Open, Heaven has been praised by Anne Enright, Kaveh Akbar, Ferdia Lennon, Michael Magee, The Guardian, The FT and became an Instant Irish Times Bestseller.
Seán Hewitt FRSL is a poet, memoirist, novelist and literary critic.
His debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their "30 under 30" artists in Ireland.
His book J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism was published with Oxford University Press (2021).
His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in non-fiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Polari Prize, the Michel Déon Prize, and for a LAMBDA award. He won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022.
300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World, illustrated by Luke Edward Hall, was published in 2023. A second collection of poetry, Rapture's Road, was published in 2024, and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. His work has been translated into more than 10 languages.
He is Assistant Professor in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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Set in the English countryside, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year as two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives.
THE LITERARY DEBUT NOVEL OF THE YEAR: a gloriously alive coming- of-age story about male friendship and diving into love for the first time.
On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. Beholden to the expectations of home and family, his burgeoning desire – an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex – threatens to unravel his shy exterior.
Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, yet underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own.
As the seasons pass, and the pair form an ever-changing bond, James falls into a terrifying first love that will transform his life forever. Enthralling and richly immersive, Open, Heaven is a debut novel about the freedom of youth, the sacrifices of friendship, and the possibilities of love in all its forms.
What does it mean to make art? Can a robot do it? How did a sentient AI piece of art take over one of London's biggest galleries? Can art change the world? So many big questions, and, fortunately, an expert is here to talk us through it.
Farah Nayeri is a world-renowned authority on art. She’s the host of the podcast CultureBlast where she interviews creative stars like Emma Thompson, Ai WeiWei and Marina Abramović. She’s the author of Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age. She’s a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Frieze and the Art Newspaper.
Follow Farah on Instagram for frankly incredible updates on the art world.
You are a voice in your community. AI is already impacting you life and your environment. Madhumita tells us why it matters that we get involved and where to go for guidance.
Madhumita Murgia is the author of Code Dependent which was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction last year. She’s the first AI Editor for The Financial Times. She was previously Tech Editor for The Telegraph and Associate Editor for WIRED. She’s the host of the podcast Tech Tonic.
Code Dependent has been praised by The Guardian, The Times, Martha Lane Fox, New Scientist, The Telegraph and Shoshana Zuboff.
Get the book here or at your local bookshop.
Through the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from Silicon Valley, Code Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often exploitative technologies on individuals, communities, and our wider society. Madhumita Murgia, AI Editor at the FT, exposes how AI can strip away our collective and individual sense of agency – and shatter our illusion of free will.
AI is already changing what it means to be human, in ways large and small. In this compelling work, Murgia reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity.
Folakunle Oshun is an artist and curator currently based in Paris. He is the Founder of the Lagos Biennial, a non-profit contemporary art platform that privileges adventurous approaches to artmaking, presentation, and critical discourse–aspiring to broach complex social and political problems, cultivate new publics, and establish fresh modes of engagement within the city, as well as throughout the country and internationally. Its next exhibition is in 2026.
You might know Folakunle from his work curating the incredibly popular Lagos, Peckham, Repeat Exhibition for the South London Gallery. He was also invited to Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne as a guest curator for the group exhibition LOOK AT THIS in 2021. He also served as an advisor for the Africa Season (2020). His solo exhibition “Museum of Hope” opened in the same year at the Berliner Dom.
Oshun earned a B.A. in Visual Art from the University of Lagos, majoring in Sculpture, and an M.A. in Art History. He was the first recipient of the Curator-in-Residence grant by the Potsdam City Council, Brandenburg, Germany, in (2017).
In 2021, Folakunle Oshun was invited as Guest Professor to the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe to lead the seminar “Spatial Politics and Story Telling.” He is currently a Doctoral candidate at the Heritage Laboratory, of Cergy University, École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy, France. He also lectures at the university.
Actress Rochelle Harrington is one of the new stars of Netflix's hit series, Geek Girl.
Inspired by Holly Smale's series of novels, Geek Girl follows the geeky and socially awkward Harriet Manners who's recruited by a top modeling agent and unexpectedly embarks on a modeling career.
Playing Harriet's best friend and fellow model, is acting newcomer, Rochelle Harrington as Natalie "Nat" Grey.
Watch the show on Netflix here.
Intervals has been praised by The Guardian, the Observer, Publisher’s Weekly, Elinor Cleghorn (author of Unwell Women) and Prospect Magazine. It was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
Marianne Brooker is based in Bristol, where she works for a charity campaigning on climate and social justice. She has a PhD from Birkbeck and a background in arts research and teaching. She won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for Intervals, her first book.
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What makes a good death? A good daughter? In 2009, with her forties and a harsh wave of austerity on the horizon, Marianne Brooker’s mother was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. She made a workshop of herself and her surroundings, combining creativity and activism in inventive ways. But over time, her ability to work, to move and to live without pain diminished drastically. Determined to die in her own home, on her own terms, she stopped eating and drinking in 2019. In Intervals, Brooker reckons with heartbreak, weaving her first and final memories with a study of doulas, living wills and the precarious economics of social, hospice and funeral care. Blending memoir, polemic and feminist philosophy, Brooker joins writers such as Anne Boyer, Maggie Nelson, Donald Winnicott and Lola Olufemi to raise essential questions about choice and interdependence and, ultimately, to imagine care otherwise.
Santanu Bhattacharya grew up in India, and studied at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore. He won the Desmond Elliott Prize Residency in 2023, and the Mo Siewcharran and Life Writing Prizes in 2021. His first novel, One Small Voice, was an Observer best debut novel of 2023, and was shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award and the Society of Authors’ Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize. He now lives in London.
Deviants has been praised by The Guardian, The i Paper and The Financial Times. Santanu’s first book One Small Voice has been celebrated by Max Porter, Nikesh Shukla, Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Irish Times and The Guardian.
Get the book here or at your local bookshop.
Vivaan, a teenager in India’s silicon plateau, has discovered love on his smartphone. Intoxicating, boundary-breaking love. His parents know he is gay, and their support is something Vivaan can count on, but they don’t know what exactly their son gets up to in the online world.
For his uncle, born thirty years earlier, things were very different. Mambro’s life changed forever when he fell for a male classmate at a time, and in a country, where the persecution of gay people was rife under a colonial-era law criminalising homosexuality.
And before that was Mambro’s uncle Sukumar, a young man hopelessly in love with another young man, but forced by social taboos to keep their relationship a secret at all costs. Sukumar would never live the life he yearned for, but his story would ignite and inspire his nephew and grand-nephew after him.
Bold and bracing, intimate and heartbreaking, Deviants examines the histories we inherit and the legacies we leave behind.
The Artist has been praised by The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, Yael van der Wouden (The Safekeep), Sarah Perry (Essex Serpent) and is a Best Book of 2025 for Good Housekeeping and Stylist. It’s longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Lucy Steeds is a novelist and a graduate of the Faber Academy and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. She has a BA in English Literature and a Masters in World Literatures from the University of Oxford. She has lived in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Singapore.
The Artist is her first novel.
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PROVENCE, 1920
Ettie moves through the remote farmhouse, silently creating the conditions that make her uncle's artistic genius possible. Joseph, an aspiring journalist, has been invited to the house. He believes he'll make his name by interviewing the reclusive painter, the great Edouard Tartuffe. But everyone has their secrets. And, under the cover of darkness, Ettie has spent years cultivating hers. Over this sweltering summer, everyone's true colours will be revealed. Because Ettie is ready to be seen. Even if it means setting her world on fire.
Jennifer Daiches, daughter of the Scottish critic and biographer David Daiches, was born in Chicago, educated in the US and in England, before moving to Scotland in 1971.
From 1978 to 2001 she worked at the National Museums of Scotland in various capacities, including Head of Publications and script co-ordinator for exhibitions. She is a freelance writer and lecturer, writing on literary and historical subjects as Jenni Calder (having been married to the poet Angus Calder until 1982) and fiction and poetry as Jenni Daiches. An area of special interest has been Scottish emigration, particularly to North America, and questions of identity. Other key interests include Scottish literature and women writers.
Jenni is also a biographer, writing book on Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell and Naomi Mitchison. See her full bibliography here.
Somewhere Else has been longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Miriam Margolyes is among its fans, saying “I wept and laughed and wished I had written it.”
Get the book here or at your local bookshop.
Rosa Roshkin is five years old when her family are murdered in a pogrom and she is forced to leave behind everything she knows with only a suitcase of clothes and her father’s violin.
An epic generational novel about womanhood and Judaeo-Scottish experience across two World Wars, the creation of Israel and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jenni Daiches’s Somewhere Else explores today’s most difficult and urgent questions, not least of which: how to find identity in displacement.
Hansal Mehta
Winner of the National Award for Best Direction in 2014, Hansal Mehta talks about his Netflix drama starring Bollywood’s beloved Kareena Kapoor, Buckingham Murders.
He’s best known for Shahid (2013), Citylights (2014), Aligarh (2016), Omertà (2018), Scoop (2023), Modern Love Mumbai (2022) and Scam 1992 (2020). He is known for films that depict social and political realities in deeply polarised and troubled times.
His films are remarkable for their understanding of characters and their worlds, while telling important stories. His films Shahid (2013) and Omertà(2018) premiered as official selections at different editions of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Aligarh (2016) a moving tale about a professor suspended by university for being gay premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2015.
His films have traveled to festivals around the world and have been extensively written about and discussed in both international and local forums.
Watch the Buckingham Murders on Netflix.
When a teen boy’s murder rattles a quiet English town, a grieving detective uncovers the hidden hostilities beneath its idyllic surface…
Luna Carmoon talks about her film, Hoard, starring Joseph Quinn (Gladiator II, Stranger Things). Now Hoard is out, premiering at the 80th Venice Film Festival, Luna’s nominated for the 2025 BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer. This makes her a member of BAFTA Breakthrough and she’s already Sundance Ignite Fellow. Luna is also a regular director of music videos for Fontaines DC.
Hoard has been praised by The Guardian, The Times, Time Out and the BFI. It has a 94% Rotten Tomatoes rating.
Watch Hoard on MUBI here.
The story follows Maria - a teenager whose mother used to be a hoarder. Now (set in the 90s) she lives in a foster home where a previous resident Michael inspires her to revisit her childhood memories and passions that she has repressed.
Benjamin Markovits grew up mostly in Texas. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics – an experience he wrote about in Playing Days, a novel.
Since then he has taught high school English, worked at a left-wing cultural magazine, and written essays, stories and reviews for, among other publications, The New York Times, Granta, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and The Paris Review.
He has published seven novels, including Either Side of Winter, about a New York private school, and a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron: Imposture, A Quiet Adjustment and Childish Loves.
In 2009 he won a Pushcart Prize for his short story Another Sad, Bizarre Chapter in Human History. Granta selected him as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 2013.
Markovits lives in London and is married, with a daughter and a son. He teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
His latest novel, The Rest of Our Lives, has been praised by Sarah Hall, Clare Chambers, Lucy Caldwell, The Guardian, the Observer, TLS and many more.
Get the book here or at your local bookshop.
What’s left when your kids grow up and leave home?
When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest daughter turned eighteen. Twelve years later, while driving her to Pittsburgh to start university, he remembers his pact.
He is also on the run from his own health issues, and the fact that he’s been put on leave at work after students complained about the politics of his law class – something he hasn’t yet told his wife.
So, after dropping Miriam off, he keeps driving, with the vague plan of visiting various people from his past – an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son – on route, maybe, to his father’s grave in California.
Rosanna Pike became an instant Sunday Times Bestseller with her debut novel, A Little Trickerie. It’s been longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and has been praised by the Guardian, the Telegraph, Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry) and Ferdia Lennon (Glorious Exploits). Rosanna studied English literature at Exeter University. She is a graduate of Curtis Brown Creative and the Faber Academy. She lives in south-west London with her family.
Get the book here or at your local bookshop.
Born a vagabond, Tibb Ingleby has never had a roof of her own. Her mother has taught her that if you’re not too bound by the Big Man’s rules, there are many ways a woman can find shelter in this world. But now her ma is gone.
As she journeys through the fields and forests of medieval England, Tibb discovers that there are people who will care for her, as well as those who mean her harm. And there are a great many others who are prepared to believe just about anything…
Rowe is one of the Observer's Best Debut Novelists of 2025. She's an artist and writer who has been praised for Lifecycle of a Moth by Lucy Rose, Molly Aitken and Gabrielle Griffiths.
Get the book here or at your local bookshop.
An itchy feeling.
A wrinkle in the forest.
A cracking twig.
A coming sound.
Myma, do you hear it?
Myma, do you hear?
Myma?
Maya and Daughter live in complete isolation in a secluded woodland, their days aligned with the light and changing seasons, a complex pattern of routine and ritual. Daughter has never questioned the life her mother has chosen for them; the life that has meant she's never met another soul, or known anywhere except their forest home.
But one day, when Daughter is almost sixteen, a red-haired stranger steps into the confines of their territory. Where there was always two, suddenly there are three - and the carefully constructed world that Maya has built to keep her daughter safe may not survive it.
Urgent, haunting and thrillingly alive, Life Cycle of a Moth explores both the tenderness and ferocity of maternal love, asking what we might find ourselves capable of - and willing to sacrifice - in order to shelter those we hold dear.
Dr Karen Jennings is longlisted for this year's Women's Prize with her novel Crooked Seeds. Her book An Island was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2022. Crooked Seeds was described by the Guardian as "a perfectly realised fictional creation." It's a book of the year for the Guardian, Irish Times and CrimeReads. It's also been praised by the Observer, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Get the book here or at your local seller.
Deidre is a victim, of her family, her society, her history. That is how she sees herself, and so she feels free of all obligations, moral and practical. Until the police take her back to her family home…
In a Cape Town where water is rationed and has to be collected from trucks each day, with the consequences of apartheid and the ending of it still evident, Deidre lives from day to day in squalor – largely created by herself – borrowing, persuading, cadging her way from the water trucks to the bar, testing the tolerance and pity of everyone she knows. Then she is contacted by the police, and taken by a respectful constable to the house where she grew up and where she lost her leg in a shattering explosion while still young. Faced with what is found there, she has to accept the truth of her past, and of her older brother, her parents’ golden boy. Then she must confront herself and her responsibility, and what it truly is to be a victim.
Katie's biography, Not Your China Doll, re-examines the life of Hollywood pioneer, Anna May Wong. It's been praised by Marvel star and New York Times Bestseller Simu Liu as well as the Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian. It was nominated for the 2024 Goodreads Choice Awards in History & Biography and selected as one of Entertainment Weekly's 'Books we're excited to read in 2024'.
Katie Gee Salisbury is the author of Not Your China Doll, a new biography of Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Ringer, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in 2021 and gave the TED Talk “As American as Chop Suey.” She also writes the newsletter Half-Caste Woman. A fifth-generation Chinese American who hails from Southern California, she now lives in Brooklyn.
Get the book here or at your local seller.
Set against the glittering backdrop of Los Angeles during the gin-soaked Jazz Age and the rise of Hollywood, this debut book celebrates Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star, to bring an unsung heroine to light and reclaim her place in cinema history.
Before Constance Wu, Sandra Oh, Awkwafina, or Lucy Liu, there was Anna May Wong. In her time, she was a legendary beauty, witty conversationalist, and fashion icon. Plucked from her family’s laundry business in Los Angeles, Anna May Wong rose to stardom in Douglas Fairbanks’s blockbuster The Thief of Bagdad. Fans and the press clamored to see more of this unlikely actress, but when Hollywood repeatedly cast her in stereotypical roles, she headed abroad in protest.
Anna May starred in acclaimed films in Berlin, Paris, and London. She dazzled royalty and heads of state across several nations, leaving trails of suitors in her wake. She returned to challenge Hollywood at its own game by speaking out about the industry’s blatant racism. She used her new stature to move away from her typecasting as the China doll or dragon lady, and worked to reshape Asian American representation in film.
Filled with stories of capricious directors and admiring costars, glamorous parties and far-flung love affairs, Not Your China Doll showcases the vibrant, radical life of a groundbreaking artist.
Saraid de Silva (she/her) is a Sri Lankan/Pakeha writer living in Tamaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand. Saraid has worked as an actor, theatre-maker, voiceover artist. In 2022, she graduated from Auckland University's Creative Writing Masters and became the inaugural winner of the Crystal Arts Trust Prize.
She has also released three seasons of the documentary series Conversations With My Immigrant Parents for Radio New Zealand with co-creator Julie Zhu, and works as a writer for NZ's prime-time soap opera, Shortland Street.
Amma has been praised by Diet Paratha, NZ Poet Laureate Chris Tse and Spinoff. It was also nominated for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction.
Get the book here or at your local seller.
“Annie Ano Fernando doesn’t care much for men”
And so begins a novel exploring trauma, displacement, queerness over three generations and three continents of the Sri Lankan diaspora.
*
1951, Singapore. Ten-year-old Josephina kills her abuser.
This event becomes the defining moment in the lives of Josephina, her daughter Sithara, and her granddaughter Annie.
The effects cascade through generations as Annie sets out across the world to discover what happened to fracture her family.
Set in Sri Lanka, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and London, Amma is a novel about how the past lives with us forever, and wherever we are.
Written in sensuous, vivid prose, Amma is a story of the rich history and unknown future of the Sri Lankan diaspora - and of one family desperately trying to find peace.
Foluso Agbaje has been writing stories since she first learned to write. She loves London but calls Lagos home, and her stories are shaped by these two cities that have captured her heart. When not curled up with her Kindle, you’ll find her in a bookshop, museum, or restaurant. She is a big fan of period dramas and has watched every episode of Downton Abbey more times than she’s willing to admit.
After graduating from the Faber Academy in 2022, Foluso completed her debut novel, The Parlour Wife. She has a Master’s degree in Management and Human Resources from the London School of Economics and a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting from Loughborough University.
A storyteller at heart, Foluso is always drawn to narratives that explore identity, culture, and resilience. She continues to write, inspired by the complexities of the human experience.
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Chloe Abrahams is a Sri Lankan British artist and filmmaker. Using methods drawn from both documentary and fiction practices, she investigates the therapeutic potential of the confessional, culminating in visceral work spanning moving image, sound, writing and performance. Chloe’s debut non-fiction film, The Taste of Mango, premiered at True/False 2023 where it was named the #1 film by Sight & Sound. The film went on to win the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the BFI London Film Festival, followed by the BIFA for Best Debut Director – Feature Documentary.In 2020 Chloe was awarded the John Brabourne Award and has three times been shortlisted for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2018, 2019, 2022). She had her first solo exhibition at OVADA (2014), and has since been selected for exhibitions worldwide, including The London Open at the Whitechapel Gallery 2022. Previously, Chloe worked as the Marketing Coordinator for documentary distributor Dogwoof, responsible for the execution of all UK theatrical campaigns, and recently completed a Master’s in Moving Image at the Royal College of Art where she was nominated for the HIGH Prize for Excellence.
Follow Chloe on instagram @chloeabr
Michael’s debut novel, The Boyhood of Cain, has been praised by the Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker and Call Me By Your Name author André Aciman. In this episode we talk about the benefits of not knowing yourself, relentless productivity and the forms of knowledge contained in literature that can't be communicated by AI.
Michael is also a non-fiction writer with work published in the Guardian, New Statesman, the Spectator, The White Review and Contrappasso magazine.
His short fiction has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, among others. Meanwhile, his book-length essay, Go the Way Your Blood Beats, a meditation on truth and desire, won the 2019 Stonewall Israel Fishman Award for Nonfiction (sponsored by the American Library Association).
He is also the winner of the 2020 Hubert Butler Essay Prize and was shortlisted for the 2021 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts. His essay, ‘Does a Silhouette Have a Shadow?’, examining the relationship between mind and body through the lens of chronic illness, is published in anthology On Bodies.
Previously he has worked for Just Detention International, a health and human rights organisation that seeks to end sexual abuse in all forms of detention. He served as a commissioner on the Howard League’s Commission on sex in prisons – the first of its kind in the UK – which reported in 2015.
Get the book here or at your local seller.