Must Read Fiction For July 2025

Plucky fourteen-year-old Adunni is in Lagos, excited to finally enrol in school.

But it’s not so simple to run away from your past.

On the night before she is due to join her new classmates , a terrible knocking at the front gate summons Adunni back to her home village, Ikati, where her dramatic story of resilience first began.

There, Adunni must try to not only save herself, but also transform Ikati into a place where girls are allowed to claim the bright futures they deserve – and roar their stories to the world.

The latest book in Alexander McCall Smith’s entertaining and hilarious Professor von Igelfeld series

Professor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld is not just any German professor – he is the author of that great work of scholarship, Portuguese Irregular Verbs. His eminence in language studies is widely recognised, even if it is rarely acknowledged by his colleague, Professor Detlev-Amadeus Unterholzer, author of a much less important work on the subjunctive. Their rivalry bubbles away under the surface, but is apt to come into the open if something unusual disturbs the calm waters of the institute in Regensburg in which they both work.

One such event is the arrival from New Orleans of two visiting scholars. These ladies, Professor Pom Pom Boisseau, and her friend, Professor Alice Martinique, are both experts in the Provençal language as well as being keen bikers. When they choose to arrive on large, noisy motorbikes, Unterholzer is shocked, but von Igelfeld is rather taken with Pom Pom. In fact, he is very taken with her, even to the extent of going for a ride with her on her motorbike.

Anybody can tell that this infatuation will lead to disappointment, if not worse. But for von Igelfeld, disasters often arrive in twos and threes. The great professor is invited to attend a student occasion in which the old habit of duelling rears its head. He is handed a sword…

Von Igelfeld may suffer humiliation after humiliation, but at the end of it all there is the promise of a visit to Louisiana, a culinary paradise, where important research is being undertaken into communication among oysters.

Centuries ago, the myths say, the holy river Saraswati flowed through what is now Northern India. But when Satnam arrives in his ancestral village for his grandmother’s funeral, he is astonished to find water in the long-dry well behind her house. The discovery sets in motion a contentious scheme to unearth the lost river and build a gleaming new city on its banks, and Satnam – adrift from his job, girlfriend and flat back in London – soon finds himself swept up in this ferment of Hindu nationalist pride.

As the river alters Satnam’s course, so it reveals buried ties to six distant relatives scattered across the globe – from an ambitious writer with her eye on legacy to a Kenyan archaeologist to a Bollywood stunt double – who are brought together in a rapidly changing India. Brimming with love, lush, violence and loss, Gurnaik Johal’s magisterial debut deftly animates the passions that bind us to our histories, our lands and each other.

From the author of The Stationery Shop of Tehran, a heartfelt, epic new novel of friendship, betrayal and redemption set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation.

Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming ‘lion women.’

But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls’ high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.

Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.

Frankie Howe was never quite sure enough of herself to take centre stage – after all, life had already judged her harshly. Now in her eighties, she finds it easier to forget the life that came before.

Then Damian, a young Irish carer, arrives at her London flat to keep an eye on her as she recovers from a fall. A memory is sparked, and the past crackles into life as Damian listens to the story Frankie has kept stored away all these years.

From post-war Ireland to the dazzling art scene of 1960s New York, Frankie shares a world in which friendships and chance encounters collide. A place where life blazes with an intensity that can’t last but will perhaps live on in other ways and in other people.

Every flame tells a story…

George McGlory has been struggling since the death of his beloved wife, Audrey. But when he witnesses a public health funeral – with no flowers and no mourners – he is inspired to create The Light a Candle Society.

As George and his friends join together to celebrate forgotten lives, their care, compassion, humour and friendship become gifts not only to the people they are remembering, but to each other.

And the kindness of strangers gives them strength to confront the secrets of their own histories, forging joyful and unexpected new connections…

There was a unicycle hanging from a metal rack, its lemon-coloured wheel hovering above my head. The last thing I remembered was that party in Manhattan, somewhere in the West Village, drinking odd-looking cocktails and eating walnut cookies . . . Everything seemed vague.

In New York City, an Albanian interpreter cannot help but become entangled in her clients’ struggles, despite her husband’s cautions. When she reluctantly agrees to work with Alfred, a Kosovar torture survivor, during his therapy sessions, his nightmares stir up her own buried memories; while an impulsive attempt to help a Kurdish poet leads to a risky encounter and a reckless plan.

As ill-fated decisions stack up, jeopardising the nameless narrator’s marriage and mental health, she takes a spontaneous trip to reunite with her mother in Albania, where her life in the United States is put into stark relief. When she returns to face the consequences of her actions, she must question what is real and what is not.

Ruminative and propulsive, Misinterpretation interrogates the darker legacies of family and country, and the boundary between compassion and self-preservation.

In the heart-aching new novel from the author of the award-winning Golden Child, a mother searches for the daughter she left behind a lifetime ago.

Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged 16, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela. There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption.

Dawn tries to carry on with her life – a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce – but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been.

Then, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch. She says that she might be Dawn’s long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care a mother has left to offer?

A hidden maze with secrets in its walls. A young woman on a journey to unravel the truth…

1924. Lord and Lady Kearsley’s glittering Summer Ball is in full swing when their betrothed daughter Xanthe slips out of the Orangery and into the maze for a secret encounter. By the next morning, the grand house will be in ashes and two bodies removed, but no one will ever know what happened that night in Winterthorne.

2024. Juliet Stewart discovers she has inherited a cottage in the cliff-top village of Winterthorne from a relative she never knew existed. Stumbling upon the ruins of Kearsley Castle, she learns about the fire that destroyed the family. Puzzled by the disturbing gifts appearing on her doorstep, Juliet realises that someone doesn’t want her in Winterthorne. But as she becomes drawn deeper into Xanthe’s story, she discovers that danger lies not only in uncovering the past, but in the present too…

1979. In the vast and often unforgiving city of London, two Irish outsiders seeking refuge find one another: Milly, a teenage runaway, and Pip, a young boxer full of anger and potential who is beginning to drink it all away.

Over the decades their lives follow different paths, interweaving from time to time, often in one another’s sight, always on one another’s mind, yet rarely together.

Forty years on, Milly is clinging onto the only home she’s ever really known while Pip, haunted by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, traipses the streets of London and wrestles with the life of the recovering alcoholic. And between them, perhaps uncrossable, lies the unspoken span of their lives.

Dark and brave, this epic novel offers a rich and moving portrait of an ever-changing city, and a profound inquiry into character, loneliness and the nature of love.