Literary fiction
The Salt Orchard
A grieving fruit scientist inherits a failing orchard on a salt-burned coast, along with a ledger that seems to predict every bad harvest. Hollis writes weather the way other novelists write villains.
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Fantasy
A House of Paper Moths
A bookbinder’s apprentice discovers that the moths eating the library’s oldest folios are rewriting them. Strange, tender and very funny.
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Essays
Fieldwork
Twelve essays on walking the same three miles of farmland for a year. The best nature writing I’ve read in a decade, and the least preachy.
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Science fiction
The Glass Cartographer
A mapmaker on a generation ship charts corridors that keep moving. Big ideas, small kindnesses, and an ending that earns its hope.
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Mystery
Northern Ledger
A tax inspector, a frozen harbour town and a set of accounts that don’t add up. A slow-burn mystery with a wonderfully dry narrator.
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Poetry
Winter Pears
Short, plain-spoken poems about a mother’s last winter. I read it in one sitting and then again, slowly, with a pencil.
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Historical
Under the Tamarind
Three generations of a Lagos family across one tree’s lifetime. Sprawling, generous and full of food you can almost taste.
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Literary fiction
The Quiet Arithmetic
A retired maths teacher counts her way through a year of small losses. Beautifully written, if a little too restrained for me.
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Literary fiction
Letters to the Lighthouse
A novel in letters between a lighthouse keeper and the widow who writes to him by mistake. Gentle, witty, and sad in all the right places.
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Literary fiction
The Tide Ledger
The first Tidewater book: a coastal village, a drowned church and the woman who decides to dig it out. Where the sequence begins.
