International

Few writers have shaped modern romantic fiction quite like Cecelia Ahern, whose debut PS, I Love You became an international phenomenon. Her latest novel, Love Unlocked, published by HarperFiction in August, has been shortlisted at the 2026 An Post Irish Book Awards, and it shows her still finding fresh ways to write about love.

The setup is a delightful blend of rom-com and mystery. Al, an engineer still reeling from discovering that his fiancée and his best friend were together behind his back, has had all the love locks removed from a Dublin bridge because their weight is a safety risk. Shortly afterwards, couples begin splitting up at an alarming rate, not only in Dublin but across the world. Melody, a commitment-shy podcaster who has decided love is not for her, starts digging into the phenomenon and soon tracks down the man responsible.

What follows is a gently magical romance in which two people who have given up on love are drawn together while trying to solve everyone else's heartbreak. Ahern grounds the whimsy in history by weaving in letters and the story of Grace Gifford and Joseph Plunkett, the Irish revolutionaries who married in Kilmainham Gaol in 1916 on the eve of his execution. Those sections add poignancy and a sense of how love endures.

The middle section repeats itself a little, and the plot relies on convenient meetings. But Ahern's humour, generosity and gift for character carry it. This is a comforting, uplifting read for fans of her earlier work and anyone in need of a little enchantment.

The Heights is Ian Rankin's first standalone thriller in roughly twenty years, and it finds the creator of John Rebus on fine form in an unfamiliar setting. Published by Orion in October and described by its publisher as an instant Sunday Times bestseller, it was praised in Laura Wilson's Guardian crime round-up as being well up to his usual high standard.

The setting is The Heights, a luxurious new high-rise looming over Hyde Park, built for the global super-rich. Its residents are used to discretion, security and getting their own way. When the night concierge is found murdered in the lobby, that bubble bursts, and Detective Sergeant Gillian Gish arrives to start asking questions. She is a London native, cynical, bolshie and quietly decent, and the gulf between her world and theirs drives much of the novel's energy.

Rankin structures the story like a traditional closed-circle mystery. Each floor brings new suspects with secrets to protect, and a couple of subplots complicate matters further. He keeps the many strands clear and moving, and his eye for the absurdities of extreme wealth gives the book a satirical edge.

What lifts it above a simple puzzle is Gish herself, a heroine with a clear moral compass and a dry wit that makes her excellent company. The final twists are neatly set up and satisfying. Rebus fans will not feel short-changed, and newcomers have an ideal starting point.

Liz Nugent has a gift for narrators who make readers squirm, and The Truth About Ruby Cooper, published in March by Sandycove, the Irish imprint of Penguin, is one of her most daring books. It was reviewed in The Irish Times crime column, chosen as RTÉ's Book of the Week, and has been shortlisted at the 2026 An Post Irish Book Awards. Nugent's website reports that it went to number one in the Irish charts.

The story begins in Boston, where Ruby Cooper and her sister Erin are raised within a tight church community that values appearances. When Ruby is sixteen, an incident occurs that splits the family and sets off a chain of consequences lasting decades. As adults the sisters live on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Ruby in Dublin and Erin in Boston, but neither can escape what happened.

Nugent is less concerned with a single shocking revelation than with how a family constructs and defends its version of events. She examines rivalry between siblings, the way communities assign guilt, and how a lie can become an inheritance. Ruby herself is complex and often unsettling company; Nugent gives her a voice that is sharp, funny and self-justifying, and refuses to make her simply a victim or a villain.

The novel deals with sexual violence and an accusation that divides a family, and it handles those themes in a way that will provoke debate. Some readers may find it hard going. But the craftsmanship is undeniable, the structure is beautifully controlled, and the final pages land with real force. It is essential reading for fans of dark, character-driven suspense.

The Jasmine Murders, published by Aleph Book Company in New Delhi and reviewed in The Hindu in March, introduces a new crime-solving partnership in Indian fiction. Roopa Unnikrishnan, making her debut as a novelist, sets the story in the early 1960s in Manamadurai, a provincial town in southern Tamil Nadu.

Jayan, a young officer, has taken up his post as Assistant Superintendent of Police, and he brings with him his new wife, Uma, whom he married just forty days earlier. Both are from Kerala, so they are newcomers in more ways than one: learning the language and customs of the town while still discovering each other. When a string of crimes unsettles the community, Jayan is under pressure to find answers, and Uma, sharp-eyed and quietly determined, becomes an unofficial partner in the investigation.

Much of the book's appeal lies in its setting. Unnikrishnan evokes the heat, the scent of jasmine, the social hierarchies and the fault lines that run beneath small-town life, and she captures a newly independent India still shaped by colonial institutions. The author has said the couple were partly inspired by her parents, and the gradual deepening of their marriage is one of the novel's quiet pleasures.

The plotting is solid rather than flashy, and readers expecting relentless twists may find the pace gentle. But the story builds to a vivid finale on the coast near Dhanushkodi, and the characters are engaging enough that a series feels very welcome. Recommended for fans of historical mysteries with a strong sense of place.

Michelle Good made a remarkable debut with Five Little Indians, which won the Governor General's Literary Award and Canada Reads in 2022. Her second novel, Eliza Sunshine, is on the 2026 Giller Prize shortlist, and it widens her lens from a group of survivors to a single family seen across three generations of Cree women.

Eliza is the hinge of the book. She returns home after years spent in a residential school, carrying experiences she cannot easily name, to a community and a family that have also been changed by her absence. Her grandmother Swan, her nôhkom, holds older knowledge and older griefs, while Eliza's daughter Ella grows up in the long shadow of what happened before she was born. Good, a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation who spent years as a lawyer representing residential school survivors, has said the novel draws on her own family history.

That closeness shows in the detail. The novel is attentive to everyday life, to work, food, humour and the push and pull between relatives who love each other but cannot always reach each other. Good writes plainly and with great control, letting the historical injustice sit underneath the story rather than on top of it, so that its impact accumulates gradually.

If there is a reservation, it is that the steady pace asks for patience in the early chapters. Readers who give it that patience will find a deeply humane novel about inheritance, resilience and the ways women keep culture alive under pressure.

All Her Lives is the first work of fiction from Ingrid Horrocks, a Wellington writer previously known for her memoir Where We Swim, two poetry collections and a literary history of women travellers. In May 2026 it won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, worth $65,000, at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, beating a strong shortlist that included Catherine Chidgey.

The book gathers nine stories, each centred on a woman at a particular point in her life, and together they span more than two centuries. Horrocks moves from girls raised in the garden of Truby King, the founder of New Zealand's Plunket child-health movement, to a queer university student at a Berlin rave in the mid-2000s, to rural Wairarapa and the icy ports of Norway. In one of the most affecting pieces, a mother has to reckon with what her son's climate rebellion will cost the family.

Threaded through the collection is Mary Wollstonecraft, whose eighteenth-century journey through Scandinavia, undertaken in grief and political ferment, becomes a kind of guiding presence. Horrocks uses her lightly, as an echo rather than a lesson, and the effect is to make the women's struggles feel connected across time.

The writing is controlled and observant, with sentences that reward attention, and the judges' description of the book as emotionally intelligent and historically alert feels apt. Some readers may want more plot from individual stories, but the cumulative effect is rich and quietly powerful. This is a fine choice for anyone who loves literary short fiction or historically minded writing about women's lives.

Fierceland, Omar Musa's second novel, won the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Fiction, and it is easy to see why judges responded to its scale and nerve. At its centre is a family summoned home. Roz, an artist based in Sydney, and her brother Harun, who lives in Los Angeles, return to Kota Kinabalu in Malaysian Borneo after the death of their father, Yusuf Mansur, a palm-oil magnate whose wealth came at a cost to land and people.

The funeral is only the starting point. Musa opens in 1998 with a trip into the forest, then roams freely across time: the parents' meeting in Adelaide as students, the siblings' divergent adult lives, and strands set in 1970s Nigeria and nineteenth-century Venice. Joseph Conrad appears in person, and the novel can be read as a deliberate answer to Heart of Darkness, told from the side of the people and places such stories usually silence.

What makes the book distinctive is its chorus of voices. Musa, who is also a poet and performer, writes with rhythm and swagger, and he lets the forest speak alongside his human characters, drawing on the Malay hikayat storytelling tradition. That sometimes makes for demanding reading, and not every thread carries equal weight. But the anger about environmental destruction is matched by real compassion for a family trying to understand what their father built and what it destroyed. It is a bold, generous novel for readers who like their literary fiction expansive.

Louise O'Neill made her name with hard-hitting fiction such as Only Ever Yours and Asking For It. In A Bigger Life, published by HQ in September, she turns her clear eye on herself. The memoir has been reviewed in The Irish Times and the Irish Independent and is on the 2026 An Post Irish Book Awards shortlist.

The book begins with a breakup. At thirty-eight, O'Neill's long relationship ends, along with the house and future she had planned around it. She writes honestly about the panic that follows, the cultural messaging that tells women over thirty-five they are running out of time, and her fears about motherhood and desirability. Rather than settle, she sets out to discover what she wants, travelling to Paris, London and New York, going on a great many dates and experimenting with wellness practices, retreats and therapies.

The strongest passages connect this adventure to her history: years lost to an eating disorder, the aftermath of sexual assault, and a long struggle to feel at home in her body. Against that background, her pursuit of pleasure and connection feels like a reclaiming. She is also perceptive about how online discourse turns dating into a battleground, and she finds, to her own surprise, more good people than bad.

Critics have noted that the book could probe the costs of its wellness journey more deeply, and readers wary of self-discovery memoirs may feel the format is familiar. Yet O'Neill's humour, candour and warmth make it a generous companion, especially for anyone navigating heartbreak or the pressure to have life figured out.

Murder Most Cryptic is the debut novel of Alys Cummings, a journalist who worked on local newspapers, for a news agency at the Old Bailey and for BBC Panorama. Published by Michael Joseph in October and featured in Laura Wilson's Guardian crime round-up, it is a puzzle mystery with a genuinely fresh hook: the clues are cryptic crossword clues, and readers can try to solve them alongside the characters.

The heroine, Nina, is a talented young reporter and a recovering alcoholic who goes to a weekly support group in a local church hall. When an unfamiliar man joins one evening, everyone assumes he has come for help. Moments later he collapses and dies. The police conclude it was an accident, but the group find a crossword clue in his pocket, and the answer is Murder. More clues then start to appear in a newspaper's crossword, each more menacing than the last, and the group realise one of them could be next.

Cummings plays fair with her puzzles, building them into the narrative and supplying the solutions at the end, so solvers and non-solvers alike can enjoy the ride. The cast of misfits is likeable, and their shared struggles with addiction lend the story more emotional weight than the average cosy mystery. There is a darker edge, too, as the threats escalate.

The tone occasionally wobbles between light-hearted puzzling and serious subject matter, and the plot leans on coincidence at times. Still, this is an inventive, entertaining debut, ideal for anyone who starts the day with a crossword and ends it with a whodunnit.

At 81, M. John Harrison is one of the elder statesmen of British speculative fiction, and The End of Everything, published by Serpent's Tail, has put him on the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist. Should he win on 9 November, he would be the oldest winner in the prize's history. The novel shows why his admirers prize him and why he can divide readers.

The setting is the coastline of Kent in a near future that has already lived through some kind of catastrophe. No one can explain what happened. The government barely functions, the sea teems with new forms of life, Europe has somehow gone missing and the sky itself seems to malfunction. Phillip Tennent gets by on the tideline, picking up artefacts from the Channel, until he retrieves something that keeps changing and that he cannot simply sell or hide. He has to take it inland.

Harrison is less interested in answers than in atmosphere and perception. His prose is exact and luminous, full of chalky light, damp seaside towns and uneasy encounters, and the reader is invited to dwell in uncertainty rather than solve it. Beneath the strangeness is sharp satire about a society that keeps going about its business while its explanations of the world collapse.

Reviews have ranged from rapturous to sceptical, with The Irish Times finding it rudderless and The Guardian praising its vision. That is a fair guide: if you want a conventional apocalypse with clear stakes, this is not it. If you enjoy fiction that unsettles and lingers, it is a remarkable experience.

C. J. Tudor has built a strong following with The Chalk Man, The Burning Girls and The Drift, novels that sit somewhere between crime and horror. Serenity Falls, published by Michael Joseph in September and reviewed by Lisa Tuttle in The Guardian's round-up of recent horror, is one of her most enjoyable books yet, swapping English villages for the manicured lawns of Florida.

The premise is classic. Dan, a widower, and his daughter Sadie move from the UK to Serenity Falls, a carefully planned community that boasts of having no crime. It seems the perfect place to start again. Almost immediately, though, a body is discovered in their pool, and as Dan starts asking questions he learns that the town has a long record of fatal accidents stretching back over its fifty years. As the community prepares to celebrate its anniversary, more odd discoveries pile up, from empty houses to unexplained activity at night.

Tudor's great skill is in making the ordinary sinister. Neighbourly kindness feels like surveillance, and rules that seem quaint gradually look like something worse. She balances suspense with warmth, particularly in the relationship between Dan and Sadie, and with the wry humour that runs through her work.

The book is long, and the middle section occasionally lingers, but the payoff is worth the wait. It will appeal to fans of Stephen King's small-town horror, Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives and anyone who has ever suspected that a town seemed too good to be true.

Wild People Quiet, shortlisted for the 2026 Giller Prize, is the kind of historical novel that illuminates a chapter many readers will know little about. Tara Gereaux, a Regina author whose earlier books include Saltus and Size of a Fist, sets her story in 1946 in Torduvalle, a small Saskatchewan town where reputations are everything and differences are noticed.

Florence Banks has made herself fit in. She is Métis, but she lives as a white woman, colouring her hair blonde and guarding her history carefully. Her careful life begins to shift when Métis labourers come to work on local farms, and when government plans to remove Métis people from their land start to take shape. Suddenly the community Florence has kept at arm's length is on her doorstep, and the cost of her silence becomes impossible to ignore.

Gereaux is good on the textures of postwar prairie life: the weather, the work, the small social rituals that police who belongs. She avoids melodrama, preferring to let pressure build through glances, half-truths and conversations that stop when someone enters the room. Florence is not always likeable, and that is a strength; her compromises are shown as survival rather than simple betrayal.

The pacing is measured, and readers who want a fast plot may find the middle section slow. But the novel's moral seriousness and emotional honesty are considerable. It is a rewarding read for fans of quiet, character-driven historical fiction and anyone interested in Indigenous histories of the Canadian West.

May We Feed the King is the first novel from Rebecca Perry, a poet previously shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and it has become one of the literary stories of 2026: shortlisted for the Booker Prize, winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and, according to its publisher, a Sunday Times bestseller. It is also one of the most unusual historical novels in recent memory.

The book moves between two worlds. In the present day, an unnamed curator arrives at a historic palace to create the period room displays that visitors walk through, sourcing historically accurate food and objects with obsessive care. In the archive, the curator encounters the record of a short-lived medieval king, a reluctant ruler who inherited the throne after both his older brothers died and who seemed to want nothing to do with power. As doubts about his fitness to rule grow at court, the idea takes hold that someone else might rule in his place.

Perry refuses the usual comforts of the genre. Names are withheld, motives are obscured, and we see the court in glimpses: through windows, from thresholds, in overheard fragments. At the same time the physical detail is extraordinarily vivid, from banquet dishes to fabrics and light. The effect is of standing in a beautifully staged room, trying to imagine the lives that once filled it.

That ambiguity will not suit every reader, and anyone seeking a conventional royal drama should look elsewhere. But as a meditation on what history can and cannot tell us, it is clever, sensuous and haunting.

Kelly McCaughrain has already collected a shelf of awards in Ireland for her earlier novels, Flying Tips for Flightless Birds and the Carnegie-shortlisted Little Bang. Just Another Dead Boy, published by Walker Books in June 2026, is her first speculative romance, and it has earned a place on the 2026 An Post Irish Book Awards shortlist.

The premise is striking. In a world where people can learn their exact death dates, the rich are able to check in to exclusive resorts to enjoy their final weeks in comfort. Regan works at one of these resorts, and she is very good at her job: helping guests feel they have found true love before they die. The cardinal rule is that she must never fall in love herself. Then she meets Jude, a guest with just one week to live, and their carefully scripted romance begins to slip off the page.

McCaughrain balances the big ideas with a light touch. The banter between Regan and Jude is sharp and funny, and their relationship develops with genuine tenderness. Beneath the romance lies a pointed critique of a system in which the poor provide comfort to the wealthy at the end of life, and the novel asks how anyone should spend the time they have.

It is a story about grief and hope as much as love, and the emotional moments hit hard, so sensitive readers should be prepared. The ending stays with you. Teens and adults who enjoyed Adam Silvera's They Both Die at the End will find a thoughtful, moving companion here.

The Erin Patterson trial was one of the most closely followed criminal cases in Australian history. In July 2023, Patterson served a lunch in Leongatha, Victoria, after which three of her guests died and a fourth fell gravely ill from death cap mushroom poisoning. In July 2025, after a ten-week trial in Morwell, she was found guilty of three murders and one attempted murder; she has since been sentenced to life imprisonment and has lodged an appeal.

Among the writers in the public gallery were Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, three of the country's leading literary nonfiction authors. Rather than each writing a separate account, they recorded their conversations, originally with a podcast in mind, during the long drives between Melbourne and the courthouse. The Mushroom Tapes, published by Text in November 2025, is the result, and it topped the 2025 bestseller list at Readings, the Melbourne bookseller.

The conversational format is the book's great strength. The three authors challenge each other, change their minds and admit their own discomfort at being drawn into a spectacle. They discuss motive and evidence, but also media behaviour, the appetite for true crime, and what it means to make literature from other people's grief. Throughout, they show real compassion for the victims, the survivor and the children caught up in the case.

Readers wanting a definitive, chronological account of the trial may find the structure loose. But as an intelligent, candid study of why such stories grip us, it stands apart from the rest of the genre.