sprackland’s own crunchy Translator’s Note a brilliant taster of the challenges she and predecessors rise to. In her consciously poeticising yet conscientious versions, the works themselves retain all the strangeness and burn that attracted TS Eliot and Salvador Dalí, Thomas Merton and Pope John Paul II. “Falcon love” and a “wounded hart” brave the “wild wood” or “shepherding night”: imagery both hieratic and human.

The Mud Princess by Beatrice Alemagna, Thames & Hudson, £12.99
Annoyed with her big brother after school, Yuki throws her keys down a maintenance hole – only to discover the twiggy-haired Mud Princess, who lives on edible anger in a strange, blobby underworld with touches of unexpected beauty. This strikingly memorable 4+ picture book vividly evokes children’s intense and complex feelings.

Where Are You, Eddie? by Michael Rosen and Gill Lewis, Walker, £12.99
In this picture book for slightly older readers (5+), Rosen revisits the territory of 2011’s Sad Book, searching for his lost son Eddie in the places they spent time together, and in memories shared by friends and family. Lewis’s loose, lively illustrations transport the reader effortlessly into a meditative state straddling “now” and “then” in this moving, generous story of grief and contemplation.

The Kindness of Strangers by Emma Garman (Virago, £20)
Set in a Chelsea boarding house in 1953, Garman’s debut novel opens with Jimmy Sullivan – who “wore spiv’s shoes and spoke in unmistakable Cockney tones” – bleeding to death under the dispassionate gaze of the landlady and her lodgers. The big Victorian house, presided over by bohemian literary widow Honor Wilson, is home to a debutante fallen on hard times, a wannabe writer, a young cinema usher with social aspirations, and a Jewish poet who managed to escape Hitler but lost his wife and child in the process. All have secrets, but none more than Honor herself, and the arrival of Jimmy, who claims to be the son of an old family retainer, threatens them all. This is not only an excellent mystery, but an evocative portrayal of a group of people displaced socially and geographically by war and its aftermath, with the moral and topographical landscape of 1950s London superbly rendered.

Night Babies by Lucie McKnight Hardy (John Murray, £18.99)
When their house is flooded, Astrid and her husband take the refuge offered by her friend Flora in the Brecon Beacons. Astrid was particularly affected by the flood, which damaged paintings intended for her first solo exhibition at a prestigious London gallery. The old chapel her friend is renovating becomes her new studio. But instead of working to salvage her portraits, she becomes obsessed with painting the landscape of lake and sky. She tries to shrug off her bad dreams, strange physical sensations, missing items and the dirty, child-sized handprints on the walls, but disturbing facts about the chapel’s history emerge, and she’s not the only one affected by what appears to be a malevolent haunting. She’s haunted, too, by memories of a student art trip to Florence, a significant turning point in her friendship with Flora. Astrid is her own worst enemy, but her issues – ambition, envy, ambivalence about motherhood – will resonate with many readers. A sophisticated, chilling tale that works both as supernatural and psychological horror.

The House of Broken Things by Kim Moore (Corsair, £14.99)
Moore’s new collection constructs an ambitious architecture for exploring intergenerational trauma and motherhood. At its best, we find her confessional signature, as in The Black Notices, cataloguing unidentified murdered women, or Giving Birth With Anne Sexton, where literary inheritance meets bodily terror. Sometimes, however, this commitment to sincerity and transparency results in poems that feel like pedagogic exercises: Damaged Cento catalogues the “eight stages” of domestic homicide, while The Trimesters documents pregnancy’s upheavals. The motherhood poems, though deeply felt, risk predictability in their exploration of well-trodden territory – breastfeeding, bedtime routines, and the spectre of parental loss (“I imagine someone taking her away, / or a car ploughing into the pram”). It’s technically hard to make this new. Moore clearly presents the “I” as a site of shared, unpolished vulnerability, prioritising emotional legibility over lyric innovation.

The Tree Is Missing by Shannon Kuta Kelly (Faber, £12.99)
“I’m not sure yet what the threshold is”: uncertainty about geography and intimacy looms large in this elusive debut. Drifting between Polish border towns and the changing seasons, Kelly’s poems are invested in disconnection or dissociation, lingering around “the place that is nowhere” (train stations, mirrors, missing trees) to create a mood-board expressing displacement and memory loss. Kelly’s minimalist style, marked by end-stopped lines and unrhymed couplets, enforces a sense of stasis: “Time always goes and everyone is waiting.” While the restraint can feel prose-like, it’s punctuated by tactile details such as “a mummified frog” or “the smell of frying lardons”. These atmospheric sketches keep the reader behind glass, rather than inhabiting the haunted materials.

Dog Star by Michael Symmons Roberts (Cape, £13)
An existential wrestle between body and soul remains one of Symmons Roberts’s defining poetic drives, and in his ninth collection that tension finds urgent new energy in grief and species loss: “But these words contain their negation. / For every goldfinch put into a poem, / one will vanish from the world outside.” Attentive to humans’ destructive impact, the collection carries a “wild voltage” as it shows natural and urban worlds colliding into “a brief coalescence of matter”. A keen observer of flora and fauna with a Midas-like gift for metamorphosis, Symmons Roberts discovers kinship between unlikely phenomena: “Only the mountain hare has guile and sorcery / to stand tall like a heron in a river.” Although some poems would benefit from tighter distillation, Dog Star showcases the poet’s “ungovernable electricity”, the force of “a primeval singer with a modern / repertoire” extending his range with sure-footed confidence.

Horses by Jake Skeets (Akoya, £14.99)
“Horses buried / thigh-deep in mud / clawing for the first world”: documenting the 191 wild horses that died in 2018 in the Navajo Nation during extreme drought, Skeets channels haunted animal voices into fast-changing “mineral strata”, where a river makes the sound of “grocery store carts / a freeway a few yards east of us”. Recalling Eliot’s The Waste Land, he recreates a desert landscape visited by ghostly thunder, yet his lines breathe distinctively, pressing indigenous cosmology and consumer modernity into violent contact. “We become lightning sometimes and there/ only then become song, carry our ache, its kick pull haul hull”: each syllable marking a separate exhalation, a separate loss. The collection’s sharpest grief is found in these discomforting lines: “there is microplastic in my name / there is a drought in his”, before opening into wonder: “there is a meteorite in my hand / a sparrow in yours”.

Alan, King of the Universe by Tom McLaughlin, Hodder, £12.99
These five splendidly silly, surreal graphic novel adventures, starring Alan, an orange cat with opposable thumbs and dreams of world domination, and his canine sidekick Fido, should appeal to Dog Man fans of 6+.

Megalomaniacs by Jamie Smart, David Fickling, £9.99
From the creator of Bunny vs Monkey come the Megalomaniacs – alien invaders hampered in their attempts to conquer Bobbletown by their minute size and unceasing infighting. An irresistible 7+ comics romp, crammed with bum jokes, eyewatering colour and an array of tiny villains, from a Jekyll and Hyde carrot to a cyborg kitten bounty hunter.