Helm (2025) Sarah Hall "I'm awed by Sarah Hall's ability to hold timelines from prehistory to modern climate anxiety in simultaneous tension. I wouldn't think a novel could be at once so taut and so multifarious, expanding one's sense of what fiction can do."
Days of Light (2025) Megan Hunter "There's warmth and depth in Hunter's well-wrought prose. The characters stay with you in the best way."
Small Rain (2024) Garth Greenwell "A fierce, beautiful novel about loving, living, dying, caring and being cared for. Greenwell's sentences crackle with contained energy."
Followed by the Lark (2024) Helen Humphreys "This Thoreau is flawed, human, muddling through, and yet also prescient about the consequences of empire and what some called progress. Followed by the Lark is a beautiful threnody and elegy for what is lost as we grow and what is destroyed by colonization."
Orbital (2023) Samantha Harvey "I admire Orbital even more than the rest of Harvey's work... I don't think I've read anything else with such love for its characters and such clarity about the state of the planet, and I was deeply grateful for the novel's refusal of despair or cynicism."
The Weeds (2023) Katy Simpson Smith "A beautiful, strange, and compelling novel. I liked it for its playfulness about history, for its embrace of bodies in place, for its sense of doom and weirdness at loose in the world. I kept wanting my friends to read it so we could talk about it."
Haven (2022) Emma Donoghue "Haven is a beautiful and timely novel about isolation, passion and the conflict between obedience and self-preservation. The island setting and the characters stayed with me long after I finished reading."
Hearts and Bones (2022) Niamh Mulvey "These stories are vivid, memorable and beautifully crafted. I was delighted to discover Niamh Mulvey's work."
Trespasses (2022) Louise Kennedy "Kennedy's writing is beautiful and I will continue to read everything she publishes."
The Colony (2022) Audrey Magee "The Colony is a vivid and memorable book about art, land and language, love and sex, youth and age. Big ideas tread lightly through Audrey Magee's strong prose."
The Child (2021) Kjersti A Skomsvold "The Child pays close, intelligent attention to motherhood and art. It's written with memorable precision and love, and I was sorry to finish it."
Nervous System (2021) Lina Meruane "Nervous System is fast, uncompromising and shimmering with intelligence."
Kawai Strong Washburn "Sharks in the Time of Saviours is a brilliant novel and one of the most engaging and memorable books I've read this year. Sentences sparkle, the narrative voices remain distinctive and complete, and the deep notes of magic sound under the realism of poverty and loss. I didn't want it to end."
Hamnet (2020) Maggie O'Farrell "Grief and loss so finely written I could hardly bear to read it."
The Mercies (2020) Kiran Millwood Hargrave "The most interesting historical fiction speaks of the time of writing as much as of its subject . . . The Mercies shows us the patriarchal fear of women's strength and reason."
The Glass Woman (2019) Caroline Lea "Memorable and compelling. A novel about what haunts us - and what should."
