10 Must-Read Fiction Books To See You Through Spring
Time to head to the park with your phone, your keys and one of these spring titles
Your spring book stack starts here. We’ve read a bunch of new fiction releases out now or due this season and put together this edit of ten must-reads.
The list includes heavyweights such as the return of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a fiendish murder mystery debut from Louise Hegarty and a stunning book exploring the impacts of war from French author Mathias Enard. Elsewhere, we have a road trip novel, some speculative near-future fiction and a book about one, long, strange night out.
- Missed our winter reads? Check out 10 new fiction books to read in 2025
We’ve also coincidentally got more than our fair share of midlife crises in the pages below - something for us all to look forward to.
1. Universality
(Natasha Brown)
It takes some guts to take aim at columnists, publishers and literary festivals with your second book but that’s exactly what Natasha Brown has done. If that all sounds a bit insider-y, it’s actually far from it. This 150-odd page novella zips through a plot involving a stolen gold bar, an anti-woke icon, posh hippy activists, a Yorkshire countryside rave and a b*nker w*nker (or is he?). In other words, it’s having a lot of fun. Case in point, a lot of Brown’s cast of characters are having an argument in their head, not in fact with the person in front of them.
She gets stuck into questions of class, taste, cynicism-versus-idealism, internet rage-bait, bad dinner parties and, crucially, who exactly gets to be universal, who gets to speak on behalf of ‘the people’. To complete the full Universality experience, we recommend a trip to a bougie, self-congratulatory literary talk or at the very least reading a bunch of fawning, slightly scared reviews of this book.
2. Flesh
(David Szalay)
Remember when Danny Wallace became a Yes Man, saying yes to everything for a year? Well, David Szalay’s hero István is something of an “Okay” Man, going along with almost everything that’s put in front of him: jobs, affairs, even war. Szalay follows István from his start as an unsure, uncommunicative teen in Hungary, through stints in prison and serving in the Iraq War, ultmately landing him in London’s Chelsea working security for some extremely wealthy, well-connected people.
Taking in sex and intimacy, men’s friendships and father-son dynamics, the reader is required to work throughout to fill in some key story gaps, and even some heavy emotional beats, but this patience is rewarded towards the conclusion of István’s story. What plays out in the pages of Flesh is really quite haunting as we see the consequences of decisions and non-decisions through the years. This one stays with you.
3. Fair Play
(Louise Hegarty)
A bunch of friends rent a big country house on Airbnb for a joint NYE and birthday party with a murder mystery theme. So far, so millennial. But when one of the friends is found dead the next morning, this debut novel from Irish writer Louise Hegarty turns into something stranger that’s very tricky to pull off. Fair Play does for Agatha Christie-style detectives stories and really, actually thinking about death what Radiohead did with alternative rock and experimental ‘world’ music: leads you gently from one to the other with no complaints from the audience.
Clues, red herrings, money, love, secrets, it’s all packed in to this deftly constructed story. I don’t want to say too much more to avoid spoiling it, but if you like postmodern, meta narratives that get inside your head and still manage to honour the emotional heart of the characters, this is one to seek out.
4. The Deserters
(Mathias Enard)
It’s only April but I already know The Deserters will be one of the books of the year for me. The work of French author Mathias Enard, translated into English here by Charlotte Mandell, it’s a kind of study of conflict in Europe, approaching the subject from all sorts of expected and unexpected angles.
With parallel stories of a soldier deserting a war and the daughter of a concentration camp survivor learning about his life, it’s at times cerebral, at others visceral, concerned with the beauty and danger of both nature and humankind, sometimes highly specific and other times anonymous, examining the immediate aftermath of war alongside the ramifications down the decades. Poetic pages and old love letters will be followed by down-and-dirty descriptions of boots and guns and back again, with each mood enhancing the other. Just stunning.
5. Stag Dance
(Torrey Peters)
Gosh, where to start. This collection of four stories from American writer Torrey Peters is precise, original, funny and fearless. Written across ten years, each one is an experiment in telling the lives of trans women ranging from speculative near-future fiction about hormone wars - which has a spectacular f*ck you ending - to secret boarding school shenanigans and subculture power dynamics.
The title story, which could be its own standalone novella, is set in a 19th century ‘pirate’ lumberjack camp, deep in icy winter woods and it’s a page-turner that will surprise you again and again. Jealousy, shame, mythical beasts, Las Vegas Strip sting ops, everything in Stag Dance feels genuinely fresh from the overarching desires down to all the details. And you won’t think about pigs the same way again.
6. The Rest of our Lives
(Ben Markovits)
Ben Markovits’ protagonist in The Rest of our Lives is 55 year-old Tom. He’s a law professor who is on leave, he’s married to Amy, he’s suffering from Long Covid and he has just dropped the youngest of his two kids Miri off at her college dorm in Pittsburgh. What follows is an All Fours-style crisis road trip from this midlife man’s perspective. He drives around the US to meet with friends, family, an old girlfriend — in other words he goes anywhere but home to the empty nest.
Markovits gives us a compellingly true to life mix of action and passivity from Tom, who narrates the book with a matter of fact, everyman tone as he decides who to confide in and when. And in the background hums the likes of Neil Young, John Mellencamp, the Bourne trilogy and Raymond Chandler. Tom takes in dive bars, pick-up basketball and sees how other people’s domestic lives have turned out, as he examines his own unrealised ambitions, the state of his marriage and what on earth to do next. A sympathetic portrait of all concerned.
7. Dream Count
(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
Probably the biggest fiction release for spring, this is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel in over ten years. The author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun is back with a beautiful book which follows four Nigerian and Guinean women in America - travel writer Chiamaka, her lawyer friend Zikora, her banker-turned-student cousin Omelogor and her housekeeper Kadiatou - asking big questions about their lives and what they’re hoping for, from men in particular.
This is honest, heartfelt writing, including painful surveys through the characters’ past relationships. Adichie also gives herself space to explore themes of women’s bodies and health, childbirth, motherhood and sexual assault across the four women’s interconnected sections. Dream Count is very much the other half of the ‘lost men’ story of this decade and Adichie carefully weaves religion, money and the pandemic into the larger story. Considering this is almost 400 pages, you could easily sink into the reflections of Adichie’s characters for a whole weekend.
8. Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken Hearted
(Ben Okri)
Ever read T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land? If not, we recommend reading it before picking up Ben Okri’s Madame Sosostris, which takes its title from a character in the 1920s modernist poem and themes from both the work and Eliot’s own life. The Booker Prize-winning Okri has incredible range - he wrote a beautiful poem on the Grenfell Tower tragedy in 2017. Here, he is in a playful yet contemplative mode as he uses a fantastical party in the woods in the south of France, with masks, costumes, music and a famous fortune teller, to examine two couples that might or might not be in crisis: Viv and Alan, Beatrice and Stephen.
Okri is also a playwright and at times this book feels like a play script, with heaps of witty dialogue and wordplay on romance and breakups, the popularity of tarot, yoga and astrology and the one thing every character is obsessed with: the future. The literary references don’t stop with Eliot, either: there’s plenty in here for Shakespeare heads too.
9. Sister Europe
(Nell Zink)
Sister Europe, a 1980 Psychedelic Furs album and now the title of American-writer-in-Germany Nell Zink’s new novel. Taking place over the course of one very weird night out in Berlin, this 200-pager starts out seeming like it’s intentionally put together a motley crew purely to clash with one another. But as Sister Europe unfolds, it subverts the stereotypes - a trans teenager, her art critic father, an Arab prince, the ageing hipster and a few more - and fully lets us into each of their heads. It’s funny too and full of erudite art, history and architecture references; Zink makes it crystal clear that these are often simply one character trying to impress another but you’ll end up sheepishly noting them down for yourself regardless.
And all throughout, in a superb Confederacy of Dunces-esque choice, the group is followed by a tragic policeman watching all these rich people flirt and yawn, itching to arrest someone for something, anything. The kind of book that’ll have you second guessing yourself the next time you have a conversation with someone you’ve just met.
10. Theft
(Abdulrazak Gurnah)
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, Theft is quite a classically told tale of three teenagers coming of age in 1990s Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania. The interlocking stories of Karim, Badar and Fauzia follow the different struggles they encounter from how they’re treated by the adults in their lives to what opportunities are open to them.
There’s nothing showy in the language here but you always feel that you’re in safe hands with Gurnah and his storytelling in Theft. Old family feuds, small kindnesses and postcolonial politics all work as powerful forces on the shapes of their lives and while Badar, who progresses from servant to hotel staff, becomes our main focus as the book continues, there’s a lot of care for each of his characters. Understated but that’s no reason to overlook it.