New year, new books! Looking for something new to read? Browse our fiction picks for January! Includes books by Libby Page, Ali Smith, Vaseem Khan and more.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
This Book Made Me Think of You
Libby Page
When Tilly Nightingale receives a call telling her there’s a birthday gift from her fiancé waiting for her at her local bookshop, it couldn’t come as more of a shock. Partly because she can’t remember the last time she read a book for pleasure. Mainly because Joe died five months ago.
The gift is simple – twelve carefully-chosen books from Joe, one for each month, to help her turn the page on her first year without him. Tilly sets out on a series of reading-inspired adventures that take her around the world. But as she begins to vlog her journey, her story becomes more than her own.
With help from Alfie, the bookshop owner, her budding new following and her friends and family, can Tilly’s year of books show her how to love again?
Glyph
Ali Smith
It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost. Is it imaginary? Is it real?
Then it all starts again thirty years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture to pieces in her bedroom. What to do? She phones her sister.
In a chiaroscuro dance through our increasingly antagonistic era, Glyph asks if we’re attending to the history that’s made us and to the history we’re making. A funny, warm and clear-eyed take on where we are now, Glyph is about what our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time, we rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness.
The Distinctly Competent District Councillor
Jonas Jonasson
All over the world, people sleep blissfully in Traumbett beds. Made in Hamburg, they’ve successfully cornered the market everywhere except Sweden, which is why the new owner, Konrad Kaltenbacher Jr, is desperate to expand there.
Seeing an opportunity to attract 800 new jobs back to her small, decaying town of Halstaholm, new district councillor Julia Bäck jumps right into spearheading a persuasive campaign with an unprecedented charm offensive to win the contract over Stockholm.
A roundabout is hastily renamed in honour of Angela Merkel and adorned with black, red and gold flowers; a German school is quickly established under the leadership of three elderly pensioners; and the town swimming pool is rapidly transformed into a beerhouse – it had been empty for years anyway!
Julia’s tenacity impresses the German bed boss Konrad Jr but has she bitten off more than she can chew?
Dear Debbie
Freida McFadden
Sometimes, enough is enough. Debbie Mullen is losing it. For years, she has compiled all of her best advice into her column, Dear Debbie, where the wives of New England come for sympathy and neighbourly advice.
Through her work, Debbie has heard from countless women who are ignored, belittled, or even abused by their husbands. And Debbie does her best to guide them in the right direction.
Or at least, she did. These days, Debbie’s life seems to be spiralling out of control. She just lost her job. Something strange is happening with her teenage daughters. And her husband is keeping secrets, according to the tracking app she installed on his phone.
Now, Debbie’s done being the bigger person. She’s done being reasonable and practical. It’s time to take her own advice. And now it’s time for payback against all the people in her life who deserve it the most.
My Husband’s Wife
Alice Feeney
Eden Fox, an artist on the brink of her big break, sets off for a run before her first exhibition. When she returns to the home she recently moved into – Spyglass, an enchanting old house in Hope Falls – nothing is as it should be. Her key doesn’t fit.
A woman, eerily similar to her, answers the door. And her husband insists that this stranger is his wife. One house. One husband. Two women. Someone is lying.
Six months earlier, a reclusive Londoner named Birdy, reeling from a life-changing diagnosis, inherits Spyglass. This unexpected gift from a long-lost grandmother brings her to the pretty seaside village of Hope Falls.
But then Birdy stumbles upon a shadowy London clinic that claims to be able to predict a person’s date of death, including her own.
Chosen Family
Madeleine Gray
Nell has accepted, at age 12, that hers will likely be a friendless existence. She does not care for boys, or makeup, or competing to see who can eat the least – so has no hope of success at tweenage girl social climbing.
But then, a new girl arrives at school. Eve has short hair like a boy’s, a wicked sense of humour and an unshakable confidence that she will one day find her place in the world. The moment they meet, Nell changes her mind about the friend thing.
From their childhood to their 20s and 30s, Eve and Nell will love each other and hurt each other – through teenage feuds and the chlorine-scented savagery of all-girls’ schools; through long, drunken nights in scruffy share houses; through the highs and lows of coparenting a child together without being romantically involved.
But always, despite a mire of unspoken feelings and sexual confusion, they will choose each other. Again, and again. As friends, as lovers, as family.
Forbidden Waters
Rob Parker
It starts with the knife. Found at the bottom of a hidden lake in the Norfolk Broads, covered in blood and heart tissue so fresh the water hasn’t yet washed it all away. What salvage diver Cam Killick has found is a murder weapon from a very recent crime – but how do you solve a murder without a body?
The remoteness of the setting is itself a clue. Only a handful of people know the location of the lake, let alone how to access it. But no sooner have Cam and DS Claire Rogers started working through this ready-made suspect pool than one of them disappears.
The ripples from Cam’s discovery have disturbed a dangerous predator, one who knows the water even better than Cam himself. The question now is what they want – and how many more people will die before Cam can stop them?
A Killer in Paradise
টম হিন্ডেল
When five old friends are invited to join Abigail Blythe at the launch of her luxury hotel in the Costa Rican rainforest, they jump at the chance to spend a week in paradise. None of them have heard from Abigail since the summer they went backpacking in Central America as students – a trip that ended in disaster for one member of the group.
Ten years may have passed, but old rivalries are never far from the surface. So when a body is discovered during the hotel’s launch event, it soon becomes clear that one among them must be responsible.
Someone is desperate to keep an old secret hidden – whatever the cost.
Room 706
Ellie Levenson
Nobody knows she’s checked into Room 706.
Kate stretches her legs and turns on the TV while James washes away the traces of their morning. She watches in horror at the unfolding news: the hotel they are staying in has been taken under siege.
She is trapped somewhere she shouldn’t be, with a man she definitely doesn’t love.
How will she begin to tell Vic what she is doing here? If her body is found, will it give up the secret of what she’s been up to?
For now, Kate can only hide, take a deep breath, and reflect on the series of choices she’s made that have brought her to this moment.
What will her marriage and her life look like, if she makes it out?
The Edge of Darkness
Vaseem Khan
India, 1951. After wilfully ignoring orders from her superiors, Persis Wadia, India’s first female police detective, has been exiled from Bombay to the wild and mountainous state of Nagaland. As India’s first post-Independence election looms, and tensions rise across the country, Persis finds herself banished to the Victoria Hotel, a crumbling colonial-era relic, her career in ruins.
But when a prominent local politician is murdered in his locked room at the Victoria Hotel, his head missing – a case appears quite literally on her doorstep. As the political situation threatens to explode into all-out havoc, Persis has only days to stop a killer operating at the very edge of darkness.
Bengali 
English 
Polish 
Lithuanian 
Romanian 
Portuguese