With longer days and a little more time to ourselves, spring presents the perfect opportunity to get lost in a good book. Whether your preferred reading spot is a sun-drenched terrace, a quiet corner at home or somewhere further afield, we’ve curated a selection of compelling new reads spanning literary fiction, gripping page-turners and extraordinary true stories, each offering a very good reason to put everything else on hold for a while.
Taipei Story
by Rebecca F. Kuang
The bestselling author of Yellowface turns to Taipei for this searching coming-of-age story. Lily Chen arrives hoping to improve her Chinese and reconnect with her roots; instead, an awkward romance, vicious gossip and sudden grief turn her summer into a search for the grandfather she has lost and the family history she never knew.
The Things We Never Say
by Elizabeth Strout
In a novel longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize, Strout returns with Artie Dam, a beloved Massachusetts history teacher whose genial exterior conceals profound loneliness. A brush with death dislodges
a long-buried secret, altering the shape of his marriage, his bond with his adult son, and the life he thought he understood.
The World Beneath Her Feet
by Holly Ringland
Far from the wild Queensland valley that shaped her, Maggie Byrd has built a charmed life in London and kept the betrayal that drove her away buried. An unexpected inheritance now places the land in her hands, drawing her back to the place and the people she left behind, and to the unfinished story awaiting her.
Big Little Truths
by Liane Moriarty
Following on from global phenomenon Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty returns to Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata and Bonnie a decade later. Their children are now teenagers, a stranger is circling the school with unsettling questions, and a macabre discovery threatens to expose everything this tightly bound community has kept hidden.
The Farm
by Bruce Ansley
Armed with a ten-week polytech course and a dangerously persuasive dream, Bruce Ansley swaps his home on a Christchurch clifftop for a deer farm on Banks Peninsula. The result is a warm, wry account of what it really takes to live the country dream, and what happens when paradise refuses to follow the plan.
One Day a Taniwha
by Tīhema Baker
Four months into fatherhood, Hepa is struggling to keep his family together. Then something with pāua-shell eyes begins watching from his dreams, and following him into waking life. As the boundary between nightmare and reality collapses, Hepa must decide whether it’s the beast threatening his family, or if the real danger lies closer to home.
Exit Party
by Emily St. John Mandel
In 2031, with America at war with itself and curfew finally lifted in Los Angeles, Ari Waker joins the celebrations at a local party, where an uncanny doppelganger appears and the host vanishes. Years later in Paris, the mystery of that night still haunts her, and may hold the key to another world.
The Song of Stork and Dromedary
by Anjet Daanje
Inspired by the life and work of Emily Brontë, Anjet Daanje’s multi-award-winning novel follows Eliza May Drayden, whose maligned book becomes a masterpiece after her death. Told through letters, notebooks, and lives unfolding across centuries, The Song of Stork and Dromedary has been touted as the finest Dutch novel of this century.
Partita
by Barbara Kingsolver
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first novel since Demon Copperhead. Once a gifted pianist, Livia traded musical promise for the shape of an ordinary life. Now, decades later, an old lover calls, forcing her to decide whether to meet the man who changed the course of her life, or leave the past undisturbed.
Switzy
by Emma Cline
David, an ageing former executive, is travelling to Switzerland to arrange his final days in this Booker Prize-longlisted novel from author of The Girls and The Guest. Armed with reminders he barely recognises, he stops in London to see his daughter, and in France to meet an estranged friend, while the past steadily floods the gaps opening in his mind.
An Unexpected Life
by Gloria Steinem
Before she was a defining voice of modern feminism, Gloria Steinem was a curious child moving from place to place, weathering family hardship and finding refuge in books. Intimate, spirited, and rich with hard-won wisdom, An Unexpected Life traces the experiences that transformed Steinem’s private awakening into a lifetime of public change.
John Berger: From Life
by Tom Overton
After John Berger gave his archive to the British Library, Tom Overton began cataloguing its contents and struck up a friendship with the writer. Drawing on their conversations and a vast trove of previously unseen material, Overton illuminates the artist, novelist, and radical thinker who transformed how generations learned to see.
