Contemporary Fiction

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Love Forms

By Claire Adam

Love Forms is a 2025 literary fiction novel by Trinidad and Tobago-born Claire Adam, longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. Narrated by Dawn Bishop, a fifty-eight-year-old former GP in London, the novel traces the lifelong weight of a 1980 secret: an unplanned pregnancy in Trinidad, a covert journey to Venezuela to give birth, and the relinquishment of her daughter to nuns for adoption. Forty years on, a message from a woman in Italy claiming to be her lost child sets in motion a search across three countries and four decades of memory. The novel examines how love takes shape and deforms across a family, how secrets calcify into silence, and how absence echoes through every bond that follows. Adam moves between 1980s Caribbean life, present-day London, and the terrain of recollection with quiet, cumulative force.

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Calling for a Blanket Dance

By Oscar Hokeah

Oscar Hokeah's first novel follows Ever Geimausaddle, a young man of Kiowa, Cherokee and Mexican heritage, from a traumatic infancy in Oklahoma through a turbulent adulthood. Ever never narrates his own early life. Relatives tell it instead, each from a different generation and with a different stake in who he becomes: grandmothers, a grandfather, cousins, aunts and others. Together they show how a family absorbs harm and tries to answer it with care, ceremony and practical help. The title comes from a powwow custom in which a community gathers to support someone in need. Among the notable debut novels of 2022, this work of literary fiction won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. It is a good choice for readers drawn to family stories, Indigenous life in the present day and multi-voice storytelling.

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The Land in Winter

By Andrew Miller

The Land in Winter is a novel about two marriages tested by one unforgiving season. In the winter of 1962–63, a young country doctor, Eric Parry, his wife Irene, and their farming neighbours Bill and Rita Simmons find their West Country lives closed in by snow until there is little left to hide behind. Andrew Miller cares less about what the weather destroys than about what it exposes: the compromises each partner has made, the social distances that marriage was meant to close, and the legacy of a war that ended less than two decades earlier. The book matters because of its sense of proportion. It gives an ordinary domestic crisis the seriousness usually reserved for public upheaval. The novel was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and won the Walter Scott Prize. It stands out among book club books because it offers four flawed but sympathetic points of view and no easy verdicts.

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Red, White & Royal Blue

A Novel

By Casey McQuiston

In Casey McQuiston’s romantic comedy, Alex Claremont-Diaz, the ambitious son of the president of the United States, has long regarded Britain’s Prince Henry as an aloof rival. After a public confrontation creates an international embarrassment, their families and advisers require them to perform a carefully managed friendship. Private messages and reluctant encounters gradually overturn Alex’s assumptions, and the staged reconciliation becomes a secret romance with consequences for a presidential election and the British monarchy. The novel combines an enemies-to-lovers courtship with an optimistic alternative version of contemporary politics. Beneath its banter and public-relations crises, it examines the tension between private identity and inherited duty. Alex and Henry must decide whether protecting powerful institutions is worth concealing themselves—and whether honesty can become a form of political as well as personal courage.

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The Flatshare

By Beth O’Leary

After leaving a troubled relationship, London book editor Tiffy Moore needs an affordable home immediately. Hospice nurse Leon Twomey needs extra money to help his brother challenge a wrongful conviction. Their solution is an unusual flatshare: Tiffy occupies Leon’s one-bedroom apartment at night and on weekends, while Leon uses it during the day after his night shifts. They even share the same bed—at different times—and initially conduct the arrangement without meeting. Household notes gradually become jokes, confidences, and acts of care, allowing an intimacy to develop before face-to-face attraction complicates the agreement. Beth O’Leary’s debut uses this playful romantic-comedy premise to examine trust, friendship, economic pressure, and recovery from emotional abuse. Alternating between Tiffy’s expansive voice and Leon’s clipped narration, the novel shows two people learning that a safe home depends less on conventional rules than on respect, communication, and the freedom to be…

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Get a Life, Chloe Brown

A Novel

By Talia Hibbert

After a frightening brush with death, Chloe Brown decides that managing her fibromyalgia has allowed caution and isolation to define too much of her life. She moves out of her family home and creates a list of experiences intended to make her more adventurous. Help arrives from an unlikely source: Redford “Red” Morgan, the motorcycle-riding superintendent of her apartment building, whose warmth and artistic talent complicate Chloe’s dismissive first impression of him. Their mutually beneficial arrangement develops through sharp exchanges, physical attraction, and increasingly vulnerable conversations. Yet both characters carry wounds that affection alone cannot erase. Chloe must distinguish necessary self-protection from emotional withdrawal, while Red confronts the damage left by an abusive former relationship. Their romance becomes a story about pleasure, autonomy, disability, trust, and the difficult work of being understood without surrendering one’s boundaries.