Must Read Fiction For May 2025

Have you ever had the sense that maybe all lives are nothing more than the chronicle of countless stinging might-have-beens that continue to haunt us?

In the scorching New York heat, a hundred people wait to be selected as jurors. Paul is reading a newspaper. Catherine is reading a novel. So begins a whirlwind flirtation: over cappuccinos in Manhattan and gallery trips to Chelsea, Paul and Catherine escape into the illusion of an Italian getaway. Their feelings quickly evolve into something deeper, something – as mature adults with lives of their own – Paul and Catherine must carry on in secret, with the understanding that anything more than a casual crush is out of the question.

But as the sultry summer week draws to a close, the end of their rendezvous comes into focus, and Paul and Catherine are forced to decide whether to act on their feelings or leave the fantasy of what could have been to the annals of the past.

The enthralling tale of a powerful Greek goddess maligned in both myth and ancient history, as told by Sunday Times bestselling author Jennifer Saint.

When Hera, immortal goddess and daughter of the ancient Titan Cronus, helps her brother Zeus to overthrow their tyrannical father, she dreams of ruling at his side.

As they establish their reign on Mount Olympus, Hera suspects that Zeus might be just as ruthless and cruel as the father they betrayed.

She was always born to rule, but must she lose herself in perpetuating this cycle of violence and cruelty? Or can she find a way to forge a better world?

Often portrayed as the jealous wife or the wicked stepmother, this retelling captures the many sides of Hera, vengeful when she needs to be but also compassionate and most importantly, an all-powerful queen to the gods.

SOMETIMES YOU MUST CHOOSE TO PLAY WITH FIRE…

On a remote university campus in the north of England, famed for the wild waters that surround it, two cousins arrive for the new term.

Zara wants to be at the centre of everything Leysham has to offer.
Serena, an ex-champion swimmer, struggles to find her place.

When they meet Jane, a beguiling and ambitious postgrad obsessed with historic local witch trials, both are drawn in by her desire to expose Leysham’s dark legacy – a centuries-old culture of violence among the privileged elite.

As protests flare across the campus, a simmering rivalry takes hold between the cousins. But when cracks start to appear in Jane’s stories, everything spirals out of control…

Therapy was meant to solve her problems, not make them worse…

Twenty-year-old Dani is desperate to overcome her demons, leave her dead-end job and return to her hard-won place at university. Using her limited earnings, she decides to start seeing a psychotherapist.

Richard Goode is educated, sophisticated and worldly-everything Dani aspires to be. As he intuitively unpicks her self-loathing, Dani assumes the fantasies she’s developing about him live only in her head. That is, until things take a shocking turn…

Descending into a maelstrom of twisted desire, manipulation and mistrust, the power struggle between Dani and Richard escalates until she’s forced to make a decision she never would have anticipated.

Fifty Minutes is a propulsive and bold debut that marks Carla Jenkins as a vital new voice in fiction.

‘In our family, secrets were buried deep like treasure, never to be spoken of…’

1974. Melike should be happy: school is shut and her parents have stopped hosting parties for their rowdy political friends. But she’s scared. She can tell from her parents’ urgent whispers about prison, invasion and military coups that Istanbul is changing. So when the family relocate to a quaint village in the south, Melike is hopeful life might get better. And for a while, it does. But then her beloved father disappears…

2003. Nearly three decades have passed, and Melike has done her best to move on. But despite her successful career as an art historian and a husband who adores her, she has always felt a lingering discontent. When she meets mysterious – and extremely handsome – stranger Petro, Melike feels her fortunes changing. But Petro isn’t who he says he is. And when Melike uncovers his true identity, she also lays bare a lifetime of hidden pasts…

With a backdrop of the Turkish army’s occupation of Cyprus in 1974, Summer Heat explores family secrets, tangled identities and one woman’s place in her country’s devastating history.

A woman learns the astonishing truth of her family’s ties to a vanished American Kingdom in this riveting new novel from the bestselling and award-winning author of Take My Hand

Nikki Berry hasn’t seen her grandmother Rita in years. When she calls out of the blue asking Nikki to visit her urgently in the hills of North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. Her mother and grandmother have long been estranged, and after years of silence in her family, Nikki is determined to learn the truth while she still can.

But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki the incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who became its queen.

It sounds like the makings of a fairy tale – royalty among a community of freed people. But the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family’s secrets are contained in these hills. Because this land is their legacy, and it is up to her to protect it before – like so much else – it is stolen away.

Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multi-generational novel about the stories that shape us and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.

A civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test whether time-travel is feasible.

Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, supporting and monitoring expat ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore, a former Victorian polar explorer. Gore, an adventurer by trade, soon adjusts to this bizarre new world of washing machines, feminism and Spotify; and during a long, sultry summer the pair move from awkwardness to friendship to something more.

But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy that history when it is living in your house?

A forbidden love.
An impossible decision.
A family changed forever…

1954. Bea Bell has lived in Grenada her whole life… until she meets handsome surveyor Patrick Anderson. The two are quickly swept up in a whirlwind romance that takes them across the crumbling Empire. But not everyone is as accepting of their interracial marriage. And soon they are faced with an impossible decision, one that threatens to tear them apart…

2015. Since her mother’s death, Amelia has tirelessly taken care of her family. So it falls to her to pack up her family’s memories and sell their family home, whilst taking care of her aging father. But then Amelia finds a handwritten letter, unveiling a family secret that reveals how little she really knows about herself…

The Mapmaker’s Wife is a sweeping love story which explores identity, friendship and family and will appeal to fans of Santa Montefiore and Dinah Jefferies.

A heart-stopping dual timeline mystery, from the bestselling author of The Belladonna Maze.

In 1924, Annie, dreaming of a new life, leaves her home in Ballydrynawn, West Kerry, and boards a ship bound for New York. With Irish maids in demand, she soon finds work with the wealthy Cavendish family in their opulent Fifth Avenue mansion. Only Annie knows the secrets she left behind though and when her friendship with an Italian waitress named Elena deepens into something more passionate and dangerous for them both, Annie’s past rises up to haunt her. Will be she be forced to flee again?

Now, Emer arrives at her family’s holiday home in Ballydrynawn. Burnt out and desperate for more, Emer has run away from her new life in LA. But even as the village begins to work its healing magic, the past refuses to stay silent.

As Annie and Emer’s past and future begin to intertwine in the shadows of the village’s magical Fairy Tree, long buried secrets will be revealed…

Should we really ever bring our whole selves to work? In a London call centre, Jimmie helps holiday makers with myriad problems, but he is hardly a model employee. He doesn’t simply provide customer service to his clients and advice to his colleagues, he gets involved in their fantasies and frustrations, and now he’s about to be hauled up in front of the boss.

From perfecting his roles as an undertaker and as a clown to performing duties above and beyond his employment contract, he debates the importance of the optimum shade for lipstick and bathroom walls, the pros and cons of nudist versus textile, as well as the psychological impacts of an Italian mother and an emotional support animal.

This is the second, ribald, scatological novel from the brilliant author of The Appointment. Jimmie’s sly, sharp, melancholy insights into the indignities of a world which aims to eliminate the human will make you laugh, weep and never look the same way at an electric carving knife again.