Fiction
Land by Maggie O’Farrell
In her novels, Maggie O’Farrell has roamed from Renaissance Florence and Elizabethan England (Hamnet) to 1950s London. In Land she alights on Great Famine-era Ireland. This is a family story, a tale of regret, loss, rebellion and love, following the travails of Tomás, a mapmaker, and his family. Tomás’s profession allows O’Farrell to mine, with a sure emotional touch, both the past and its myths as well as survey the topography of the land and the people who live on it. Read our review here.
Tinder Press, 448pp, £25. Buy the book
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zi, translated by Lin King
Taiwan in the summer is not for the weak. Humidity hovers at 90 per cent. The air is thick enough to carry. But humans have done what humans do best: adapt – and, crucially, adapt what they eat. Fill yourself with shaved ice, herbal jellies and jute soup, and you too can master a Taiwanese summer. This is what Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese travel writer and protagonist of this International Booker Prize-winning novel, learns when she arrives on “the southern island” in 1938. Dispatched by the imperial government to document life there, Chizuko becomes fixated on finding “the real Taiwan”. But what is a nation’s cultural identity when it has been shaped and reshaped by the hands of its colonisers? Read our interview with the author here
And Other Stories, 320pp, £14.99. Buy the book
This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Here is a rare political novel, one animated by curiosity about how power actually works. In tracing the history of a Pakistani family and their dependants over six decades, Daniyal Mueenuddin adroitly illuminates not just a complicated country but its moral framework too. Read our review here.
Bloomsbury, 368pp, £18.99. Buy the book
Transcription by Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner is no stranger to autofiction. His latest novella shifts from the satirical to the elegiac. An elderly professor-cum-artist is joined on his final trip abroad by the narrator, who poses as a magazine interviewer. Pieced together from the transcript, Transcription is a literary puzzle full of twists and contradictions. Read our review here.
Granta, 144pp, £14.99. Buy the book
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar
India’s history is littered with famines that cost the lives of millions. In A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar imagines Kolkata in the grip of a future climate crisis. Ma (“Mother”) wants out, with her young daughter and father, and her misadventures are set against stories of hardship. Fleeing or staying are equally hard.
Simon & Schuster, 224pp, £16.99. Buy the book
Natives of My Person by George Lamming
At last reissued, this long out-of-print 1972 masterpiece – described by the critic CLR James as a West Indian Moby-Dick – poignantly envisions the conquest of a Caribbean island by European colonisers in the 17th century. Arguably George Lamming’s finest novel.
Penguin Modern Classics, 432pp, £12.99. Buy the book
Château Rouge by Amit Chaudhuri
A master prose stylist working in the modernist tradition, Chaudhuri has recently been preoccupied by the challenge of capturing life in moments. Paris provides the perfect setting for this beautiful, quietly experimental novel about a man floating through a city he struggles to find his place in.
Faber & Faber, 208pp, £14.99. Buy the book
Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi
Hannah Lillith Assadi’s third novel is semi-biographical: it draws inspiration from her Palestinian father’s expulsion and his choice to settle in the United States. It does not romanticise exile, but rather presents it as a ghostly state full of contradictions. Read our review here
4th Estate, 320pp, £16.99. Buy the book
Non-fiction
The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and His Search for Humanity by Andrea Wulf
Andrea Wulf has carved out an unlikely niche as the author of blockbuster intellectual biographies. Her latest is an account of the 18th-century polymath George Forster, who – aged only 17 – was employed as a naturalist on Captain Cook’s voyage to the Pacific. Encountering Pacific Islanders, Forster learns their languages and makes a discovery that puts him at odds with Europe’s finest minds: that all humans are equal. There is, as Wulf shows, still so much to learn from Forster’s insights. Read our review here
Allen Lane, 512pp, £30. Buy the book
The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires by Sophie Pinkham
Trees are overlooked in Russia’s history. But, as the cultural historian Sophie Pinkham points out, for centuries the country’s pines and larches have been both friend and foe to Russians and their enemies. Spanning prehistoric times to the modern era, Pinkham’s book highlights the enduring presence of the woodlands. During times of war, in their contribution to the economy, amid ecological disasters and in providing significant locations (the dissolution of the Soviet Union was formalised in the Belovezha Forest in 1991), forests have – and continue to have – a formidable impact on the lives of Russians. Read our review here
William Collins, 304pp, £25. Buy the book
Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun by Keza MacDonald
Oscar Wilde, Vincent van Gogh and Otto von Bismarck could have played Nintendo together, if they’d had the ornate hanafuda playing cards the company made at the end of the 19th century. As the 20th century arrived, Nintendo made plastic toys and games, and when these games moved on to screens they retained the same imaginative, tactile qualities. While other games companies focused on simulating the experience of combat, Nintendo persisted in building its own quirky, animistic world. Keza McDonald’s love letter to the company contains none of the corporate barbarity or disgrace that are so often the subjects of business books, and Super Nintendo is no less compelling for it.
Guardian Faber, 304pp, £20. Buy the book
Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul by Caroline Moorehead
The latest biography of Leonardo Sciascia approaches his life from a fresh angle. Tracing his journey from humble beginnings into the world of high politics, it focuses on how both fascism and the turbulent history of Sicily moulded Sciascia into one of Italy’s most revered writers and statesmen.
Chatto & Windus, 320pp, £25. Buy the book
A History of Modern Syria by Daniel Neep
Drawing from a rich pool of sources, from soap operas to autobiographies, Daniel Neep’s refreshing take on Syria’s history reveals how the modern state was built on layers of earlier making and remaking.
Allen Lane, 704pp, £40. Buy the book
Kafkaesque: Ten Great Writers Translate the Twentieth Century by Maïa Hruska
Franz Kafka, a German-speaking Czech Jew, is a global phenomenon. But this is due in large part to the translators who carried his fictions into other literatures – from the novelist Bruno Schulz, who translated Kafka into Polish, to the poet Paul Celan who did the same in Romanian. Maïa Hruska relates their often tragic stories in this intellectual voyage around Mitteleuropa. Read our review here
William Collins, 272pp, £16.99. Buy the book
Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer
A leading historian offers the definitive account of Weimar, a city that is central to Germany’s literary tradition – as well as to the darker chapters of its history.
Allen Lane, 496pp, £30. Buy the book
Iran and the Revolution: A History by Homa Katouzian
Iran’s 1979 revolution, which brought about the removal of the shah and his replacement by Ayatollah Khomeini, was, says Homa Katouzian, just another convulsion in a centuries-old history of unstable politics. The brutal theocracy that has since been in power has so far seen off every threat – both internal and external.
Yale University Press, 352pp, £25. Buy the book
The Migrants: A Memoir with Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel
This memoir by Christopher de Hamel, a rare books specialist and author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, is about a New Zealand bibliophile’s coming of age. As a 12-year-old, De Hamel came across a page of “an actual Gutenberg Bible” hanging on the wall of his local library in Dunedin, and his future course was set. Read our review here
Allen Lane, 320pp, £25. Buy the book
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This article appears in the 01 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Happy Birthday America
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