Fiction Picks - Christmas/Winter 2025
Here are our fiction picks for Christmas/winter 2025! Have a browse through to help focus your gift buying for this season, and beyond!
A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A LOSS THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART.
The untold love story that inspired Shakespeare's greatest masterpiece. On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help.
Why is nobody at home?Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.
Hamnet tells the powerful story of Agnes and Will, and of the son whose life has been all but forgotten, but who inspired one of the greatest plays ever written.
Bathroom salesman Matt is at a crossroads. He has lost his job, he is about to be made homeless and his girlfriend has left him.
He wants his luck to change and he wants things to go back to how they were. Out of the blue he is offered a job that comes with a free luxury apartment. He hopes this might be enough to tempt her back.
But, as events unfold, it starts to dawn on him that perhaps she didn't leave of her own accord after all...?
On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything.
Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe. This was meant to be an escape.
But with dwindling savings, no job, and her family across the sea, Ciara finds herself adrift, facing a broken housing system and the voice of her own demons. As summer passes and winter closes in, she must navigate raising her children in a hotel room, searching for a new home and dealing with her husband Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back. Because leaving is one thing, but staying away is another.
What will it take for Ciara to rebuild her life? Can she ever truly break away from Ryan’s control – and what will be the cost? Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over.
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025
Through chance, luck and choice, one man’s life takes him from a modest apartment in Hungary to the elite society of London – in this captivating new novel about the forces that make and break our livesFifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion.
As these encounters shift into a clandestine relationship, István’s life spirals out of control. Years later, rising through the ranks from the army to the elite circles of London's super-rich, he navigates the twenty-first century's tides of money and power. Torn between love, intimacy, status, and wealth, his newfound riches threaten to undo him completely.
Quantum of Menace (Vaseem Khan)
Q is out of MI6 . . . and in over his head.
After Major Boothroyd (aka Q) is unexpectedly ousted from his role with British Intelligence developing technologies for MI6's 00 agents, he finds himself back in his sleepy hometown of Wickstone-on-Water. His childhood friend, renowned quantum computer scientist Peter Napier, has died in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind a cryptic note.
The police seem uninterested, but Q feels compelled to investigate and soon discovers that Napier's ground-breaking work may have attracted sinister forces . . .
Can Q decode the truth behind Napier's death, even as danger closes in?
Houston, 1975. A new Apollo mission launches into orbit, on course to dock with a Russian Soyuz craft: three NASA astronauts and three cosmonauts, joining to celebrate a new dawn of Soviet-American cooperation. But as NASA Flight Controller Kaz Zemeckis listens in from Earth, a deadly accident changes everything.
Meanwhile, from a remote location in east Asia, the first Chinese spacecraft secretly launches. On board is China's first astronaut, Fang Kuo-chun, whose mission puts him on a collision course with the Apollo crew. As Kaz races against an enemy on the ground and for answers beyond the sky, the safety of the remaining crew hangs in the balance .
. . Full of intrigue and real history - including the fascinating story of Professor Tsien Hsue-shen, the 'Father of Chinese Rocketry' and founder of China's space program - Final Orbit accelerates to a thrilling conclusion that captures the beauty and terror of survival 270 miles above Earth, as could only be written by one of the most experienced astronauts alive.