Must Read Debuts

Half His Age is a highly anticipated, funny, sad, thrilling novel about sex, class, desire, and power – and the (often misguided) lengths we’ll go to to get what we want, from Jennette McCurdy, the three-million copy bestselling author of I’m Glad My Mom Died.

Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Hurting. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all? Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher.

Mr Korgy, with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn’t know why she wants him. Is it his passion? His life experience? The fact that he knows books and films that she doesn’t? Or are they actually kindred spirits, sharing the same filter with which they each take in the world around them? Or, perhaps, it’s just enough that he sees her when no one else does.

Startlingly perceptive, mordantly funny, and keenly poignant, Half His Age is an incisive study of a yearning seventeen-year-old who disregards all obstacles in her effort to be seen, to be desired and to be loved.

A Female Gladiator’s Vow. A Stolen Child. A Storm to End Empires

In an oil-fuelled Roman Empire which never fell, Arrow – a gladiatrix turned governess – must rescue Livy, the child she never meant to love, a girl who could tear down the world.

When Livy is abducted during a devastating Godstorm, Arrow must unleash years of the gladiator training she’d sworn to forget in order to save her. Defying her owner, a heartless Consul, Arrow turns to her ex-lover and the illegal druid underworld in a desperate attempt to rescue the girl she has tried not to think of as her own.

Her search will take her across Londinium, a city of petrol-powered chariots, to the pagan Old Town, and eventually the edge of the known world: the Amazon, where destiny and destruction intertwine.

Facing battle and betrayal Arrow must choose: reclaim her past as a killer―or risk everything for the child who might call her ‘mother.’

She is the Sword.

Two girls went into the Hanging Woods. Only one returned.

Twenty years ago Caitlin vowed never to return to her small Irish hometown. Now she drifts from temporary jobs to temporary men, trying to escape memories of the Hanging Woods. Of what happened to Roisin there.

But with news of her estranged mother’s sudden death, Caitlin is forced to return home, back to the town where everyone knows each other’s business and old resentments run deep.

Roisin’s sister Deedee, now a Garda, has never given up on finding the truth of what happened in those woods. And Caitlin’s return makes old wounds fresh, threatening to exhume secrets that have lain buried for two decades – while the Hanging Woods begin their siren call to Caitlin and Deedee once more . . .

TO KILL A MONSTER, SHE MUST BECOME ONE . . .

As the emperor lays dying, the once-great Azalea Dynasty plunges towards civil war. While its princes plot for power, a more hidden war – to become the next empress – occupies the imperial court.

Wei Yin – peasant girl turned concubine to the cruel Prince Terren – has already endured unimaginable suffering. Ripped from her family, she has no title, no allies, and no escape. But she does have a secret . . .

In the shadows of the palace, surrounded by enemies, she is learning a skill forbidden to women. Because when words are weapons and poetry holds an ancient magic, the fate of a girl – and a nation – can both be rewritten. All she has to do is compose the perfect poem – a tale so powerful, it can kill any man, even the next emperor.

The epic political arena of The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang meets the intimate tragedy and luscious language of The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller in this sensational debut novel by visionary new talent Shen Tao, unmissable for die-hard genre fans as well as readers of literary fiction looking to make their first foray into fantasy.

Born in Germany to Afghan parents, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice. Now in Berlin’s techno-filled warehouses, their walls still scarred by the ravages of the last century, she has found her tribe.

Then Nila meets American writer Marlowe. As she is sucked into his seductive but controlling orbit, and ugly racial tensions begin to roil through Germany, she is forced to ask herself the question she’s been running from: who does she want to be?

Mairéad works tirelessly in a run-down West End theatre’s wardrobe department – mending shoes, fixing broken zips and even handwashing underwear. She must also sidestep groping hands backstage and withstand the relentless bullying of the show’s producer.

The job was meant to be the first step towards the life Mairéad has always wanted, and yet half of her remains back home in Ireland, along with everything she abandoned there.

A reckoning with the past is coming and, with it, the need to forge a new present – one stitch at a time.