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
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
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