To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong (Les Fugitives)
In her final year of university, an undergraduate in psychology reckons with a romantic obsession with a postgraduate in computer science. The story of a first love, unrequited, but not quite, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies confronts thorny gender relations, contradictory desires, consent, and unravelling mental health within Gen Z. Armstrong queries the nature of experience, mapping the disintegration of a young woman’s sense of self and engagement with the physical world in an anti-Bildungsroman that is a most powerful first novel.
Harriet Armstrong, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies (Les Fugitives)
Harriet Armstrong was born and raised in Oxford. In 2024, aged 24, she was a Resident at the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts. Her first novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, was published by Les Fugitives in June 2025, and is published or forthcoming in French, German, Spanish and Turkish translation. Her short stories have been published in Forever Magazine, the London Magazine, Granta, HEAT Literary Magazine (Giramondo), Kismet, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She lives and works in London. [Photo Credit: Maria Calinescu]
Instagram: @harrietarmstrong2000
Chaotic Good by Isabelle Baafi (Faber)
A piercing debut about how we are made, how we get lost and how we find new selves.
Framed by the story of escape from a toxic marriage, Chaotic Good focuses on the incremental ways in which power accumulates, shifts and is relinquished within both home and community. Incisive, rigorous and artful, Isabelle Baafi reminds us of the importance of self-determination, and how, when we feel most eroded, we might discover what we need deep within ourselves: 'This time and every time, I was the code I needed to find my way back.'
Isabelle Baafi, Chaotic Good (Faber)
Isabelle Baafi is a poet, editor and critic. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress) won the Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her poetry and prose have been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, London Magazine, Oxford Poetry and elsewhere. She studied Comparative Literature and Film at the University of Kent, and Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. She is the Reviews Editor of Poetry London, a Ledbury Poetry Critic and an editor of Magma Poetry.
X: @isabellebaafi | Instagram: @isabellebaafi |
Website: www.isabellebaafi.com
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)
Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punch line of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.
But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. They share everything, from blagging their way into nightclubs to trips to the Family Planning clinic when they are late. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin charting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace — their friendship is as indestructible as they are. But as they grow up and away from one another, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh takes you by the hand and leads you through Doncaster’s schoolyards, alleyways and nightclubs, laying bare the intimate treacheries of adolescence and the ways we betray ourselves when we don’t trust our friends. Like The Glorious Heresies and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked place into the very centre of the world.
Colwill Brown, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)
Colwill Brown was born and raised in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. She holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she received a James A. Michener Center Fellowship, and an MA in English Literature from Boston College. Her work has appeared in Granta, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. For fifteen years, she’s lived with ME/CFS, a debilitating neurological disease triggered by a virus that, due to systemic medical neglect, currently has no treatment. A proud Donny lass, she claims to have played bass guitar in (nearly) every rock venue on South Yorkshire’s toilet circuit. [Photo credit: Kathryn Widdowson]
Instagram: @_colwill_
Joy Is My Middle Name by Sasha Debevec-McKenney (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
Joy Is My Middle Name documents crawling through your twenties and emerging into your thirties. Walking uneasy cities and rural towns, talking about sex, race, womanhood, addiction, sobriety, consumerism and pop culture, these poems pull at the edges of the performed self with conversational ease.
Humble, giddy, bold, empathetic, subversive, hilarious, lithe – the collection feels like a conversation with your greatest friend, over the best dinner. Full of stories, character, awkward silence, relatable sentiment; the buzz of perfect moments are funnelled onto the page.
Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Joy is My Middle Name (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Yale Review. She was the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and is currently a creative writing fellow at Emory University. She lives in Decatur, Georgia. [Photo credit: Michael Doyle Olson]
Instagram: @sashajdm
Under the Blue by Suzannah V. Evans (Bloomsbury Poetry)
From the multi-award-winning poet: a new collection of soaring lyricism and desire, exploring the act of care and the consequences of loving
Under the Blue is an arresting, deeply candid exploration of both the shimmering beauty of life and the realities of care.
Through a series of glittering fragmental prose poems and evocative postcards, Suzannah V. Evans has produced a kaleidoscopic meditation grounded by profound humanity and empathy - about intimacy and togetherness, sickness and pain, what can be said and what remains unsayable.
Suzannah V. Evans, Under the Blue (Bloomsbury Poetry)
Suzannah V. Evans is a poet, researcher and educator. She is the author of Brightwork and Marine Objects / Some Language, and the editor of All Keyboards are Legitimate: Versions of Jules Laforgue. Her poetry has been awarded the Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment and a Northern Writers’ Award, performed at international festivals and broadcast on BBC Radio. She lives in Bristol, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Under the Blue is her debut collection. [Photo credit: Naomi Woddis]
Instagram: @suzannahvevans
Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape [Vintage, Penguin Random House])
James dreams of another life far away from his small village. Almost an adult, his newfound desires threaten to unravel his shy exterior. Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to stay with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm.
With the passing seasons, a bond emerges between them that transforms their lives. Yet James is never sure of Luke’s true feelings and as the end of summer nears, he has a choice to make: will he risk everything for the possibility of love?
Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven (Jonathan Cape [Vintage, Penguin Random House])
Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [Photo credit: Stuart Simpson]
Instagram: @seanehewitt
What Remains After a Fire by Kanza Javed (W.W. Norton & Company)
A haunting, powerful collection of stories spanning modern-day Pakistan and the diaspora in the United States, from a sparkling new literary talent.
In eight unflinching and stunningly crafted stories, Kanza Javed unspools the lives of characters desperately trying to forge a path for themselves on the margins of society. An addict teaches his young son to shoot feral dogs on the streets of Lahore. A Christian nurse gets drawn into a plan to trap the ghost of her patient’s former lover. A Pakistani student in a small Appalachian town grapples with a startling act of violence that shatters her illusions of safety and freedom. A lonely wife, trapped indoors by a harsh winter, becomes increasingly obsessed with a cloth worry doll left behind by a previous tenant.
Written with keen psychological insight and remarkable empathy, these stories reach across divides of class, gender and religion as Javed deftly examines questions of identity and agency, belonging and loss. What Remains After a Fire is a moving portrayal of fiercely resilient characters who desire more than what their circumstances can offer them—and what these desires ultimately cost them.
Kanza Javed, What Remains After a Fire (W.W. Norton & Company)
Kanza Javed was born and raised in Lahore. She holds an MFA from West Virginia University, where she received the Rebecca Mason Perry Award, and an MPHIL from Kinnaird College for Women. She was shortlisted by the Santa Fe Writers Project and is the winner of the 2020 Reynolds Price Prize for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in American Literary Review, Punch Magazine, Salamander, The Malahat Review, Narrating Pakistan, Greensboro Review and elsewhere. [Photo credit: Farrukh Gill]
X: @KanzaJaved | Instagram: @kanza_j
The Tiny Things Are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo (Manilla Press [Bonnier Books UK])
The Tiny Things Are Heavier follows Sommy, a Nigerian woman who comes to the United States for graduate school two weeks after her brother, Mezie, attempts suicide. Plagued by the guilt of leaving Mezie behind, Sommy struggles to fit into her new life as a student and an immigrant. Lonely and homesick, Sommy soon enters a complicated relationship with her boisterous Nigerian roommate, Bayo, a relationship that plummets into deceit when Sommy falls for Bryan, a biracial American, whose estranged Nigerian father left the States immediately after his birth. Bonded by their feelings of unbelonging and a vague sense of kinship, Sommy and Bryan transcend the challenges of their new relationship.
During summer break, Sommy and Bryan visit the bustling city of Lagos, Nigeria, where Sommy hopes to reconcile with Mezie and Bryan plans to connect with his father. But when a shocking and unexpected event throws their lives into disarray, it exposes the cracks in Sommy's relationships and forces her to confront her notions of self and familial love.
A daring and ambitious novel rendered in stirring, tender prose, The Tiny Things Are Heavier is a captivating portrait that explores the hardships of migration, the subtleties of Nigeria's class system, and how far we'll go to protect those we love.
Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo, The Tiny Things Are Heavier (Manilla Press [Bonnier Books UK])
Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from Florida State University. Her fiction has appeared in Isele Magazine, Guernica, and Catapult. She’s a recipient of a 2021 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Home for her is Lagos, Nigeria. She lives in Detroit, Michigan. [Photo credit: LeChoyce Photography]
Instagram: @ifesinachy
Borderline Fiction by Derek Owusu (Canongate)
Loneliness means you don't have to disappoint anyone until you develop the habit of talking to yourself
At nineteen, Marcus is young and in love . . . again. When his latest crush, Adwoa, starts showing him true affection, Marcus is ready to reconsider his lifestyle - the drugs, the casual encounters. At least for a little while.
Now, before he knows it, Marcus is twenty-five. And history risks repeating itself.
Told through two parallel narratives - one past, one present - Borderline Fiction is a highly original and deeply affecting contemporary tale written with an intensity of emotion and vulnerability. The novel is a close-up, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes funny examination of what it means to be a young black man navigating today's world.
Tortured, beautiful, anxious and poetic, Borderline Fiction is a memorable glimpse into the inner world of a young man searching for an authentic way to love and be loved.
Derek Owusu, Borderline Fiction (Canongate)
Derek Owusu is an award-winning writer and poet from North London. He has written for the BBC, ITV, Granta, Esquire, GQ and Tate Britain. In 2019, Owusu collated, edited and contributed to SAFE: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space, an anthology exploring the experiences of Black men in Britain. His first novel, That Reminds Me, won the Desmond Elliott Prize for best debut novel published in the UK and Ireland. His novel Losing the Plot was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2023. The same year, he was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. [Photo credit: Josimar Senior]
Instagram: @DerekvsOwusu
Absence by Issa Quincy (Granta)
A child is beguiled by a poem read to him by his mother. The poem follows this elusive narrator like a whisper throughout his life, echoing across the years in the stories and lives of others as they are recounted to him: an enigmatic and beloved schoolteacher who leaves behind a dark secret after his death; a woman who lays the table for a son she knows will never return home; a young man shunned by his family, who finds solace and freedom in the letters from an estranged aunt; a black-and-white photograph that tells of another family, afflicted with generations of tragedy.
With fierce imagination, Issa Quincy has constructed a transcendent portrait of humanity, deftly illuminating a symphony of memories, murmurs and phantoms that add up to an ordinary human life.
Issa Quincy, Absence (Granta)
Issa Quincy is a British writer. His poetry has appeared in the London Magazine and the Atlantic, and has been anthologised by New Rivers Press. His fiction has appeared in Transition Magazine and the Kenyon Review. Absence is his first novel. [Photo credit: Jim Larsen]
Gunk by Saba Sams (Bloomsbury Circus)
Jules has been divorced from her ex-husband Leon for five years, but she still works alongside him at Gunk, the grotty student nightclub he owns in central Brighton. She spends her nights serving shots and watching, from behind the bar, as Leon flirts with students on the dancefloor.
But then Leon hires nineteen-year-old Nim to work the bar - and her arrival jolts Jules awake for the first time in years. When Nim discovers she's pregnant, Jules agrees to help. As the months pass, and the relationship between the two women grows increasingly intimate and perplexing, it emerges that Nim has her own unexpected gifts to give.
Now, alone in her small flat, Jules is holding a baby, just twenty-four hours old, who still smells of Nim. But no one knows where Nim is, or if she's coming back. What could the future - for Jules, Nim, and this unnamed baby - possibly look like?
Raw, exhilarating, tender and wise, Gunk is an electrifying debut novel exploring love and desire, safety and destruction, chaos and control - and family in all its forms.
Saba Sams, Gunk (Bloomsbury Circus)
Saba Sams was raised in Brighton and now lives in Wales. She was selected for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2023 and The Sunday Times’ Young Power List in 2025. Her short story collection Send Nudes was awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2022 and was shortlisted for the University of Swansea International Dylan Thomas Prize 2023. The story ‘Blue 4eva’ from the collection was awarded the BBC National Short Story Award. Send Nudes was selected as a book of the year by the Guardian, Stylist, Vogue, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Evening Standard, Irish Independent, AnOther, Foyles and bookshop.org, and was named a Sunday Times paperback of the year in 2023. [Photo Credit: Alice Zoo]
Instagram: @Saba_sams
Make a Home of Me by Vanessa Santos (Dead Ink Books)
Peer through the keyhole what will you see?
A mysterious dinner party with a sickening twist. A woman’s intense new relationship with a single father and his strangely shy daughter The rediscovered journals of a famous artist with a singular obsession who disappeared in suspicious circumstances. A family driven to desperation by the impossible appearance of nonsensical notes. And a seemingly happily married couple driven to the edge of despair by a neighbour’s crying baby.
Set in houses that should provide protection but instead turn on their inhabitants, places of safety invaded without warning, and familiar landscapes that gradually change beyond recognition, Make a Home of Me is about all the ways in which our sanctuaries can turn into foreign places, casting us as strangers as we roam the halls.
The stories in Make a Home of Me are unsettling and distinct, introducing a fresh new voice in the horror landscape.
Lock up when you’re done...
Vanessa Santos, Make a Home of Me (Dead Ink Books)
Vanessa Santos was born and raised on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic. She now lives in Scotland (though still by the sea) and spends as much of her time as possible devouring stories, writing stories, and wandering the endless Scottish woods. Her short fiction has been published online at Samjoko Magazine and Idle Ink, and in anthologies by Sliced Up Press, Colp, and Solar Press. Her debut short story collection Make a Home of Me was published by Dead Ink in 2025, and her debut novel In Your Heart a Devil will be published in October 2026, also by Dead Ink.
Instagram: @nesscbsantos