NEWEST IN
We are constantly scouring the new publications for the best, the most interesting and the innovative. Here is a brief selection of what's noteworthy and just out.
Please note that we don't have a comprehensive list of everything new on our website, but if you send us an email to linda@bookspaperscissors.co.uk, we can source (almost) anything!
The Divorcées, Rowan Beaird ( paperback June 2024)
£9.99
Lois Saunders thought that marrying the right man would finally cure her loneliness. But as picture-perfect as her husband is, she is suffocating in their loveless marriage.
In 1951, though, unhappiness is hardly grounds for divorce - except in Reno, Nevada. At the Golden Yarrow, the most respectable of Reno's 'divorce ranches' Lois finds herself living with half a dozen other would-be divorcees, all in Reno for the six weeks' residency that is the state's only divorce requirement. They spend their days riding horses and their nights flirting with cowboys, and it's as wild and fun as Lake Forest, Illinois, was prim and stifling.
But it isn't until Greer Lange arrives that Lois's world truly cracks open . . .
Gorgeous, beguiling, and completely indifferent to societal convention, Greer is unlike anyone Lois has ever met - and she sees something in Lois that no one else ever has. Under her influence, Lois begins to push against the limits that have always restrained her. But how much can she really trust her mysterious new friend? And how far will she go to forge her independence, on her own terms?Set in the glamorous, dizzying world of 1950s Reno, THE DIVORCEES is a deliciously slow-burn, atmospheric page-turner and a dazzling exploration of female friendship, desire, and freedom.
Come and Get It, Kiley Reid ( paperback May 2025)
£9.99
Everything comes at a price. But not everything can be paid for…Millie wants to graduate, get a job and buy a house. She’s slowly saving up from her job on campus, but when a visiting professor offers her an unusual opportunity to make some extra money, she jumps at the chance.
Agatha is a writer, recovering from a break-up while researching attitudes towards weddings and money for her new book. She strikes gold when interviewing the girls in Millie’s dorm, but her plans take a turn when she realises that the best material is unfolding behind closed doors. As the two women form an unlikely relationship, they soon become embroiled in a world of roommate theatrics, vengeful pranks and illicit intrigue – and are forced to question just how much of themselves they are willing to trade to get what they want.
Sharp, intimate and provocative, Come and Get It takes a lens to our money-obsessed society in a tension-filled story about desire, consumption and bad behaviour.
Paperback May 2025
The Life Impossible, Matt Haig ( June 2025)
£9.99
The remarkable new novel from the author of the multimillion-selling international sensation The Midnight Library'A beautiful novel full of life-affirming wonder and imagination' BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH'What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don't understand yet . . .'When retired Maths teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her.
She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the Balearics Grace searches for answers about her friend's life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed.
But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past. Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.
Heart Be At Peace, Donal Ryan ( paperback June 2025)
£9.99
Some things can send a heart spinning; others will crack it in two... In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storms of economic collapse and are looking towards the future. The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the marks of its history, new stories are unfolding.
But a fresh menace is creeping around the lakeshore and the lanes of the town, and the peace of the community is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way. Young people are being drawn towards the promise of fast money whilst the generation above them tries to push back the tide of an enemy no one can touch…Told in twenty-one voices, Heart, be at Peace is a heartfelt, lyrical novel that can be read independently, or as a companion to Donal Ryan’s multi-award-winning novel, The Spinning Heart, voted ‘The Irish Book of the Decade’. *****
Note image of hardback is featured... paperback cover is similiar but not identical!
When the Cranes Fly South, Lisa Rizden ( paperback May 2025)
£14.99
The most moving book of the year about the power of human connection. A book to love, and share. Fredrik Backman.
Bo lives a quiet existence in his small rural village in the north of Sweden.
He is elderly and his days are punctuated by visits from his care team and his son. Fortunately, he still has his rich memories, phone calls with his best friend Ture, and his beloved dog Sixten for company. Only now his son is insisting the dog must be taken away.
The very same son that Bo is wanting to mend his relationship with before his time is up. The threat of losing Sixten stirs up a whirlwind of emotions and makes Bo determined to resist and find his voice. An instant number one bestseller in Sweden and winner of the Swedish Book of the Year, When the Cranes Fly South is a profoundly moving and life-affirming novel about one man?s desire to preserve his autonomy, the multitude of stories contained within a life, and the big things for which we have no words.
The Names, Florence Knapp ( hardback
£16.99
The Names is the story of three names, three versions of a life, and the infinite possibilities that a single decision can spark. 'I've just been blown away by the best debut novel in years . . a genius idea for a book'Sunday Times.
It is 1987, and in the aftermath of a great storm, Cora sets out with her nine-year-old daughter to register the birth of her son. Her husband intends for her to follow a long-standing family tradition and call the baby after him.
But when faced with the decision, Cora hesitates. Going against his wishes is a risk that will have consequences, but is it right for her child to inherit his name from generations of domineering men? The choice she makes in this moment will shape the course of their lives. Seven years later, her son is Bear, a name chosen by his sister, and one that will prove as cataclysmic as the storm from which it emerged.
Or he is Julian, the name his mother set her heart on, believing it will enable him to become his own person. Or he is Gordon, named after his father and raised in his cruel image - but is there still a chance to break the mould? Powerfully moving and full of hope, this is the story of three names, three versions of a life, and the infinite possibilities that a single decision can spark. It is the story of one family, and love's endless capacity to endure, no matter what fate has in store.
All Fours, Miranda July ( paperback May 2025)
£9.99
A semi-famous artist turns forty-five and gives herself a gift - a cross-country road trip from LA to New York, without her husband and child. But thirty minutes after setting off, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel - and embarks on the journey of a lifetime.
With July's wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman's quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic and domestic life of a 45-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectations while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman.
The Director, Daniel Kehlmann ( hardback May 2025)
£22.00
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody.
Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. The returning family is confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime.
But Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin, wants the film genius, he won't take no for an answer and makes big promises. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement. Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph.
Shanghailanders, Juli Mia ( paperback May 2025)
£10.99
Leo and Eko Yang and their three daughters seems to have it all - wealth, beauty and brains; a privileged life in the world of international Shanghai, Paris and Boston. But as the children become adults and their parents celebrate twenty-five years of marriage, the Yangs are at a crossroads. What bonds still keep them together? What are the foundations of a family?Beginning in the year 2040 and moving backward through the present to 2014, Shanghailanders takes readers into the intimacies and desires of each of the Yangs, as well as the people in their orbit - a nanny from the provinces, a private driver with a penchant for danger, and a grandmother whose memories of the past echo the present.
As we watch this changing family in their changing world, universal constants remain: love is complex and family will always be stubbornly connected by blood, secrets and longing. Along the way, Min shows how a family makes and remakes itself over the years, what unites us and slowly drives us apart.
Longlisted for the 2025 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENECE IN FICTION
Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way, Elaine Feeney
£16.99
Claire O’Connor’s life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved from London back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. But glimpses of her old life are sure to follow when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby.
As Claire is thrown into a love she thought she’d left behind, she questions if Tom has come for her or for himself. Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While Claire tries to maintain a normal life – getting lost online, going to work and minding her own business – Tom’s return stirs up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house.
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is a story of love and resilience, rich with history and drama, and the legacies of violence and redemption. As the secrets of the past are revealed, Claire must confront whether she can escape her history to make a future for herself. '
Elaine Feeney is one of Irish literature's most gifted and persuasive storytellers' SINÉAD GLEESON
An uncanny understanding of the workings of the human heart. I loved this book' LOUISE KENNEDY
Albion, Anna Hope ( hardback June 2025)
£16.99
The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home – twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone – to bury Philip: husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember. Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn.
Each believes their father has given them his blessing, setting them on a collision course with each other. Isa has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and hopes to seek out her childhood love, who still lives on the estate, to discover whether it is her feelings for him that are creating the fault lines in her marriage. And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.
Superb … Anna Hope engages, head-on, with some of the most urgent and challenging issues facing the world today, and transforms them into spellbinding family drama' Jonathan Coe
Speak to Me Of Home, Jeanne Cummins ( hardback May 2025)
£20.00
Rafaela remembers everything that matters: her beautiful childhood in San Juan, her marriage to Peter, uprooting their children, Ruth and Benny, to the American Midwest, and losing all sense of her place in the world. So she tells no one when her memory begins to slip. Her daughter, in New York with a family of her own, wishes she could forget her muddy feelings about where she comes from - the same feelings which motivated her 22-year-old daughter Daisy to reconnect with their past.
Daisy, who has momentarily forgotten everything, hears the word critical in a hospital room in San Juan and remembers, all at once, the car that hurtled towards her, the terrible storm, and something else. What was it?Now Ruth and Rafaela must return to the city where it all began, to gather by Daisy's bedside and confront the twists of fate that have caused a growing rift in their family and led them to this moment.
'A riveting tale of three generations, this is storytelling at its finest'JOHN BOYNE, author of The Heart's Invisible Furies'
The Racket : On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation – and the other 99% by Conor Niland ( paperback june 2025)
£10.99
Conor Niland may only have managed a career-high ranking of 129 – only? that is some achievement in itself! – but The Racket, his account of how he managed this, is up there with the best half-dozen books on tennis ever written.' Geoff Dyer
WINNER OF THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024
When Conor Niland was 16, he was chosen to hit with Serena Williams at Nick Bollettieri's famed tennis academy. Conor, the Irish junior number one, was feeling a bit homesick. Serena, also 16, already owned her own house beside the academy.
Conor Niland knows what it's like when Roger Federer walks into the dressing room ('Ciao, bonjour, hello!'), and he has had the exquisitely terrible experience of facing Novak Djokovic in the world's biggest tennis stadium - while suffering from food poisoning. But he never reached the very top. The Racket is the story of pro tennis's 99%: the players who roam the globe in hope of climbing the rankings and squeaking into the Grand Slam tournaments.
It brings us into a world where a few dozen super-rich players - travelling with coaches and physios - share a stage with lonely touring pros whose earnings barely cover their expenses. Painting a vivid picture of the social dynamics on tour, the economics of the game, and the shadows cast by gambling and doping, The Racket is a witty and revealing underdog's memoir and a unique look inside a fascinating hidden world.
The Echoes, Evie Wyld ( paperback June 2025)
£9.99
Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. This summer, discover the beautiful novel that ‘will stay with you forever’ (Observer).
‘Like all the best ghost stories, The Echoes is also a love story’ PAULA HAWKINS
As a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, Max watches his girlfriend Hannah in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him. In the months before Max’s death, Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seems to offer the potential of a different story. Yet the past refuses to stay hidden.
Bogboy by Patrick Kealey ( paperback June 2025)
£10.99
Alfie O'Brien, soon to rename himself Bogboy, is born an orphan into a house of dead things, presided over by his imperious, ailing aunt. This is a place where the past won't let the present go, where ghosts confer with the living, and where discovering who you are means coming face to face with some uncomfortable truths. It is a house cursed by shadows, secrets and dynasty.
While the wind blows in from the Atlantic across these Irish peatlands, old enmities bite down, and when Bogboy is left for dead, he must learn how to trust love, discover where he belongs, and reconcile himself with his destiny. The ancestors are gathering and Bogboy is about to become a man. An audacious, rousing story of hope and beauty rising out of the dying embers of a corrupt and redundant regime, Bogboy is a story for our times, reminding us that attention to the natural world offers solace and healing, and that love - wherever we may find it - is always stronger than hatred.
Scaffolding, Lauren Elkin ( paperback June 2025)
£9.99
Scaffolding is like a perfect French movie of a novel…elegant, original and often very funny’ Kevin Barry
Two couples inhabit the same apartment in Paris, almost fifty years apart…2019. When David takes a job in London, Anna is left alone in their Paris apartment. It’s August and the city is deserted but when Clémentine moves into the building, Anna finds herself drawn inextricably into the younger woman’s world…1972.
Florence is finishing her degree in psychology and contemplating pregnancy. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood and both have distractions outside their marriage…As the two couples face the challenges of marriage and fidelity, the characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space.
‘Intelligent, sexy and brilliantly observed’ Stylist‘Atmospheric and evocative’ Observer
Happiness Forever, Adelaide Faith ( hardcover May 2025)
£16.99
A hilarious and utterly original debut novel following a woman trying to make sense of her life and herself as she falls in love with her therapist. Sylvie is only happy when she is at therapy. This is because Sylvie is in love with her therapist.
She wants to kiss her and roll around on the floor with her. She thinks about her every second they’re not together (roughly 167 hours and 10 minutes per week). She’s aware she has an obsession, but whether it is – as her therapist suggests – a case of extreme ‘erotic transference’, or a lost person’s need to connect, Sylvie isn’t sure.
Beyond therapy, Sylvie has what she considers to be a small life: a job as a veterinary nurse, her little brain-damaged dog, Curtains, and a new friend Chloe who she met on the beach. When the therapist delivers some devastating news, Sylvie has to imagine new and lasting ways of coping (that don’t include being adopted by the therapist). Her world has begun to open up, inching beyond the fear that has confined her until now, and she must decide whether she’s ready for a bravery of feeling.
In this stunning debut novel, Adelaide Faith encapsulates the great vulnerability, difficulty and joy of being alive. 'There is so much rare humour and insight and sweetness and humanity … and a true and ringing voice' Sheila Heti
The Benefactors- Wendy Erskine ( hardback June 2025)
£18.99
From the prize-winning author of Dance Move and Sweet Home, this is an astounding novel about intimate histories, class and money - and what being a parent means. Meet Frankie, Miriam and Bronagh: three very different women from Belfast, but all mothers to 18-year-old boys.
Gorgeous Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children's services charity, loves celebrity and prestige.
When their sons are accused of sexually assaulting a friend, Misty Johnston, they'll come together to protect their children, leveraging all the powers they possess. But on her side, Misty has the formidable matriarch, Nan D, and her father, taxi-driver Boogie: an alliance not so easily dismissed.
'Erskine's great gift is for character. Not a single figure in this novel feels contrived'Guardian
'A writer of an unrivalled range of imaginative empathy'Financial Times'
Story of a Heart, Rachel Clarke ( paperback June 2025)
£10.99
WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024
BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN, NEW SCIENTIST, AND PROSPECTThis is the unforgettable story of how one family's grief transformed into a lifesaving gift.
With tremendous compassion and clarity, Dr Rachel Clarke relates the urgent journey of a young girl's heart and explores a history of remarkable medical innovations , stretching back over a century and involving the knowledge and dedication not just of surgeons but of countless physicians, immunologists, nurses and scientists.
'The best narrative non-fiction I've read in years. Rachel Clarke has written a profound piece of investigative journalism and wrapped it up in poetry' Christie Watson
My Friends, Fredrik Backman ( hardback June 2025)
£20.00
You have to take life for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings andwater balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do. In the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world three tiny figures sit at the end of a pier.
Most people don’t even notice them. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise.
Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers seek refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days together. They tell jokes, they share secrets, and they commit small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.
Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into 18-year-old Louisa’s care. Determined to learn how it came to be and to decide what to do with it, Louisa embarks on a cross-country journey. But the closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes.
In this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art, Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect.
A stunning, sweeping, extraordinary story of connection, love, and the unbreakable bonds that guide and shape us. Full of humour and heart, My Friends is simply wonderful’ Chris Whitaker
The Wood Where Magic Grows, Andy Shepherd ( paperback july 2025)
£7.99
The first book in an enchanting new series from the author of the bestselling THE BOY WHO GREW DRAGONS, full of unexpected adventure, wonder and wildness, and just a little touch of magic!
Have you ever looked at a tree and seen a face staring back? Maybe you spotted a knobbly brow or a knotty pair of eyes, or even a mossy beard? Well, next time you do, stop staring and say hello! When Iggy discovers overgrown Wildtop Wood at the end of his new garden, he couldn't be more excited. A whole new world opens up for him and his brother Cal, high in the treetops, a world of tangled greenery and unexpected adventure. But some say the wood is a place of danger and mystery.
And as Iggy and Cal venture further into the trees, they hear whispers of a fading green magic, and scampering animals seem to be leading them to a secret deep at the heart of the wood. Could it be that the wood needs them just as much as they need it?Are you ready to join the Treetoppers?Then come on in - the Green is waiting!
'A warm, witty and wondrous adventure' - Maz Evans, author of WHO LET THE GODS OUT?'Brimming with humour and heart, this is the kind of storytelling that young readers will adore' - Abi Elphinstone, author of EMBER SPARK
Beartooth, Callan Wink ( hardback Feb 2025)
£14.99
In the Montana backcountry live two brothers who run a saw mill and do a little poaching on the side. Thad is the brains of the operation. His brother Hazen has a talent for tracking and hunting and getting himself into trouble.
Together they have just about made it work, but now there are mounting bills, a leaky roof and winter is closing in. When a menacing figure known as the Scot offers them a risky but potentially lucrative hunting job in Yellowstone National Park, the brothers can't refuse, but before long the precarious nature of their lives and their bond is exposed. From a fresh new voice in American fiction, this is a propulsive, bracing story about the cost of survival set against the unforgiving wilderness of the American northwest.
Among Friends, Hal Ebbott ( hardback July 2025)
£18.99
Four friends. A betrayal that should shatter their seemingly perfect lives.
But will they let it?Amos and Emerson have been friends for more than thirty years. Despite vastly different backgrounds, the two now form an enviable portrait of middle age: their wives are close, their teenage daughters have grown up together, their days are passed in the comfortable languor of New York City wealth. They share an unbreakable bond, or so they think.
This weekend, however, something is different. After gathering for Emerson’s birthday at his country home, celebration gives way to old rivalries and resentments which erupt in a shocking act of violence, one that threatens to shatter their finely made world. In its wake, each must choose: between whom and what they love most.
Hal Ebbott's Among Friends explores themes of class, marriage, friendship, and power, as well as the things we tell ourselves to preserve our finely made worlds. 'A powerful, elegant novel that offers unsparing insight into the lives of others' - Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
Same As It Ever Was, Claire Lombardo ( paperback July 2025)
£9.99
At fifty-seven, Julia Ames finds herself with an improbably lovely life. She has a husband she loves, two happy children and a contented existence in the suburbs. She's unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, a soon-to-be empty nest, and a seductive resurgence of the past - all of which threaten to derail Julia's hard-earned peace.
Wise, witty and deeply moving, this brilliantly observed domestic drama asks what it takes to make - and not to break - a family.
SUCH A PLEASURE' CLARE CHAMBERS'WITTY AND INSIGHTFUL' BONNIE GARMUS