Archives de catégorie : Fiction

THE INVITATION de Veronica Henry

Be swept away by the enchanting and devastatingly romantic new novel from Sunday Times bestselling author Veronica Henry, set between post-war London and the enchanting Foxwood Manor in the rolling Somerset countryside. Filled with secret love affairs, heartbreak and friendship, expect surprises on every page.

THE INVITATION
by Veronica Henry
Orion, February 2026
(via Mushens Entertainment)

A secret love story.
A chance to stay forever…

London, 1953

Clementine falls for Alfie Arbutus and knows that life will never be the same again. Especially when he invites her to visit Foxwood Manor.

Stella lost a part of her heart when Edwin Arbutus died. Their wartime love affair changed everything, but now she has her son, Ted, to fight for.

Elizabeth hopes that throwing the Foxwood Snow Ball will bring joy to her husband, Michael, for the first time since they lost their son.

Yet as the invitations are sent, the lives of the women collide with unimaginable consequences. Will the secrets of the past break the family apart, or bring them back together?

Veronica Henry is the Sunday Times bestselling author of over 20 bestselling novels published into 25 languages over 30 territories.

Veronica Henry has always been involved in storytelling, from her first job typing scripts for The Archers to being writer-in-residence on the Venice-Simplon Orient Express. She was a scriptwriter for many years, working on some of our best-loved dramas including Heartbeat and Holby City. She has written over twenty novels, all published by Orion. She won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award with A Night on the Orient Express. She lives on the North Devon coast where she loves walking on the beach, swimming in the sea or watching the sun set with a killer negroni.

THE SUMMER WE LIED de Rebecca Hardy

THE SUMMER WE LIED
by Rebecca Hardy
Raven/Bloomsbury, Summer 2026
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Then. Bunking off school on a hot summer’s day, three young teenagers hear a brutal double murder. In the confusing aftermath, only two come forward, and one takes the stand, pointing the finger at a respected member of the community, who police seem only too happy to accuse. But did he actually do it, or do all of them have more than one reason to lie?

Now. Almost two decades later, new questions are asked about old evidence, and their part in it all is about to be discovered. Estranged since the trial, the friends are forced back together when a new attack casts doubt on the conviction, and it becomes clear that someone else knows their secret. As their lives and lies start to crumble around them, they are forced at last to confront their own culpability, the secrets they kept from each other, and the traumas that rest at the heart of their silence.

An English teacher for almost twenty years, Rebecca Hardy has recently taken a career break to pursue her love of writing. She lives in East Sussex, with her wife and teenage son, in amongst the fields and hills where her novel begins. A place which is, thankfully, far more tranquil in real life than on the page. THE SUMMER WE LIED is Rebecca’s debut.

THOUGHTS BE BLOODY d’Auden Patrick

A struggling student, a resident golden boy, and the curse that will bring them together: this queer, trans retelling is Hamlet as you’ve never read it before. Exploring classism, identity, and the true meaning of revolution, this dark academia novel is perfect for fans of R. F. Kuang’s Babel and S. T. Gibson’s An Education in Malice.

THOUGHTS BE BLOODY
by Auden Patrick
DAW, March 2026
(via Mushens Entertainment)

The summer before his sophomore year, Horatio Bithersea walks into the university library to find Carson Hamlett, resident golden boy and master magician, cradling his father’s dead body. Life at Elsinore, one of the most prestigious universities in the secretive magical world, simply goes on when the professor’s death is ruled an accident—despite the mysterious circumstances and the bloody scene. 

A year later, Horatio is keeping his head down, attempting to graduate without his out-of-control magic harming his classmates. That changes when the ghost of Hamlett’s father appears and places a curse on Horatio and Hamlett: avenge his death by destroying Elsinore and its heart, lest the ghost robs them of their minds, memories, and their very souls. 

Elsinore has given Horatio everything—knowledge of his magical ability, an escape from his abusive family, and freedom to pursue his life as a transgender man—and now he’s to be its doom. As the two uncover more of Elsinore’s secrets Horatio finds himself becoming more and more ensnared in Hamlett’s dark but charismatic web. 

The question is not if Horatio will manage to destroy Elsinore. The question is if Hamlett will destroy him first. 

Auden Patrick is a late-20s queer and trans author who most frequently writes about fear, love, and monsters. He was a student at Cat Rambo’s inaugural Wayward Wormhole Workshop in 2023, and his work has appeared in Apparition Lit, Beaver Magazine, among others.

THE UNHELD de Luke Larkin

A girl sets out to find her father after he is carried off by an otherworldly creature in this atmospheric horror Western.

THE UNHELD
by Luke Larkin
Hyperion Ave, August 2026
(via Neon Literary)

While other twelve-year-olds are in school. Charlie spends her days skinning the animals her father hunts in the wild woods just outside their cabin. Charlie’s life in the Montana Territory is a lonely one, as her father is a mercurial man of few words who mostly ignores her until there’s a chore to be done.

One night, a living nightmare appears, stalking out of the trees. Neither animal nor human, the Beast drags Charlie’s father into the wilderness. To find him Charlie enlists the aid of two unlikely allies: an Englishman with a connection to a mysterious occuIt society and a Cheyenne policeman exiled for a crime he didn’t commit.

Yet as she and her allies prepare for a confrontation with the Beast, Charlie will need to decide if her father is ultimately worth saving. What does she owe the man who called her daughter yet never showed her love?

THE UNHELD is an unsettling and soulful historical horror novel—perfect for readers of Christopher BuehIman’s Between Two Fires, Andy Davidson’s The Boatman’s Daughter, and T. Kingfisher’s What Maxes the Dead. The novel’s ingeniously conceived monster will set your skin crawling, while the indomitable heroine at the story’s center will capture your heart.

Luke Larkin is a writer who lives in Missoula, Montana, where he earned his MFA in creative writing at the University of Montana. His writing has appeared in publications such as the Iron Horse Literary Review, HAD, and Sonora Review.

SENSUAL WORLD de Lauren Friedlander

A stylish and surreal Midwestern coming-of-age with black humor, SENSUAL WORLD is a story about desire, destruction, and transcendence for fans of Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch and Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise.

SENSUAL WORLD
by Lauren Friedlander
Catapult, February 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Sensual World is about two young women—one escaping an isolated, sordid home in the plains, one escaping a TV-set childhood in The Big City—who meet at an avant-garde theater school in Kansas called “the Con.” They become the best of friends; together they strive to become Artists.

The founder of the Con, Una Flood, wrote a supposedly-cursed, never-performed play and a manifesto on how to become The Ultimate Artist. When the friends are cast in Possum Play, they are torn apart by the absurdist preparations and Flood’s supernatural machinations. A car crash; an identity swap; two women enter a maelstrom of obsession from which only one can emerge! The third act of redemption and reconciliation turns violent and strange—as they strive to embody The Ultimate Artist, the audience (us, fair readers) is unable to look away.

Sensual World lies somewhere in among the concepts of “if Ottessa Moshfegh went to theater camp,” and the movie Poor Things. The novel is viscerally stylish; you will taste the language of the Kansas soil and it’ll shock your senses like Sprite up the nose.

A writer from Kansas, currently in Brooklyn, Lauren Friedlander is a recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction has been longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions and published in the Best Microfiction anthology, Catapult, Hobart After Dark, Okay Donkey, The Rumpus, Shooter, Slice, and Washington Square Review.