Prize-winning and shortlisted authors to rediscover

Author of seven novels and winner of the Booker Prize in 2004, few authors are as revered in literary circles as Alan Hollinghurst and his new book, Our Evenings, doesn't disappoint. In it, he returns to some of his most enduring themes: sexuality, social mobility and the friction of class differences. David Winn recollects his experiences as a mixed-race scholarship student at boarding school, his relationship with his mother, and his time at the Home Counties estate of the Hadlows, the family who fund his scholarship. It's an intricately constructed, searing portrait of British society told through the divergent paths of its characters. 

From the author of The Trees, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Erasure, adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction, comes James. The novel is told from the perspective of James (formerly ‘Jim’), the affable companion in Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. In Everett’s re-telling, James is resurrected from the graveyard of racist archetypes and given multiple dimensions and a character arc of his own. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, Percival Everett's latest work has already secured an accolade of its own. 

Tim Winton is not short of accolades: he has won the Miles Franklin Award (an award that celebrates novels portraying Australian life) four times and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Now, he's back with Juice, an urgent work of climate-fiction set in an apocalyptic dystopian future. Alone, exhausted, and scarred by what they’ve seen on their travels, a man and child search for safety in a sunburned and stony desert. Chancing upon an abandoned mine, the man knows that this desolate place is their best bet for shelter, even though they have no idea who or what lurks in the mine’s depths. In Juice Tim Winton asks: how far will humans go to survive when the world has been turned upside down? 

Charlotte Mendelson's writing, which often explores serpentine and challenging family politics, has won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and has been longlisted and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. In her latest book, Wife – a 'clever, lacerating account of coercive control' – we follow Zoe Stamper, a junior researcher in Ancient Greek Tragedy, who becomes enamored with the glamorous Dr Penny Cartwright. Once Penny confesses all to her live-in lover, Justine, their happiness seems assured. But there is something else Penny needs as badly in her life as Zoe’s adoration . . .

Small Rain is a profound and vivid novel about mortality, beauty, art, love and ultimately, the fragility of the American dream. It is Garth Greenwell's third book, following Cleanness and winner of the Debut of the Year Award, What Belongs to You. In Small Rain we meet a poet, confined to a hospital bed after being rushed to the ICU in excruciating pain. As he navigates the complex and unjust American healthcare system and experiences what it feels like to stare death in the face, he searches for answers about what is happening to a body he has taken for granted for decades. 

Arriving in San Miguel, Mexico from her native India to learn Spanish for the summer, student Bonita relishes the chance to be whoever she wants to be. When she spies a woman watching her, who later tells her that she knew her mother as a young artist in the town, everything Bonita thinks she knows about the woman who raised her and their shared history is thrown into question. A novel about grief, memory, and identity from three-time Booker-shortlisted author Anita Desai, Rosarita shines a light on the ebb and flow of one mother-daughter relationship.

Sarah Moss is best known for her novels, including Ghost Wall, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, and Summerwater. This time she turns to non-fiction with her memoir, My Good Bright Wolf. Growing up in the 1970s, Sarah Moss learned that the female body and mind were battlegrounds shaped by austerity and second-wave feminism. Expected to be slim yet unvain, intelligent but not angry, she internalized conflicting messages. Years later, this self-control turned dangerous, leading to a medical emergency as her teenage anorexia resurfaced. Moss navigates these contested memories with humour and insight, revealing how writing and books offered her an escape.