As the late, great Tim Curry once said (okay, I’m paraphrasing and it was actually Frankenfurter but, hey…), nothing gets the juices flowing quite like a little antici… pation. J.M. Coetzee knew it in Waiting For The Barbarians. So, too, did Dino Buzzati and Samuel Beckett. With his latest novel, Ada, Mark Haber joins the ranks of great writers who appreciate the enormous power of suspending gratification, making the wait more tense, exciting and thought-provoking than whatever it is we’re waiting for.

Here we get the obsessive ranting of a nepo-tyrant, recently ascended to the throne, who is hell bent on reconnecting with his lost love. Never mind that they only had a brief fling and she has since married. While his empire crumbles around him, Desacroux IV anxiously awaits the arrival of Ada and her husband. He has invited them to visit, with the intention of offing the latter and keeping Ada for himself. Equal parts Blackadder-style farce and serious meditation on power, lust and delusion, Ada is another slice of top notch story-telling from the IYKYK criminally under-appreciated Haber. Seriously, four books in and the guy can do no wrong.

Ada by Mark Haber
Coffee House Press, 2026
90 pages

In the closing chapter of Rachel Cusk’s latest book, the titular M (a thinly veiled Natalie Portman) expresses disappointment verging on anger about how the book has turned out. She doesn’t like how she’s been portrayed. Now, aside from some rather glaring biographical parallels, there’s nothing explicitly saying that M is Portman. But parse the subtext (by which I mean read the gossip rags) and it seems the actress and author went into the project together and remained conspirators until Portman saw the finished product. The ensuing hullabaloo has made what was already a literary event (as is any new Cusk book) into a Hollywood scandal.

Bummer that, because Life of M is a brilliant observational exercise into fame, the nature of acting and the meaning of self. Heck, it almost made me a Cusk fan (#sorrynotsorry). Portman M proves the perfect case study, having been in the public eye since she was a child, and denied any semblance of normalcy, no matter how much she has tried to manufacture some. Cusk dissects her life, and the downright strange scaffolding built around her. There’s no soft light here. Just blinding, cold truth. Almost makes up for The Phantom Menace.

Life of M by Rachel Cusk
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026
192 pages

It’s almost a truism that fables make for great novellas. Animal Farm. The Metamorphosis. The Little Prince. Often, the power lies in brevity; stripped of fat, words become finely honed blades of change. There is, however, a danger. Any author hoping to make a point will be tempted to pull back the curtain and expose the inner workings just in case. It comes down to a matter of trust.

And so I was left wondering just how much Fadi Zaghmout, in his mostly superb novella, trusted his readers. It starts off brilliantly. In a society structured around height - where shorts are the ruling class and talls are considered less than - a short seamstress falls for a man of middling height. I was completely taken in. And yes, I saw it for its sharp critique of how we view gender, gender identity and sexuality.

But Zaghmout wants to make sure you get it. About two thirds through, when revolution is in the air and the shit is circling the fan, he goes full Jeff Goldblum and shows you the turning cogs. The immersion is momentarily broken. If only he’d trusted in the power of the fable he’d created.

The Man of Middling Height by Fadi Zaghmout (Tr. Wasan Abdelhaq)
Syracuse University Press, 2025
198 pages

Anyone who has read Anna Burns’s divisive 2018 Booker Prize winner, Milkman, will know exactly what they’re in for when picking up Mostly Hero. There will be a familiar story, deconstructed, reconstructed, shone through a thousand prisms and made meta within an inch of its life. It will take the form of words of the page that you may or may not understand. The fact I still can’t decide what I thought of Milkman should probably clue you in to where I’m going with this. Like that book, Mostly Hero is a highly self-conscious subversion of a well-worn genre though this time it’s the classic superhero tale.

There’s a fair deal of lampooning at play here. The characters are mostly named for their types - hero, femme fatale, etc - though the ones that have names are chefs kiss wonderful. Great Aunt (the arch villain), Monique Frostique. You get it. Burns has a blast with all the superhero tropes, though I struggled to parse the plot for all its linguistic acrobatics. More than anything, it made me think back to Andrew Kaufman’s delightful All My Friends Are Superheroes. Also subversive. Also satirical. But accessible and sweet. Maybe read that first.

Mostly Hero by Anna Burns
Faber, 2026 (2014)
106 pages

If books land in a particular cultural moment, then Yishay Ishi Ron’s deeply moving and psychologically complex novel, Dog, couldn’t have picked a worse time. I imagine people won’t be flocking to read a novella by a former Israeli soldier that projects his own experience with PTSD in the wake of wartime horrors onto a sympathetic (and seriously messed up) homeless dude roaming the streets of Tel Aviv. It’s a shame really, because Dog is an excellent book, and well worth your time.

Geller (named for the great spoon-bender Uri) is living rough. Wracked by flashbacks, addicted to heroin and generally in the pits of living hell, he is the poster boy for post-service system failure by an uncaring government. His chance at redemption comes in the form of a ragged mutt that turns up out of nowhere and starts following him. A murder and weird quasi-romance subplot propel Geller’s tale along but what really makes this book special is its brutal honestly, raw emotion and unflinching take on an overly-familiar conflict from a totally new perspective.

This might well be Israel’s All Quiet On the Western Front as narrated by Trumbo’s Joe Bonham. Harrowing, dignified and vital.

Dog by Ishay Ishi Ron (Tr. Yardenne Greenspan)
Soncata Press/Ginninderra Press, 2025
141 pages

Full disclosure. Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life (not to be confused with the bloated trauma porn bible, A Little Life) is one of my all-time favourite books. And while I’ve since read every book of his that’s been translated, none have lived up to the sheer magnificence of that miniature masterpiece. Okay, The Tobacconist was pretty good but The Field was an experimental mess and The Cafe With No Name was a little too ethereal and meandering.

Thankfully, there is much to love in this, his latest work. Based (as usual) on true events, it tells of Gustav Mahler’s final voyage across the Atlantic in 1911, just before the great composer dropped off the mortal conductor’s podium. Seethaler’s Mahler is a shadow of his former self - his powers are waning, his marriage disintegrating, and he is bereft following the death of his eldest daughter. Yet, in his plight we see a shared humanity that transcends stature and accomplishment. It’s beautiful. There’s also a little fan service - Seethaler scatters seeds of his previous work throughout, which I smugly gobbled up.

It all amounts to something that, while not quite A Whole Life, is a lovely return to form.

The Last Movement by Robert Seethaler (Tr. Charlotte Collins)
Canongate, 2026
108 pages

Believe the noise around Copi’s 1979 subversive classic and you’d be forgiven for thinking City of Rats is the most depraved book ever written. Just a quick glance at Goodreads (urgh…) and you’ll be assailed by a barrage of clutched pearls. To be fair, it has moments that might make you squirm with discomfort. But I found much of its over-the-top graphic sex and violence cartoonish to the point of silliness. Mostly, I laughed.

City of Rats is the anti-Ratatouille. In the sewers of Paris, rats, humans and other despicable creatures duke it out for ultimate control of the city. Epistolary in form (the book is told through letters sent by a rat to the author), and politically charged in nature, City of Rats riffs rather unsparingly on Copi’s obsessions: poverty, class, gender identity and body horror. Along the way we meet a wonderful cast of weirdos that might not have been out of place in a JK Huysmans nightmare.

The city is lush, filthy and decadent, and you can tell Copi relished bubble bathing in the disgust he sought to invoke. But blow the feculent foam aside and you’ll find something more akin to Orwell than Passolini. Filthily delightful.

City of Rats by Copi (Tr. Kit Schluter)
Vintage Classics, 2026 (1979)
124 pages

While man’s capacity for wanton stupidity is well known, some cockamamie schemes still manage to test the bounds of reason. The scheme at the centre of Roque Larraquy’s damning satire of ethnocentric patriarchal hubris just about takes the cake.

It’s 1933 and Argentinian rubber baron Amado Dam has just paid for nineteen indigenous people to be shipped from the Amazon to Buenos Aires for display in his new theme park. Alas, there’s a screw up with their papers and they end up in his apartment where Dam discovers a wooden totem they’ve brought along for the ride. He breaks it open and finds a hibernating sloth. Which is where this book gets weird.

Turns out the sloth has a magic power: its claws cause telepathic connections between the people it scratches. Not just any connections. Intense, orgasmic connections of pure sexual bliss. Needless to say, Dam forgets about his lodgers in favour a much more lucrative business opportunity. Things escalate quickly. The government steps in, seeking to harness the sloth for its own nefarious purposes. The novel splits and fragments, a tumbling barrage of stylistic flashes that explode in a Catherine Wheel of socio-political lampoonery. Absurdly funny and deeply disturbing.

The National Telepathy by Roque Larraquy (Tr. Frank Wynne)
Charco Press, 2024
154 pages

Cthulhu knows what was in the water back at the turn of last century, but those Eldritch horror writers sure drank a lot of it. There’s something oddly charming about their wildly fertile imaginations, even if their obsession with large tentacled creatures from some Hellish dimension make me giggle more than poop my pants. Now, I’m not a huge Lovecraft fan - I like my horror Annie Wilkes style - so I came to this book with only a passing curiosity. But given it kicks off with the whole found manuscript schtick, I was willing to go along for the ride.

Two men on a fishing trip in Ireland find a journal tucked into some ruins at the edge of a large abyss. Written by a strange loner, it recounts his time in a house tending to his sister. Weird stuff begins to happen. Strange lights filter through windows. A parallel dimension opens up in the form of a vast plain, into which the loner ventures. All the Eldritch trappings are here - beasts, hostile lands, sentient vengeful vegetation. And an all-consuming, ferocious swine monster. Honestly, it’s bloody hilarious, albeit unintentionally, and an absolute hoot to read. Do it!

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
Penguin, 2024 (1908)
190 pages

There are plenty of great novels about the horrors of colonial conquest but few I’ve read are as unsparingly brutal as Mathieu Belezi’s Attacking Earth and Sun. Set at the dawn of France’s occupation of Algeria, it spins a double tale of misery - the invading army’s barbaric destruction of local villages and massacre of the unsuspecting locals, and the futile attempts of the French civilian settlers to make something of their new environs. The first is as you would expect. Stomach turning. Heart breaking. Infuriating. But it is the latter that really sets this book apart.

Narrated by Seraphine, a young woman who was sold a false bill of goods by the French government, with promises of fertile lands to cultivate and riches to be made, we bear witness to her quickly shattering dreams and the realisation of the inhumanity to which she is accomplice. It makes for a complex character study. Seraphine and her fellow farmers are both victims and perpetrators. In so framing the book, Belezi invites us to consider the many faces of colonialism and how, ultimately, everybody loses. Almost two centuries after the events it recounts, Attacking Earth and Sun is shockingly relevant.

Attacking Earth And Sun by (Tr. Lara Vergnaud)
New Directions, 2025
132 pages

Only three books have changed my life. I Am The Cheese opened my 14-year-old eyes to the possibilities of fiction. The abject absurdity of existence was revealed to me at university in The Trial. And then, in 2018, came Édouard Louis’s Who Killed My Father. More a polemic than a novel, this J’Accuse for our times completely reset my understanding of class, power and the crushing force of structural inequality. I have since read everything Louis has written and, while nothing has lived up to …Father, he continues to shock and fascinate me.

Now, it’s arguable whether his books should be considered novels, even by very generous interpretations of autofiction. They are published as such, but they seem to dangle over the precipice of memoir. His coming of age and coming out, the death of his mother, a violent rape (arguably the best of these ‘novels’). And now, in Collapse, we get the estrangement, decline and death of his brother. Like all these books, it’s a tough read. Louis pulls no punches in his depiction of an alcoholic, homophobic thug about whose death he cares little. A complex, unpleasant read, but also a work of quite remarkable genius.

Collapse by Édouard Louis (Tr. Tash Aw)
Harvill, 2026
194 pages

Some snazzy looking new editions, plus my overwhelming desire to step away from the high-lit wankery that has marked my reading of late, recently sucked me back into the world of the great French thriller writer, Jean-Patrick Manchette. It’s been years since I was enthralled by The Prone Gunman and Nada, and I realised I’ve never read what many consider his 1977 masterpiece - Fatale. Alors!

Aimée Joubert is a kick-arse assassin for hire who likes to mix a bit of political activism in with her killing. After a Bond-style opening salvo in which she shoots a rich hunter in the face, Aimée sets her sights (#sorrynotsorry) on the small town of Bléville. There she hatches a Dirty Rotten Scoundrels style scheme to upend its corrupt cabal of local elites and, by playing them off against one another, make a… #stillnotsorry… killing. Of course, her plans go arse up and all hell breaks loose.

It’s an absolute blast watching the whole thing unfold, and Manchette’s clear delight in shoving it to the ruling class gives a sharply radical edge to an otherwise violent, fast-paced and tightly-plotted yarn. You’ll be grinning from ear to bloody ear when you catch your breath.

Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette (Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith)
Vintage Classics, 2026
89 pages

There have been some pretty weird narrators over the years. A pot in Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector. A gecko in José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons. Any number of inanimate object (and a colour) in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red. But none of them could prepare me for the intestinal worms lodged in the gut of a dying French bulldog that hold the microphone in The Oldest Bitch Alive. Imagine the editorial pitch meeting that green lit this!

Gelsomina is already on her last legs when the infestation hits. In death she is becoming a vessel for life. This existential juxtaposition underpins what could easily have been a cheap gimmick but turns out to be an absolutely fascinating mash-up of science, philosophy, body horror and linguistic acrobatics. It’s also a rather sweet treatise on our relationship with the animals we welcome into our families.

Granted this isn’t a book for everyone. Day’s ventriloquism veers into the outright absurd, with some of the weirdest poetic flourishes and thought dumps I’ve encountered. But if you’re willing to get on board, it’s an absolute trip. And, who knows. Maybe this is exactly how a worm talks.

The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day
Astra House, 2026
192 pages

For someone so singularly obsessed with novellas as me, it beggars belief that I’d never read what is considered to be one of the GOATs of the form. In some ways I’m glad because The Invention of Morel seems to have grown more prescient with time, and reading it in the era of AI and deep fakes is a delightfully creepy reward unto itself.

This celebrated story of a lone fugitive washing up on a seemingly deserted island only to fall in love with a visiting tourist who completely ignores his presence is about as mind bending as you could possibly hope. And, without resorting to spoilers, its sci-fi meets philosophy meets romance meets horror twist presages some of the greatest technological/ethical conundrums of our time. Think Val Kilmer in As Deep As The Grave or Peter Cushing in Rogue One.

In the gorgeous Letter to D., André Gorz famously wrote of his wife, “We’ve often said to ourselves that if, by some miracle, we were to have a second life, we’d like to live it together.” Casares concocts a reality in which this is very much possible. It is -alas - heaven, purgatory and hell in one.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (Tr. Ruth L.C. Simms)
NYRB Classics, 2003 (First pub. 1940)
103 pages

There are those surreal mindf*%$ novels that announce themselves from the outset and spend the entirety of their narrative playing ping pong with your brain. Then there are books like My Death; so deftly nested and subtle that you have no idea what’s going on until the rug is pulled out from under you and you go full Wile E. Coyote hurtling down the cliff face. The setup here is cosy and gentle. An unnamed, aging writer decides to return for one last hurrah. While chatting with her agent she decides it will be a biography of a minor, but to her very important, writer, Helen Ralston.

Long since gone to ground, Ralston (likely modelled on Silvina Ocampo) was lover and muse to a literary great, while also a novelist and artist in her own right. The narrator is surprised to learn Ralston is still alive (albeit 95). They meet. They chat. And Ralston begins dropping details of the narrator’s life into their conversation. What. The. Actual…

Time and space shift, realities collide and bounce off one another. And yet, you can’t help but feel you’re still reading this lovely, warm tale of women, aging, art and erasure. Just superb!

My Death by Lisa Tuttle
Vintage Classics, 2023
105 pages

Few books wield the moral force of revelation. There’s the usual suspects: Beloved, The Jungle, Disgrace, The Grapes of Wrath. To those I’d add some lesser known works: Knowledge of Angels, The Erl King, Schoepenhauer’s Telescope. I don’t think I’m taking too great a liberty by adding Tahmima Anam’s latest book to the pantheon of greats. This is a book that can change lives.

From its opening passage, Uprising will rip out your heart. Set on a small island off the coast of Bangladesh, it tells the story of a community of women who were kidnapped, tricked or sold by their families into a life of forced prostitution. In the face of unimaginable horrors, these women maintain their dignity and protect the children borne to them of their “clients”. When fresh-faced Kusum Khan arrives, their lives are thrown into turmoil. They fear her beauty and her youth. But Kusum is different. She talks of revolution. She wants them to unite and fight back. What follows is a battle of bodies, minds and weather that had me scraping my jaw from the floor.

Unsparing in its detail and ferocious in its moral rage, Uprising is a modern masterpiece and future classic.

Uprising by Tahmima Anam
Canongate, 2026
197 pages

Spanish poet Federico Lorca seems an unlikely touchpoint for a novel that interrogates the legacies of violence and deprivation, but it is the aching beauty of Lorca’s work that offsets the brutality in Neil Rollinson’s excellent debut.

Frank tracks down his brother Gordon in a remote Spanish town to let him know their father is dead. The three men have history, and not the good kind. Dear ol’ dad was a brutal tyrant who roped his young sons into his criminal capers. Robberies, murder, you name it. Frank was left broken. Gordon turned into a monster then ran off with Frank’s love, Carol.

The Dead Don’t Bleed flits effortlessly between time and place, giving us snapshot glimpses into lives of sustained trauma. It is damned bleak, but crackling with propulsive energy. There’s almost a biblical ferocity at play - Frank and Gordon are a Cain and Abel for our times. Rollinson doesn’t offer twee morality or satisfying resolution. Frank frequently quotes Lorca, a reminder that there is beauty to be found in hell. That words can be a salve. But, then again, Lorca was summarily shot and dumped in a ditch. That says it all, really.

The Dead Don’t Bleed by Neil Rollinson
Jonathan Cape, 2026
177 pages

The embers of totalitarianism glow long in this absolute gut punch of a book. Back in 1967, Hans and Katrin prepare to welcome their fist child. Even the weight of East German life can’t dampen their excitement. When the baby is born, it is quickly whisked away by doctors. They are then told it died, and to get on with life. Hans begins to mourn. Katrin insists their son is alive, goes mad and dies young. That alone would have made for a tough read. But fast forward forty years, and Hans - now an old man - receives an unlikely call. It’s from a guy called Martin, who has done an ancestry test. Hans is his father.

Any dream Hans had of a happy reunion is quickly shattered. Martin grew up in a loving family, fed the official lie that his birth parents - drunken petty criminals - gave him away. It makes for an emotionally complex showdown, as Jügler navigates each man’s grief, anger, trauma and hope. For the most part it’s a deeply sad (albeit riveting) affair. I wasn’t entirely convinced by its final turn to the promise of reconciliation, but otherwise Mayfly Season is utterly astounding.

Mayfly Season by Matthias Jügler (Tr. Jo Heinrich)
Indigo Press, 2026
143 pages

It’s easy to forget those Irish writers who did the hard yards between Joyce and, say, Enright or Mooney. Among them, Maeve Brennan is a name seemingly lost to time. She mostly wrote short stories and criticism, but if her only novel, The Visitor, is anything to go by, she was a vital piece of connective tissue between the generations. Much like The Gathering, this book does the unpleasant job of excavating the ruins of family to devastating effect.

Anastasia returns from Paris to Dublin to see her grandmother. It’s been a long time coming. Her parents split, she chose to follow her deeply damaged mum, and dad was left at home crying over his broken life. He died young and miserable. Grandma never forgave mum, or Anastasia. The meeting is predictably cataclysmic, recounted with stunning clarity in Brennan’s perfect prose. I frequently gasped - at a turn of phrase here or a petty humiliation there.

Written in the 40s but only published posthumously, The Visitor sets fire to the complex power dynamics of family, class and friendships like few books I’ve read. It throws trauma - new and inherited - in your face. And it’s downright stunning.

The Visitor by Maeve Brennan
Peninsula Press, 2025 (first pub. 2000)
107 pages

Never let it be said that I won’t go the extra mile for you. The moment I finished reading Exit 8, I downloaded the game from which it was adapted and spent the next hour wandering that single, sterile Japanese subway corridor looking for the way out. I never found it. And gave up. I suck. But it gave me some interesting insight into the nature of loose adaptations when it comes to what I feel has become one of the strongest vehicles for kick-arse narrative delivery: video games.

Exit 8 isn’t a direct port, so to speak. It can’t be. The game consists of little more than walking a single strip looking for anomalies that might help you find the exit. Some are mundane. Some are proper scary. The novel, then, is a horror of sorts but tries to shoehorn a kind of allegory for parenthood, as well as some weird moral element that feels vaguely preachy. It makes for a decent enough story, and I liked that Kawamura tried to make it something more than its source material. But when that material is basically just a PT Mod, I’m not convinced there was ever enough to mine.

Exit 8 by Genki Kawamura (Tr. Sameeha Anwar)
Ithaka Press, 2026
101 pages