What to read next (based on your favourite classic)

Explicitly and directly inspired by Thackeray's nineteenth-century novel, Becky is Vanity Fair meets Succession, the action transported to nineties tabloid-era London where our eponymous anti-hero works her way up the journalistic greasy pole. Scoop after scoop, Becky's downfall looms as she becomes more and more involved in every scandal her newspaper publishes and cares less and less about the lives she ruins in the process. Unlike Thackeray, Sarah May gives Becky control of the narrative voice and the first-person perspective gives us an unfiltered view into her complicated and compromising motives. This is a sharply intelligent and funny interrogation of how far society has really come since the original Vanity Fair.

If you fancy a take on the classic Scarlet Pimpernel story with added magic and even more mayhem, Genevieve Cogman's latest fantasy wonder is for you. Revolution's a bloodthirsty business, particularly for aristocrat vampires facing the guillotine. Determined to rescue them, the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel are set to pull off the heist of the century, sending Marie Antoinette lookalike, Eleanor, to France in an elaborate scheme to rescue the royal family. But Eleanor stumbles across a centuries-old war between vampires and their fiercest enemy, and it seems there's more to fear than the Revolution.

Pegasus is probably the most powerful piece of spyware ever developed. Installed by as little as a missed WhatsApp call, once on your phone it can record your calls, copy your messages, steal your photos and secretly film you. Those that control it can find out your daily movements: exactly where you’ve been, and who you’ve met. Pegasus the book explores how our lives and privacy are being threatened as cyber-surveillance occurs with exponentially increasing frequency across the world, at a sweep and scale that astounds and alarms.

Take the plot of Pride and Prejudice, transfer it to nineties London and have it narrated by a regularly-drunk, chain-smoking Elizabeth Bennett called Bridget and you have this hilarious, often-copied but never-bettered bestseller. As Bridget documents her struggles through the social minefield of her thirties and tries to weigh up the eternal question (Daniel Cleaver or Mark Darcy?), she turns for support to four indispensable friends: Shazzer, Jude, Tom and a bottle of chardonnay.

An isolated castle. A Gothic atmosphere. A parasite spreading in the dark. In a cut-off, icebound community, a doctor kills himself. The replacement, sent by the Interprovincial Medical Institute, discovers a parasite living in the corpse. But how did it survive, when the doctor was already possessed? And who exactly are the Interprovincial Medical Institute?

Equally ensconced in the Big Apple is Hanya Yanagihara's third novel, although in this case in three alternate versions of it. We start in an alternative 1893. New York is part of the Free States, and a gentle young member of a privileged family falls for a charismatic and impoverished music teacher. In 1993, Manhattan is being swept by the AIDS epidemic, and a young Hawaiian man with a wealthy older partner must hide his difficult family background. And in 2093, in a world where plague and totalitarian rule is rife, a young woman tries to solve the mystery of her husband's disappearance. 

This funny, sharp, sweet and frequently filthy book follows Paul Polydoris, a shapeshifting bartender who can change gender at will, on a riotous adventure through early ‘90s queer America. From Riot Grrl to leather cub and Iowa City to San Francisco, this is a journey through queer theory, LGBTQIA+ communities and gender fluidity, as well as a love letter to early nineties counter-culture.

Influenced by the mysterious place gingerbread holds in classic children's stories, Helen Oyeyemi invites us into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe. Perdita Lee and her mother Harriet may seem pretty ordinary but they are anything but. For one thing, their home is a gold-painted seventh-floor flat with some surprisingly verbal vegetation. And then there's the gingerbread. As we follow the Lees through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work and wealth, gingerbread seems to be the one thing that holds a constant value . . .

About to make his last stand, a soldier facing certain death at the hands of the enemy writes home to explain how he ended up there, a gentle man gradually transformed into a war criminal, committing acts he wouldn’t have thought himself capable. A profound reflection on how good people can do terrible things, this is a brave, unflinching and thought-provoking debut. 

For more than twenty-five years, David Nott has taken unpaid leave from his job as a general and vascular surgeon with the NHS to volunteer in some of the world’s most dangerous war zones, from Afghanistan to Gaza. His commitment and dedication has changed lives as well as the medical community, and now he is using his experience to train more doctors to follow in his footsteps.