It’s springtime and literary fiction is quite literally in vogue this season, making a neat counterpoint to the sheer volume of BookTok tat, both on the shelves and keeping parts of the publishing industry afloat in the year 2026.
We’re just here to tell you what’s good. Because listen, we’ve all been burned by those too-glowy blurbs before, haven’t we? Any glow found in the list below is well-earned by the authors.
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Shortlist Pick: Wimmy Road Boyz (Sufiyaan Salam)
In Wimmy Road Boyz, you’re right there with Immy, Khan and Haris in the bimmer, in the rain, on the tarmac: they’re twentysomething mates driving around for one big night out. This Joycian trip along and around Manchester’s Wilmslow Road is the first novel from 27-year-old Sufiyaan Salam, a writer and former animator from Blackburn and it’s an intoxicating piece of maximalism from Merky Books. Laugh-out-loud funny – even days later – and high energy, it’s peppered with pop culture references (music, film, Riz Ahmed), bravura surrealist tangents and experiments with the page that just feel right. We swoosh in and out of these rich, messy, sometimes desperate interiors and back into the warmth and relief these boys provide each other.
The characters and proprietors of Wimmy Road, or the ‘curry mile’, from the sweet shop Bossman to a feminist poet, are joyfully realised in full. Salam deftly brings in the perspectives of the women in Immy, Khan and Haris’ lives, while still centering on the “boydem”. He also fearlessly reclaims the ‘p’ word from the haters. He interrogates how these young, brown, Muslim men use it in their own heads and spaces versus how they encounter the slur out in the world. At times dripping in that dry Gen Z nihilism, Wimmy Road Boyz is full of new ideas and beautifully earnest where it really counts. A new Northern masterpiece.
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Transcription (Ben Lerner)
Transcription isn’t the kind of novel that you finish reading, not really. The more it percolates in your mind, the more sure you become that its author, the American writer Ben Lerner, is a bit of a genius. Because this is a potent and elegantly restrained text – at just a slim 130 pages in length – that rewards both concentrated mulling over and multiple readings. (Huh, you’ll say.)
The story: A writer visits his ninety-year-old mentor, an erudite academic and raconteur named Thomas, intending to record their conversations for a magazine piece. But he drops his phone in the hotel sink just beforehand and doesn’t admit it. Transcription is posing big questions about how technology – old and new – gets mixed up in our most ancient rituals with emotional, relational puzzles inside the allusions, near-repetitions and sensory images. The novel turns more than one potentially perilous fictional corner but Lerner is always in control. Quite stunning.
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Yesteryear (Caro Claire Burke)
It takes quite a bit to shock us and we were sho-ocked by how far Caro Claire Burke pushes and pulls her story in Yesteryear, her dark debut novel. This is the ‘tradwife wakes up in 1855’ book, which is a dynamite conceit so, yes, a movie adaptation with Anne Hathaway in the lead is already in the works. But this isn’t a lazy spin on a hot-take gimmick. Burke takes all her ideas around Natalie, her conservative, good Christian wife and mother who lives on a farm in Idaho with her big, healthy family, and follows them through to their logical, sometimes brutal conclusions.
Yesteryear is a page-turner and a real ride, pitching from comedy to horror and back again. Is Natalie really in the 1850s or is she, duh, in some reality TV show? The shortcuts to authenticity we all take to please the internet and the ‘maze’ of choice for modern women are both laid bare amongst the handmade soap, chicken coops and sourdough starters. This is a savage state-of-the-world satire that implicates everyone, including readers who couldn’t wait to devour this book. Gulp.
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John of John (Douglas Stuart)
Douglas Stuart, who won the Booker Prize in 2020 for Shuggie Bain, is back this spring with John of John, a bittersweet story about a family tangled up in secrets, set in the ancient, windswept Outer Hebrides. Cal (short for John-Calum) returns from studying textiles, pretty young men and the Edinburgh nightlife on the mainland to the Harris croft, the family loom, his pious father John and his mischievous grandmother Ella. Stuart draws his picture of awe-inspiring landscapes and the claustrophobia of uncompromising churchmen and gossipy neighbours so tenderly, it’s as if his fictional settlement of Falabay has always existed.
John and Cal both do weaving work, from their shed at home, for a mill on the Isles, priding themselves on their ability to discern the most minute differences in hues, whether that’s shells, woollen jumpers or congregants’ hair and dress. And Stuart returns to this precise distinction of colour masterfully in a couple of dramatic moments for the Macleods. With loss, shame and despair threatening to overwhelm the community, Stuart offers enough hope and grace to spiral further and further outwards.
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On The Calculation of Volume IV (Solvej Balle)
The unexpected cliffhangers get us every time with these books. If you’re not up on it, On The Calculation of Volume is Danish writer Solvej Balle’s hit seven-title series following book dealer Tara Selter and her time loops in the 18th of November. We’re now on Book 4 of the English translations by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, with the fifth installment due to be published this November. Quiet, philosophical and with a calming, distant tone of voice, there is just something about the rhythms of Balle’s writing, the way she moves between routine and pops of colour, that pulls you deeper into the sheer everydayness of the mystery.
Balle has her literary container in the form of the repeated day and she challenges herself further in IV, sticking mostly to a deserted house in Bergen, Germany, which has become a refuge for all our time loopers — or is it tracers? That’s one of the debates the expanded cast of characters sinks into: how to name things in their strange reality. A book that feels gentle enough until you encounter an echoed detail or decision in your own life that makes you stop and think again.
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Communion (Jon Doyle)
Anything inspired by Michael Sheen is alright in this house. Communion, the debut novel from working-class Welsh writer Jon Doyle, does just that. Doyle takes as his setting his hometown: referred to only as ‘the actor’ in the book, Sheen staged a Passion of the Christ play, with non-actors, in the streets of Port Talbot over the Easter of 2011. In Communion’s telling, we follow Mack O’Brien who, at 30, has returned to his parents’ house from a seminary. He’s just started working security at the town’s emblematic steelworks when the unions decide to stage a walkout timed to the Passion.
Communion splices lyrical language and dreamlike sequences with blunt, commonplace violence and some exhilarating action. Mack is nearly always moving, on his walks, on his rounds, as he wrestles with the path that’s expected of him, his family heritage formed by men in the blast furnaces of South Wales, wrestling his own ideas about finding purpose and the future of Port Talbot. Doyle has a keen sense for the kinds of memorable, cinematic images which this unique project of the town’s Passion play affords him as a writer and he does not waste them. One to watch.
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I Want You To Be Happy (Jem Calder)
Another brilliant debut, Jem Calder’s I Want You To Be Happy is one for those of the Sally Rooney crowd who don’t mind things slanting even more painfully honest than usual. Twenty-three-year old Girl (Joey) meets mid-30s Guy (Chuck) in this contemporary London-set novel that’s readable and relatable but also craftier than it first appears. Chuck’s a WFH lead copywriter at an agency (“I’m a creative”) while Joey works at an indie coffee shop, has crumbs in her bed and writes poetry on the side. Which is to say: the dialogue and the details are all on point. The gap between Chuck’s inner monologue and what he says out loud, in particular, is comical, frustrating and, at points, incredibly sad.
It’s a novel that’s very concerned with the concept of ikigai and in a good way i.e how what we like to do, what we’re good at, what will pay us and what the world needs can intersect to form some sort of life. And, of course, how that might shift as we get older, whether that’s down to comparing ourselves to our peers or nudges, encouraging or otherwise, from romantic relationships. This one might even save a reader or two from crummy situationships: a worthy cause.
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The Palm House (Gwendoline Riley)
The Palm House, the latest from prize-winning British author Gwendoline Riley, is a short, unsentimental look at midlife melancholy that’s free from any easy explanations or bombastic revelations. It centres around an undefined friendship between Laura, our narrator, and Edmund Putnam, an older deputy editor of a serious culture magazine who’s referred to exclusively by his surname throughout. And “said Putnam” is the metronome of this novel. We follow Laura’s own disorientation as a result of her grouchy, polemical sort-of-mentor being knocked off his own, usually sure and solid, course after he resigns his post to escape a grubby new boss.
This is the sort of good London fiction – full of Soho pubs, the Thames and dilapidated aristocratic apartments near Sloane Square – that makes us a bit nostalgic. It’s also stacked with well-observed details on precarity, passivity and privilege, from the stern, matter-of-fact way Putnam talks to other people’s children to the preening mannerisms of the theatre actor Laura has a fling with. By the close, something important has shifted, with little fanfare, of course.
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Boyhood (David Keenan)
Hold onto your hats. David Keenan, the Scottish writer best known for 2017’s cult classic This Is Memorial Device, is back with this big, bold, ambitious offering from White Rabbit Books. And it’s easy to see why Irvine Welsh is a fan. Boyhood is a shape-shifting, multi-stranded, art-as-life epic; it takes as its starting point the disappearance of a young boy outside a football match in late 1970s Glasgow. Keenan’s charming pulp fiction creations include a gypsy hardman quoting the ancient Greek soldier Xenophon, a poetry-loving German gymnast in pre-war Paris, a sleazy councillor obsessed with Mexican ruins and a naive burlesque dancer taking a tour of French cathedrals. (There should be a new Bechdel test but for working-class with niche intellectual interests — Keenan would nail it).
Oh, and don’t forget the secret service operative who can ‘remote view’ any location in his mind. Moving and horrifying in equal measure, Boyhood’s motifs – black magic, invisible horses, honey traps – recur and warp across timelines, like we’re in the hands of some composer of a precisely constructed piece of music, who is just toasted enough to keep outdoing himself note after note. David Keenan is a writer who can find filth everywhere and beauty anywhere.
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Into The Wreck (Susannah Dickey)
The days leading up to a funeral can be, let’s say, hard to predict. Into The Wreck, the new novel from Susannah Dickey, an author and poet from Derry, Northern Ireland, gets at this confusion and chaos from five perspectives: the siblings who have just lost their semi-estranged father Thomas, twentysomething Anna, teens Gemma and Matthew; their mother Yvonne and Yvonne’s cousin Amy who is staying at the house.
With the kids in particular, Dickey captures something of the maelstrom of competing emotions, memories and fixations, from the profound to the ridiculous, as their brains remember/forget/remember to transform ‘is’ into ‘was’. There are some perfectly distilled lines in this book, for sure. Distractions work until they don’t, well-laid plans are dashed and one by one, the characters have eerie encounters with a seemingly real but supernatural-tinged wreck that’s washed up on shore.
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