1. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Recommended by Manjeet Ridon, associate dean international for the faculty of arts, design and humanities, De Montfort University.
The Safekeep, a novel about the expropriation and theft of Jewish property during the second world war, revisits a dark chapter of Dutch history.
Before being deported, Dutch Jews were stripped of their homes and belongings, and forced to flee Amsterdam with what little they could carry. Van der Wouden’s debut novel shines an ironic light on the act of keeping or maintaining things that were to be reclaimed by their rightful owners, but which were lost or stolen in the war.
The trauma of this history hangs over the lives of three siblings grieving the loss of their mother.
Isabel, the novel’s lonely protagonist, lives alone in the family house, keeping it in order as her late mother would have wanted. All the while she suspects that their maid is stealing from the kitchen.
But following the arrival of her brother’s girlfriend, Eva, Isabel discovers the truth of the house and attempts to right historical wrongs.
2. Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Recommended by Debra Benita Shaw, reader in cultural theory, University of East London.
Winner of the Booker prize, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital skilfully exposes the human cost of space flight, set against the urgency of the climate crisis. While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the International Space Station.
Their everyday routine of tasteless food and laboratory work is in stark contrast to the awesome spectacle of the blue planet, oscillating between night and day, dark and light, where international borders are meaningless.
While they teach laboratory mice to orient themselves in micro-gravity, they rigorously document their own bodily functions to satisfy some “grand abstract dream of interplanetary life” away from “the planet held hostage by humans, a gun to its vitals”.
These are humans, Harvey tells us, “with a godly view that’s the blessing and also the curse”. Harvey has written a novel for the end of the world as we know it. The hope it offers is that we might learn to know it differently.
3. Gliff by Ali Smith
Recommended by Sarah Annes Brown, professor of English literature, Anglia Ruskin University.
Gliff shares many of the same concerns as Smith’s recent Seasonal Quartet (2016-20): the effects of climate change, the plight of refugees, and the growth of intolerance and authoritarianism. But this novel is set in a dystopian Britain where all these problems have intensified in frightening ways.
Smith follows in the footsteps of a growing number of literary novelists who have turned to science fiction in recent years, as boundaries between genres become less rigid.
This is the first of a planned pair of novels – the second to be called Glyph. Although the two words sound identical, their meanings are quite different. The Scottish word “gliff” means a shock, fright or sudden glimpse. A “glyph”, meanwhile, is a written character or symbol.
There’s similarly insistent wordplay in Gliff. It reflects its preoccupation with how meaning is created – and destroyed.
Gliff demonstrates Smith’s characteristic strengths as a novelist. The narrative is accessible and engaging, yet at the same time complex and subtle. Many puzzles are set for the reader – only some are resolved.
4. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Recommended by Orlaith Darling, postdoctoral fellow in contemporary English literature and critical theory, University College Dublin.
Intermezzo is perhaps Rooney’s most mature reflection on how relationships operate as exercises in optimism, both in each other and in the world itself. The novel is remarkable and bracing on the exchange of promises that happens in relationships, on the currency of hope they run on and the mutual, voluntary emotional debts they create.
These debts, of course, are not always repaid, and that is part of the point: the stakes of love are high, and we run the risk of defaulting and being defaulted on.
And yet, for Rooney, this risk is always worth taking. It must be, because it is all there is. Rooney’s is a world in which relationships sustain us and in which small daily miracles make life seem more bearable than is proportionate.
This might be as simple as the unthinking care enacted by such an everyday chore as “making up [a] packed lunch, Nutella sandwiches, an apple wrapped in kitchen roll” for someone else, or the unrationed totality of love a dog shows its owner after an absence.
As with each of her novels before this, Rooney’s power as a writer is to focus attention on the crazy hope we place in other people’s ability to sustain us and the anxiety we feel about what we could possibly offer in return.
5. James by Percival Everett
Recommended by Emily Zobel Marshall, reader in postcolonial literature, Leeds Beckett University.
James is an incredible rewriting of Mark Twain’s 1884 American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everett has reclaimed Twain’s “Jim” from the peripheries, boldly placing him centre stage.
Just like the original book, it’s set in the pre-civil war plantation south. It’s 1861, war is brewing, and James hears that he may be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his family. He goes on the run with the resourceful young white boy, Huck Finn.
This is a literary, writerly and scholarly novel. Everett expertly weaves black literary criticism and theory into his narrative, while also making artful allusions to the books that shaped American scholarly and literary traditions. This weaving, however, is done with a light and engaging touch.
James’s story will change you. You will start to question all the other classic novels you’ve read and wonder whose story is being suppressed. What if, you’ll ask yourself, they could be fleshed out and heard properly? It would, perhaps, be a much richer tale to tell.
6. Butter by Asako Yuzuki
Recommended by Jane McBride, PhD candidate in literature, University of Galway.
Asako Yuzuki’s Butter melts uneasily in your mind. Descriptions of food, sex and violence become transcendent, almost detached from anything physical. The prose is intense and immersive, but also clear, never dense or heady.
Journalist Rika conducts prison interviews with murderer Manako Kaji, a woman who lured lonely men with her delicious and deadly gourmet meals. As Rika talks with this strange woman, she finds herself drawn deeper into her world, fascinated by Kaji’s obsession with physical pleasure.
This is something that affects all aspects of Rika’s life, from relationships with friends and family to her own body and childhood memories.
Butter makes sharp critiques of misogyny and violence in modern Japan. This darkness is balanced by its focus on female friendship and human intimacy.
7. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Recommended by Alice Kelly, assistant professor of literature and history, University of Warwick.
How do we make meaning out of death, especially when it is violent and senseless? This question preoccupies Cyrus Shams, the protagonist of Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Martyr!
Cyrus is trying to make sense of the death of his mother, Roya, who was lost in an aeroplane shot down by US military forces over the Persian Gulf. In the wake of her death, Cyrus and his father Ali move from Iran to the US.
The question eventually leads him to work on a book about historical martyrs – “people whose deaths mattered” – from Joan of Arc to a terminally ill Iranian artist who has decided to make her decline and death a performance exhibit in the Brooklyn Museum.
In chapters alternating between different characters’ perspectives, Akbar’s writing is wry, funny and totally absorbing. It’s a profound novel about intergenerational trauma, the immigrant experience, alcohol addiction and, ultimately, how we “make a death useful”.
8. Parade by Rachel Cusk
Recommended by Scarlett Baron, associate professor in the department of English, UCL.
Parade is a searching book, written against conformity. It is an exploration of the role of gender in the genesis and reception of art – a novel in which selfhood, creativity and family relations are submitted to unflinching analytical scrutiny.
Cusk’s examination of these subjects is conducted through a kaleidoscope of narratives, told from different points of view, in which the same themes crystallise and dissolve again and again.
The book’s four chapters focus on the lives of artists, each of whom is referred to as “G”. The Stuntman tells the story of an artist who, “perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down”.
The Midwife tells the story of an artist who paints “horrible, pornographical and gleeful” works as a visceral response to her parents’ disapproval and neglect.
In the opening chapter, the first-person narrator ponders “the virtues of difficulty”, observing “how far people have been prepared to run the risk of not being understood”. This is a risk which Cusk, in this taut, haunting, exalting book, shows herself willing to take.
9. Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
Recommended by Ankhi Mukherjee, professor of English and world literatures, University of Oxford.
This is an unforgettable novel of formation – an awakening from tribal loyalties into new possibilities of identity and agency – set in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, during the civil war (1983 to 2009). The protagonist, Sashikala Kulenthiren, is a Tamil teenager, walking apace with her brothers toward medical or engineering degrees, and elaborations of a future peaceful with books, dialogue and organic living.
When the government atrocities and the call of militancy start disappearing boy after boy from the peninsula, Sashi is reduced to a bit-player of history. She becomes discombobulated by grief for fallen or embattled brothers. However, she finds strength and survives with a women’s collective that agitates, organises and treats hypermasculinity, instead of serving it.
Ganeshananthan anatomises a separatist movement without once glorifying its concerted violence. The book is history-adjacent, the narrator says. It is one in a proliferating series that will counteract unimaginable loss, such as the burning of more than 97,000 volumes in the Tamil library by the Sinhalese police.
10. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
Recommended by Edward Sugden, senior lecturer in American studies, King’s College London.
In Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, a character asks whether a human being is “a container to be filled by time with whatever it happens to have handy” or if there can be life beyond history. The novel dramatises this question throughout.
The book, which won the 2024 International Booker prize, is set in the last years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949-90) as western capitalism erodes a collapsing socialism. Against this context, two lovers, the ageing writer Hans and the late teenage Katharina, live out a doomed affair, having met on a bus one rainy evening.
The mundane deceptions of infidelity that make up the book – Hans and Katharina meet in cafes, watch films, listen to music, go shopping, take secret holidays – are freighted with history and emotional intensity as the plot plunges towards its ending, where the links between politics and the personal become tragically clear.
For some, the spiralling, fracturing and intensifying effects this tragic view has on the characters, the plot and the style, might be too much. For others, it might accurately depict the nightmarish dislocations of Europe in the 20th century.
Manjeet Ridon, Associate Dean International, Faculty of Arts, Design & Humanities, De Montfort University; Alice Kelly, Assistant Professor of Literature and History, University of Warwick; Ankhi Mukherjee, Professor of English and World Literatures, University of Oxford; Debra Benita Shaw, Debra Benita Shaw is Reader in Cultural Theory in the School of Architecture and Visual Arts, University of East London; Edward Sugden, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, King's College London; Emily Zobel Marshall, Reader in Postcolonial Literature, Leeds Beckett University; Jane McBride, PhD Candidate, Literature, University of Galway; Orlaith Darling, Postdoctoral Fellow, Contemporary English Literature and Critical Theory, University College Dublin; Sarah Annes Brown, Professor of English Literature, Anglia Ruskin University, and Scarlett Baron, Associate Professor in Department of English, UCL
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