For the 12th year running, writers and editors on the Observer New Review spent the busy weeks before Christmas immersed in dozens of forthcoming debut novels, seeking out the titles we reckon deserve to be in everyone’s hands over the months ahead. Whatever your taste in fiction, this list gives you a heads-up on the future prize winners, mega-sellers and word-of-mouth hits that change the literary conversation. From Shuggie Bain to Conversations with Friends and The Miniaturist, and from Caleb Azumah Nelson to Bonnie Garmus and Sheena Patel – all found early champions here. Colin Barrett, one of last year’s picks, just won this year’s Nero debut fiction prize, awarded last year to Michael Magee, one of our 2023 picks.

Our search for the year’s best debut novels only ever has one rule: the writers we choose must live in the UK or Ireland. After that, anything goes. The class of 2025 includes authors whose manuscripts were snapped up before they’d left university, and some who didn’t put pen to paper until a later-life left turn. Some are published by independent presses, others by cash-splashing corporates trumpeting the spoils of multiway bidding wars, television rights already in the bag. There are novels on this list that were written at dawn, through lunch breaks, whenever the nine-to-five allowed, and at least one that was written on the cushion of a six-figure advance – a pressure of its own. Several authors here are already well known for their short story collections. Nothing mattered to us but the novels themselves.

The strong showing from writers in Ireland and Northern Ireland makes sense when you hear them talk about the subsidised literary magazines and development agencies that helped them grow. Surprise, surprise: arts funding is transformative. Those kinds of fortifying networks exist in Britain too, yet the mood feels more atomised, less collegiate, not least since the White Review – a magazine that broke many new names – ceased to publish after Arts Council cuts in 2023.

If there’s a theme among this year’s books, it might be care – parent-child relationships recur in a variety of guises – but their style and subject differ as widely as their paths to publication. There’s a dizzyingly transcontinental ecological epic about Hindu nationalism, set everywhere from the Chagos Islands to the Arctic Circle. There’s a spare, slender tale of embattled gay love in 1980s south Wales. There’s a pacy page-turner about escaping coercive control, and a filthy comic romp about an “Islamic State bride” in Iraq (really). And that’s just for starters; we loved every one of these outstanding novels, and we think you will too. Here’s to yet more excellent reading.
Anthony Cummins

Gurnaik Johal

Saraswati (Serpent’s Tail, 12 June)

A lot of eco fiction is very worthy. My book has car chases!

Gurnaik Johal, 26, is among several authors on this list to have already made a name with short stories, but the success of his prize-winning 2022 collection We Move, set near his home turf in west London’s Southall (“little Punjab”), only made him wary when it came to writing a novel. “Often when a short story writer does a novel, it feels as if they’ve diluted a short story over a larger page count,” he says. “I wanted this to be a maximalist book that earned its RRP.”

Value for money Saraswati most certainly delivers, darting thrillerishly around the world to fold chewy themes of empire, populism and global warming into a cross-generational epic centred on seven strangers – among them a Bollywood stunt double and a Mauritian exterminator – who each return to their Punjabi roots amid the discovery of the lost holy river that gives the book its title.

“I knew I’d write a terrible novel if I sat down and was like, OK, I’m going to write about climate change,” says Johal, who found a way into his vast material via the terrifying trajectory of Satnam, a young Londoner who inherits a farm in Punjab after getting laid off from his corporate job; before he knows it, he’s the hired muscle in a nationalist pogrom. “He’s a very passive character, which I suppose goes against what they tell you in school about writing, but people who passively go along with things can quickly end up in an extreme place.”

Johal began the novel in 2019 – the proposal baited the hook for his agent to sell We Move – but still isn’t sure how to describe it: neither family saga nor eco fiction sits quite right with him, though he’s chuffed to be compared to Ned Beauman, whose environmental caper Venomous Lumpsucker is among his favourite recent novels. “A lot of eco fiction is very worthy,” he says. “My book has car chases!”

Now working in AI, Johal wrote Saraswati around a previous job in children’s publishing. Any pressure he felt to outrun daily headlines from Modi’s India eased once he caught himself worrying how to accommodate the spreading farmers’ protests in 2020. “I thought: I have to push off from reality and take my boat out to sea. That was sort of a thrilling moment – it’s just me now, I’m gonna make my own thing.”

Have you been to all the places Saraswati portrays?
I wish! Google Maps is very good. Maybe the globe-trotting impulse is partly a result of writing a bit of it in lockdown. It’s a sort of arrogance but that’s the joy of fiction: you can sit on your sofa or on the tube and your head’s in America or Antarctica.

Did you always want to write?
I wanted to do fine art but didn’t get the grades. A course in Manchester did English literature with creative writing so I thought: OK, I’ll still be doing something creative. My brother was the big reader when we were kids; I’d read because he’d keep the light on. It sounds so wanky but as a teenager I distinctly remember picking up Camus’s The Outsider. My mum opened it – she was still buying our books – and there was that first line: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” I was like, wow, this is edgy.

Are you working on another novel?
Tentatively: it’s about the first contact with a previously uncontacted tribe. I’m giving myself a 101 in anthropology. My writing so far is like a record of my interest – almost an excuse to formalise learning and replicate with the reader the joy I feel working on a project.
Interview by Anthony Cummins

John Patrick McHugh

Fun and Games (4th Estate, 24 April)

As a teenager, sex is all-consuming … grotty but still erotic, even romantic – shenanigans in cinemas, shenanigans behind cinemas

“I was interested in displaying the insecurity of boys’ sexuality, and how women can be sex objects to boys,” says John Patrick McHugh of his debut novel, Fun and Games. “Maybe it’s crude, maybe it’s unsaid, but it’s what I’ve experienced and it’s what the chat used to be about; as a teenager, sex is all-consuming. Everyone knows each other’s business. It’s grotty but still erotic, even romantic – shenanigans in cinemas, shenanigans behind cinemas.”

Set, like his 2021 story collection Pure Gold, on a remote Irish island – a fictionalised Achill Island in Mayo, home to McHugh’s family on his mother’s side – the novel tracks 17-year-old school-leaver John (“he isn’t me”) over a single summer as he awaits his exam results, not to mention a crunch fixture for the Gaelic football team whose first XV he’s hoping to make. On his mind, too, is the indecent proposal made by a classmate who scents opportunity when John brags about what he’s getting up to with a woman at his hotel summer job. Then there’s the family-splintering brouhaha over the topless selfie his mum sent a man who isn’t his dad: the reason why all John’s pals call him Tits.

It’s a funny and frank coming-of-age drama, propelled by the heart-swelling comic agony of the protagonist’s incapacity to act without second-guessing the consequences for his social rank. McHugh, 33, attributes some of that to his memory of being a perpetual new boy, always alert to the pecking order whenever he changed school as his family moved around Ireland, eventually settling in Galway. “Good fiction always has a bit of blood in it,” he says, recalling how his weight as a child worried him in his teens. “All someone had to do was call me fat and suddenly I’d ‘lose’, you know? Giving that to John felt true for the character, who’s so concerned what people think; he trains every couple of days and yet he’s still worried he’s fat.”

McHugh, who’s dyslexic, never imagined he’d be an author. His break came in 2014, when he got a story into the Dublin literary magazine the Stinging Fly, then edited by the writer Thomas Morris. “I remember him saying: ‘You’re funny in person, how come you’re not funny in fiction?’ One of the best things he’s ever said to me.”

Why did you set it in 2009?
I wanted to make sure there was no international soccer tournament that summer, no world cups on or anything like that to distract the boys. And I wanted it just before smartphones: text messages everywhere, landlines still a thing. I wanted the mother’s photo to be almost like a relic.

What drew you to writing about Gaelic football?
It’s a huge part of Irish life. Every village and town has a GAA club, if not two; it kind of controls community life in smaller places. I didn’t worry [about overseas readers]: Don DeLillo brought us baseball and sure no one plays baseball. It played into John’s fears about not making the team and his body. Paul Mescal has made it very famous that GAA shorts are really high.

Speaking of Normal People: Sally Rooney’s acknowledgments in that novel thank you for how much your guidance contributed to it.
We’ve been sharing work since we were 23. She gets my work in a way not many people do. Sally will still be Sally with or without me, but now and again I read her stuff as well. I’d be like: oh yeah, that’s good – she doesn’t need as much editing as I do.

Have you another novel in mind?
I’m still creatively excited by the island. I like the idea that if I write more books they’ll maybe all be on this little fictional place.
AC

William Rayfet Hunter

Sunstruck (#Merky, 15 May)

The biggest change is being allowed to view myself as a creative person

Growing up outside Manchester as the child of lawyers, British-Jamaican William Rayfet Hunter, 31, would write plays for their brothers and cousins, but an aptitude for science saw teachers steering them towards medicine. What kept them in the profession for six years after qualifying as a resident doctor was the stories. “I am fascinated by people, and in medicine you’ve got this incredibly privileged insight into how they think, how they feel. They would tell you absolutely everything about themselves.”

Hunter always sensed they’d end up writing. After revisiting journal entries from earlier on in their twenties, they were inspired to develop an unnamed character who is invited by his gilded university friend, Lily, to stay in a villa in the south of France. There, he experiences a powerful, transformative attraction to Lily’s handsome brother, Felix, and as a sultry queer romance ignites, must confront questions of class, race and power. The premise was informed by the cultural dislocation Hunter experienced when sent to board at Shrewsbury School aged 13.

Over the course of three years, jotting down sentences in the notes app on their phone, they wrote 5,000 words of what would become Sunstruck, “a love letter to the fierceness and confusion of your teens and early 20s, when you don’t really know who you are or what your place in the world is”.

The galvanising factor was the 2023 #Merky Books new writers’ prize for young, under-represented aspiring authors. Entering in the hope of getting some helpful feedback, it was only upon winning that they realised they’d actually have to finish the book (a contract with the imprint #Merky Books is part of the prize).

What did it mean to win the #Merky prize?
I’d put it so out of my mind that it floored me when I got the call. The biggest change is being allowed to view myself as a creative person. It legitimises it and that’s really freeing. There is also a strange feeling of impostor syndrome, as if I’ve skipped the queue a bit by not going the traditional route to getting published.

Are Lily and her family based on anyone you know?
They’re thankfully fictional, but I have known bits of them in different people. In a way, a lot of their thoughts are my thoughts – these characters are all versions of me and the voices that tell me things about myself. I hadn’t realised that until I finished the novel.

Did you read a lot as a child?
I escaped into books. I always found them more interesting than what was happening in front of me which was a lot of grass and trees and my brothers playing football. I was a huge fan of Jeeves and Wooster – I wanted the first half of Sunstruck to feel a bit like a Jeeves and Wooster. My mum was constantly giving me books that were a little bit too old for me. She bought me a Jilly Cooper novel when I was about 13. I read it and thought, this wasn’t what you meant to give me.

How and where do you write?
In fits and starts, mainly from a table in the bay window in my living room in Mile End, with a cigarette and a coffee. I write three words each day for two weeks and almost pack it in, then I will sit down one morning and get up at the end of the day without having eaten lunch, and with a section of the book completely done.

Is there anything you know about writing now that you wish you’d known at the start?
Repetition can be a good device sometimes, but if you repeat the bit of writing that you think is good three times every chapter you’re just going to have to delete it.

What can you tell me about the novel you’re currently working on?
It’s solidified out of wanting to write about childhood and wanting to create something that feels unreliable in how it’s told. It’s a story about how we interact with one another and how we love – that’s what interests me the most, and will I think be the through line of my writing career.
Hephzibah Anderson

Wendy Erskine

The Benefactors (Sceptre, 19 June)

People tell you to silence your inner critic. Absolutely not! Your inner critic is all you’ve got

“I wanted to write about competing responsibilities, which maybe sounds a bit Moral Maze-ish and not a great turn-on,” jokes Wendy Erskine, whose riveting first novel, The Benefactors, is a polyphonic drama of money and class centred on three well-to-do Belfast mothers – among them, a children’s charity chief executive – who cross paths when their 18-year-old sons stand accused of sexually assaulting a cab driver’s daughter after her shift at a hotel.

A short story writer acclaimed for her collections Sweet Home (2018) and Dance Move (2022), Erskine fancied stretching out into a form with room for cameos from 50 additional characters to continually put a fresh spin on the book’s central drama. The impulse lay partly in her facetiousness as a reader, she says. “Sometimes I’ll be reading a novel and it’s only the minor characters that interest me. Who you choose to be central as a writer says something about what you think is important. I wanted a story that would give a sense that everyone’s important, which was a bit of a gamble – to what extent are you making a reader disengage constantly from the main narrative?”

It was no gamble: Erskine’s eye for detail keeps us rapt, whether she’s writing about a lone father unsure what to do about chickenpox on his young daughter’s crotch, or a grief-struck widow lingering in a sports shop to be near a mannequin who shares her husband’s build. “If you’re trying to write characters that seem real, you have to allow people to do things that might be unexpected,” she says.

Erskine, 56, began writing seriously in 2015, after spotting that the Stinging Fly magazine ran a six-month fiction workshop in Dublin, well timed for the Monday afternoons she had free from the Belfast secondary school where she’s head of English. That led to her print debut in the magazine, whose publisher then suggested a collection. “I hadn’t a clue what I’d be doing. All you have to rely on as a writer is your own way of looking at the world. People tell you to silence your inner critic. Absolutely not! Your inner critic is all you’ve got.”

There are so many engaging voices in this book. Were you ever tempted to hold back some of them for separate stories?
Not at all. I live in a fantasy world; a lot of people do. I’ve no problem making up story after story after story. Maybe nobody would want to read them – I’m not being a bighead – but I never keep anything back because I always know I’ll be able to make up something else.

What’s your writing routine?
You have to use whatever time you’ve got. Writing is magical – you’re creating something from nothing – but it’s also graft, like creosoting a fence. It’s just about getting it done. I normally try to do it in the evenings. On Saturday I go to the central library and work there most of the day.

Do readers ever recognise you there?
Nobody would give two hoots who I was! The world of the short story is so small. Although I was once in one of those free local newspapers that come round advertising double glazing. There was a photo of me holding my book: “local writer”, you know. I had on a pink jumper. Then I happened to be wearing it in Iceland, the frozen foods place, and a woman said: “Oh, it’s you. Still wearing that jumper?”
AC

Marcia Hutchinson

The Mercy Step (Cassava Republic, 22 July)

Ultimately, if writing is your calling, you’ve just got to write

The synopsis for The Mercy Step came to Marcia Hutchinson 10 years ago when she wrote an anonymous piece in the Guardian for a series called A Letter To …. Her letter described her father as the “life-and-soul-of-the-party kind of guy” who was also a violent, alcoholic adulterer who liked to gamble. She thinks she was triggered by her siblings asking her to contribute to a headstone on the 40th anniversary of his death. “I realised that despite being brought up in the same family, we had had such different childhoods.”

The novel is loosely based on growing up in Bradford in the 1960s in a Jamaican family. It follows fervorous book-loving middle child Mercy as she reckons with an abusive father and a fundamentalist Christian mother. It’s dark, humorous, and passionately captures the unique realities of the northern Black experience. Powerfully told from a child’s vantage point, the storytelling is imaginative and animated, yet piercing in all the right places.

Hutchinson, 62, previously worked as a lawyer specialising in conveyancing and town and country planning. She was elected as a Labour councillor in 2021. She is now retired and works as a fitness instructor.

How much of The Mercy Step is a true story?
All of the major points in the novel happened [in real life]; the order has changed to make a better narrative. I made a very conscious decision to not bring in anything that happened to my siblings. One of the reasons I’ve only written a novel now is this sense of – is it OK to tell a story that impacts other people? Ultimately, if writing is your calling, you’ve just got to write.

Why did you decide to tell the story from a child’s perspective?
[Mercy] is too intelligent for her own good. She’s constantly questioning everything that happens around her. From a very early age, she’s got a really strong sense of trying to right wrongs.

How important was it to explore religion?
Absolutely essential. It’s what keeps her mother going when faced with these almost insurmountable obstacles. The mother sees the husband as the cross that she has to bear. There’s this sense of religion being a comfort when you are faced with five children, two jobs and a husband who isn’t supportive. But Mercy is clear from an early age that “I’m not just going to trust in God, I’m going to trust in Mercy.”

How did you find the whole process of publishing a book?
I mentioned the book in passing to my agent, who was absolutely buzzing and said “finish this”. It was then submitted at the 2023 Frankfurt book fair but nobody bought it. It was one of the few novels at the fair that had so much positive feedback from people who were not going to buy it. They said it was beautiful, well written, but “I can’t see where it would fit in my list” or “don’t know how to market it”. I think it’s interesting that it was bought by Cassava Republic Press, who are a Black-led publishing company.

Why do you think publishers didn’t want to buy it?
After George Floyd, there was this rush to sign Black writers. But it’s almost like Black writers are out of fashion now. We’ve done that. Got the T-shirt.

What does your work life look like now?
Although I qualified as a lawyer, I hated it. I changed jobs constantly throughout my career and I used to think that was a real negative. But 30 years later, when I started writing, I had this huge number of backstories. So now, I write every day in the mornings, and in the evenings I teach fitness classes. I teach about 15 classes a week – zumba, body conditioning and spin – and I love it. Those two jobs are perfect. With writing, you’re alone – it’s just you and the typewriter – and then in the evenings, it’s me and 30 women getting on down.
Kadish Morris

Catherine Airey

Confessions (Viking, out now)

I left Moby-Dick on the side of a road in Wales

Most childhood diaries are emblazoned with threats to ward off prying eyes. On the first page of hers, a seven-year-old Catherine Airey wrote the words “please read this diary”. She dates her ambition to become a writer from then, but found university robbed her of her confidence.

“I went from a suburban small town where I did very well at school, to being really intimidated by lots of impressive people at Cambridge who had arty parents. As a dream, creative writing felt impossible for me to achieve compared with these people.”

Instead, she joined the civil service as a copywriter and proofreader, and it took a bad break-up in her late twenties (her ex-boyfriend very promptly got together with one of her best friends) to reboot her literary aspirations. Quitting her “safe” London job, she set off for a volunteer gig in rural west Cork, patching up a 100-year-old, 50ft boat in exchange for board and lodging. It was tidal work, and she wrote around it. Gradually, a long-held “obsession” with 9/11 (it was the first global disaster to impinge on her Hertfordshire upbringing, she says) and an opening line that came to her about a character who’d lost her mother coalesced into an intricate, polyphonic novel set in different epochs in New York City and Donegal, with betrayal and redemption at its heart and plenty to say about topics ranging from women’s rights to intergenerational trauma.

A year and a half later, she had a first draft of Confessions. By the time she turned 30, it had been bought by Viking in a six-figure deal, and a similarly impressive US deal followed. Now 31, she’s living in Bristol and writing full-time.

Did it feel brave, leaving London and leaping into the unknown in Ireland?
All of my friends had these nice lives – they loved their jobs and were in relationships and buying houses – and I was so far away from those things, from what was expected of me, that it didn’t feel brave, it felt easy. I actually cycled to Ireland because taking a bike on a plane seemed impossible.

It sounds like you weren’t able to take many books with you.
I took Moby-Dick which was absolutely insane because it’s so big, and I was like, ‘I hate this, all these stupid men!’ I left it on the side of the road somewhere in Wales.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing your novel?
I’m not very well organised so I was just sitting down and writing, which was freeing in a way, but it was quite a chaotic process and there were times when it was hard to have faith in myself.

What kept you going?
Consistency was really helpful. I was writing 1,000 words a day even if I thought it was all pretty bad. The nice part about that is you might start writing about one thing, and then your brain will kind of chip in and turn it into something different, and that’s very valuable.

New York is very deftly evoked. Had you spent much time there?
I went for Thanksgiving in November 2019, and that was my last foreign trip before Covid. Writing the novel, I felt able to locate myself quite well despite not being there. I spent a lot of time on Google Maps, using the street view feature, so did a lot of “walking around”. One of my favourite novels is Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic. It’s about someone from England who moves to New York and it’s very geographical – you really know where you are.

You’re already at work on a second novel. Do you read much fiction while writing your own?
It’s a very disorienting time with the book coming out and I do tend to read as a way of calming my anxiety. But writing is almost the opposite to reading – rather than stilling the voices in your own head, you’re amplifying them and putting them out there.
HA

Rowe Irvin

Life Cycle of a Moth (Canongate, 5 June)

I intended it to be a play, but it just wanted to be a novel

One of Rowe Irvin’s most distinct memories is of her mother coming home from work “smelling like the postmortem room”. Both her parents were farm vets, and the smell was “weirdly comforting” to the young Irvin, because it meant her mum was home. “It’s an odd response to the smell of death, but I found it joyful,” says the writer, now 29.

“The cyclicality of the natural world was very present” in Irvin’s formative years in rural Norfolk and Suffolk, where she freely roamed the countryside with her younger brother. “We’d find dead things and bring them back.” She was about six when she “came home with a squirrel tail around my neck. I was like: ‘what an amazing scarf I’ve found!’” On another occasion she kept a pheasant’s egg in her room for a week – until it burst under her bed. “We were very curious. We wanted to poke things and turn them over.”

These instincts live on in Daughter, the “half-grown, child-adult-animal” protagonist of Life Cycle of a Moth, Irvin’s unforgettable debut novel. Daughter and her mother, Myma, live together in a hut in a forest. All Daughter’s life, Myma has warned her never to cross the fence at the woodland’s perimeter. So the pair stay close, finding food by setting snares for rabbits. Apart from her mother, Daughter has never seen another person – until a man infiltrates their refuge.

The novel is written mostly in Daughter’s idiosyncratic voice. Away from social norms, she and Myma have built their own language – “If I stay out in the forest too close to dark-come she gets the worry-itch on her left inner arm” – and so the resultant text is wonderfully linguistically playful. Amid this spiritedness is a foreboding undercurrent: in Myma’s backstory lies brutal male violence. Together, these two strands combine to make a book that expertly balances light and dark, childish play and the most adult of terrors.

Irvin now lives in south-east London, and is close to completing her PhD in creative writing. Her final project will be a book of experimental short stories based around the Suffolk landscape.

Did you always know Life Cycle of a Moth would be a novel?
I intended for it to be a play. I was reading a lot of Samuel Beckett and I was interested in choreographers like Pina Bausch. I wanted to write something very embodied, and I couldn’t see a way to do that that wasn’t theatre. But then I started writing and quickly realised that the bulk was very long stage directions. It just wanted to be a novel.

Which writers have influenced you the most?
Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing gave me permission to completely commit to the idiosyncrasies of a voice without regard for any rules. And Lucas Rijneveld gave me permission to play with taboos around the body.

In the novel, male violence is the threat over the fence. Why that metaphor?
Early on, someone suggested I should make it a dystopia to justify the violence. But these things don’t just exist in dystopias – we’ve seen that really starkly with the Gisèle Pelicot case. It’s not monsters committing this kind of violence; it’s fathers, brothers, sons, neighbours and friends. In reaction to that comment, I wanted to make it quite banal. Sexism is incredibly mundane in our society.

What was your routine while writing the novel?
I was getting up early in the mornings to go to do the baking shift at a cafe, then I would spend the rest of the time writing. Baking was a perfect counterweight to the intensity of being alone in my head when writing. That’s why I have a visual art practice as well. I work with pewter, making tokens, pin badges and pendants from medieval references. It allows a little bit of breathing room, a space of play outside my brain.
Ellen Peirson-Hagger

Roisín O’Donnell

Nesting (Scribner, 30 January)

Stories of this nature were shrouded in shame and stigma in Ireland

In 2020 Roisín O’Donnell – a mother of two living and teaching near Dublin and fitting in writing when she could – got a phone call from RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster. They wanted her to write a short story for radio, using the word “independence” as a starting point (to coincide with the centenary of Irish independence in 2022), and beyond that going where she pleased. “But I had small children and I was working full-time,” she says “and I hadn’t really published anything for a while (her short story collection Wild Quiet came out in 2016).” Still, the invitation sparked something​ in her. “During lockdown the constant message we were bombarded with was ‘stay home, stay safe’ and I was always thinking ‘well, what if home is the least safe space you could be in? Or you don’t actually have a home?’”

She ended up writing Present Perfect, a short story about a woman called Ciara Fay who is a teacher living in emergency accommodation with her children. It covered a day in her life, her struggles after leaving an abusive relationship, and it would form the basis of her urgent and arresting debut novel Nesting. “I remember sitting in the kitchen listening to it being read by the brilliant Siobhán McSweeney,” she says, “and it was great, but I didn’t feel that sense of closure. It was like the story was straining against its form. I didn’t know exactly how Ciara had ended up in emergency accommodation and more importantly if she was going to get away from this relationship. I wanted to say more.”

The book ​feels very raw and real, what research did you do?
I wanted it to be authentic and I spent a lot of time speaking to women who have experienced emotional abuse; coercive control where the bruises are not visible. So much of what they were talking to me about was language based​: the insults and criticism and all the mind games. I think that made me want to do the opposite with Nesting; I wanted to cut through all the noise and write a narrative that was crystal clear. It’s very character driven, we’re with Ciara all of the time and the pace and tension really comes from her situation. She’s escaping an abusive relationship at that most dangerous time, she’s desperate for a home. I suppose I could have written it differently, with sort of flights of lyricism, but that would have felt like a complete betrayal of her character.

You must be pleased by some of the early reviews.
I have been staying away from reviews, but my editor has sent me snippets and I have been deeply moved. Stories of this nature were shrouded in shame and stigma in Ireland for so long, it feels incredible to see readers connecting with Nesting and talking about it in this way. For a novel that began life as notes hastily typed on my phone in the small hours, it still feels quite surreal.

How did you come to writing?
The first stories I told were actually before I could write – I used to dictate them to my mum and she would send them to my grandad. My parents are from Derry but they emigrated to England before I was born so I grew up in Sheffield. When I was 18 we moved back to Ireland and I went to Trinity College in Dublin. I studied English and began ​writing short stories, bits and pieces, but I never really had​ the confidence to do anything with them. It was when I turned 30 [she’s 41 now] that I thought, “Right I’m going to take my writing seriously”, and I did a course at the Irish Writers Centre and started getting my work published.

What books have you enjoyed recently?
I loved Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and I have been watching and listening to interviews with her where she talks about “socially engaged” fiction, which is perhaps what I am doing with Nesting. His [Demon’s] voice is brilliant isn’t it? So clear … I just admire the way that she took on the issue of the opioid crisis but created this entire world and this utterly compelling story.
Ursula Kenny

Anthony Shapland

A Room Above a Shop (Granta, 13 March)

I got a bit teary at the realisation that I wrote a thing, and every single person in the room knew what it was and was supporting it

Anthony Shapland, 53, lives in Cardiff, just a short train ride from the valley town of Bargoed where he grew up, and which provides the unnamed setting for his fine and resonant first book.

“We used to joke that every six miles from Cardiff was a decade back in time. So in the 1980s, by the time you got to Bargoed you were in the 1950s,” he recalls.

A Room Above a Shop unfurls the story of a clandestine love affair between two men: B, who is young, and M, who is 11 years older. At only 160 pages long, its use of the continuous present tense and pared-down, imagistic prose amplifies all that goes unsaid between its characters.

Underpinning the drama’s intensity is Shapland’s own adolescent experience of realising that he was gay against a backdrop of the miners’ strike, the Aids epidemic and age-of-consent debates. He turned 16 the year that section 28 (of the Local Government Act 1988, preventing councils from promoting homosexuality) was passed.

Leaving Bargoed to pursue a career in fine art film-making, his writing emerged from the requirement to compose texts supporting his artistic practice. Eventually, the words came to seem more complex than the images.

Selection for the Hay festival’s 2023 writer at work programme led to an agent and, shortly afterwards, a book deal with Granta. He still manages g39, an artist run-space he founded in 1997, does odd jobs to make ends meet, and his working-class, rural roots mean he hasn’t yet stopped feeling like an outsider in literary circles. “You think, am I allowed to be here, in this world? I have the sense they’re going to go, ‘Who’s this jumped-up middle-aged bloke with a pencil?’”

The era you capture here has been cropping up a lot lately in books and on the screen. Why now, do you think?
I think it’s because we’ve all reached an age where we can look back and get angry. It’s like this collective howl of “What was that?” Things like realising that section 28 didn’t just come from Thatcher, it came from public opinion – it was a horrible feeling. I had a paper round and I’d put newspapers through doors with headlines on where I was thinking, that might be me.

What’s shaped your literary style?
I tend to overwrite and then trim back. The finished book is just shy of 20,000 words but it reached 60,000 words twice. I had a really good mentor who I fanboyed, Cynan Jones. It’s wonderful when you find how you articulate yourself mirrored back, and he taught me so much. Also, the school I went to was next door to the Welsh language school. Sentence structure in Welsh will change how sentence structure happens for you in English – for example, sometimes emotions will be “on” you rather than felt by you.

Who’s your first reader?
My partner, but we do check in first about what’s actually being asked. It’s a bit like the traffic light system – red if something is very new and raw, and I basically want him to pat me on the back, tell me it’s not shit. Amber is an honest “I’m ready for it, what do you think?” And the third level, after many rewrites, is green for go – test the fault lines and show me where it breaks.

Reflecting on your journey to publication, is there a moment that’ll stick with you?
Going to Granta, I got a bit teary at the realisation that I wrote a thing, and every single person in the room knew what it was and was supporting it. When I was writing it, I told myself not to fetishise a book – this is writing first, it’s got to be good enough. Now I just want to see [the finished novel] and feel it, although I’m not doing an unboxing .

Can you reveal anything about your next book?
It’s four stories that intersect so it feels like it might have to be a bit longer than my first.
HA

Garrett Carr

The Boy from the Sea (Picador, 6 February)

The book is primarily about men who don’t understand themselves emotionally

Garrett Carr’s debut novel – which follows his children’s books and The Rule of the Land, a nonfiction work about walking Ireland’s border – is set in the 1970s in the fishing town of Killybegs, Donegal, where he grew up. “Fishing communities haven’t really featured in Irish writing,” says Carr, 49, who now lives in Belfast with his wife and two sons and teaches creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University. “So I decided to step in and do it.”

Carr’s father was a fisher. Perhaps the reason men like his father didn’t write books is because “they’re just a bit more internal as a people”, the author thinks. “My father was like that. He could be gregarious, but he was also capable of being a silent horizon-watcher who didn’t go on about things. And there’d be an admiration in that culture for those strong, silent types.”

Ambrose Bonnar in The Boy from the Sea is another such fisher, and a person who lives “without negotiation”, Carr says. One day in Killybegs the tide brings in a baby in a barrel. Ambrose and his wife, Christine, adopt the baby and name him Brendan. The book follows Brendan’s childhood and adolescence, as the people of Killybegs come to believe he has a spiritual power, and his older brother, Declan, resents him for that.

Carr describes the brothers as being “on a fast train to what we now call toxic masculinity”. The book “is about people, primarily men, who don’t understand themselves emotionally. And this is not to say that they’re bad people. In fact, their instincts are often really good – but they don’t know why they’re doing the things they’re doing.”

To make that work, Carr sought a narrative voice that “had a little more emotional intelligence than the characters”. He settled on the third-person plural of the townsfolk – “we” – offering a distance reminiscent of George Eliot or Henry James, as well as an opportunity for humour: Declan “cried at the end of ET, although our town’s general consensus was that the creature was better off in space”, Carr writes.

It’s a bold stylistic choice, but Carr wears it with ease. The result is a delectably warm, communal voice through which the reader bears witness to one family’s most private moments.

What led you to writing?
I went to art school in Dublin, and then moved sideways into digital stuff during the dotcom boom in the 1990s. And then – what can I say? I developed a love of reading, and that made me want to write.

What do you think the people of Killybegs will make of the novel?
I’m not too worried about that. I think it’s a humane telling of the place. And even if people think something’s a bit harsh, they’ll probably accept it with a smile.

What kind of research into fishing did you do?
I got in touch with a whole heap of fishermen from my father’s time who showed me photographs of the boats they worked on. Later, people used camcorders, and they have stuck the footage on YouTube without any voiceover. I watched hours of that.

What is your favourite story set at sea?
The big exception to not seeing ourselves in stories was Jaws, which I always felt was a big film in Killybegs. Simply using a boat as a crucible for drama was something that we recognised. There’s a homage to Jaws in the book, in a scene where Ambrose and Christine compare their scars. That Jaws scene is the best bit of homosocial bonding ever put in a film.
EP-H

Nussaibah Younis

Fundamentally (W&N, 25 February)

I was aware I could write beautiful prose, or a dirty sex joke. I’ll write the joke

Nussaibah Younis, 38, laughs to recall just how many times lawyers gave the once-over to her debut, Fundamentally, a riotous political satire set in the Middle East. “I can assure you I didn’t personally take MDMA and have an orgy with aid workers,” she says. “If I’d behaved like the narrator, I’d be in prison!”

Acquired after an eight-way auction, with TV rights even more hotly contested, the novel is a no-holds-barred romp centred on two British Muslim women “being messy abroad”, says Younis, a phrase that sums up the book’s boldly irreverent approach to its central plight: an NGO worker’s bid to rescue an Islamic State (IS) widow still in her teens.

Yorkshire-born Younis got the idea in 2019 while advising the Iraqi government how to risk-assess refugees suspected of terror links. “I could’ve written nonfiction about de-radicalisation but I wanted the widest possible audience. I’ve signed so many NDAs anyway: what nonfiction was I going to write that wouldn’t get me sued to death?”

Working among IS suspects brought back memories of her feelings growing up after 9/11 in an Iraqi-Pakistani household in Manchester. “It felt like Muslims were under attack,” she recalls. “I wanted to do something to be helpful. Had those energies been picked up by a nefarious actor, it could’ve sent me down a different path.” She says she was lucky, not to mention tenacious, to channel that ambition into a career in international affairs. “As a British Asian woman, that was a difficult path. I was a senior fellow at a Washington DC thinktank in my 20s – it was crazy how hard I worked.”

Now that she’s jacked it in to be a comic novelist, it’s lucky the presales are going well, she jokes. While she says she won’t be sending any ex-colleagues advance copies, the book’s most gleeful piss-taking is ultimately reserved for its central duo, whose testy yet tender bond Younis pictured as a dialogue with her devout teenage self. “She’d call me a sellout. But people who give up Islam can also have this sense of patronising superiority. It’s OK for someone who doesn’t approve of casual sex to talk back at that sneering kind of brown saviour.”

Does writing feel lonelier than your former career?
This is probably my comfort zone, if I’m being real. I grew up quite solitary – I’m the eldest of five and was left to my own devices a lot.

The narrator, tasked with de-radicalising IS brides, finds herself quizzed on her lack of provision for non-binary people. Is that satire?
If people don’t believe those scenes, it’s because they’re so ridiculous that they should be untrue. That is 100% what British foreign policy is like now: a mad preoccupation with pointless detail under the veneer of being forward-thinking. “We’ll leave a British citizen groomed at 15 to rot, and let her baby die, but gimme a safeguarding report because we’re committed to using everybody’s correct pronouns.” I wanted the book to give a little taste of that.

What did you read growing up?
Anything I could get hold of: Sweet Valley High as well as Pride and Prejudice. I spent a lot of my 20s proving I was clever: it was important for me to go to Oxford, to have a PhD and insist people call me doctor! For a young woman working in the Middle East it was important. But I got over it – that academic background has liberated me to not be an intellectual snob. Writing this, I was aware I could write beautiful prose, or a fucking dirty sex joke. I’ll write the joke.
AC

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