Currency’s guide to great books to read right now

It’s the time of the year when the book world starts to swing into action in advance of the Christmas season and gift buying. As a result there is a rolling glut of juicy releases that will make for excellent holiday reading. These include the latest Richard Osman, Mick Herron and Robert Galbraith. As we wait for these unputdownable dispatches, here’s a list of goodies we’ve read in the past few months. New, old, highbrow and smutty dragon adventure – at Currency we’re not snobby about what makes as happy …

Watching Over Her, Jean-Baptiste Andrea (Jonathan Ball)

Winner of France’s Prix Goncourt, Andrea’s novel is finally out in English, and it’s worth the wait. On the surface it’s the story of a boy who falls for his muse and the art he creates as a result, but it unfolds into something much bigger – a sweeping, compelling 20^th-century history of people and place. Andrea conjures Italy’s landscapes so vividly that you’ll be tempted to book a trip while still reading. Richly atmospheric, it’s an escapist yarn that reminds you just how pleasing a great story is.

Kill Your Darlings, Peter Swanson (Jonathan Ball)

From the outside, Thom and Wendy Graves look like peak domestic bliss: high school sweethearts still together, a handsome Victorian, and a grown son flown the nest. Inside? Wendy is coolly plotting her husband’s murder. The fun – if you can call it that – is in watching Swanson roll the story backwards, peeling away decades of compromise, resentment and lies until you’re left wondering who’s really the villain. It’s domestic noir done Swanson’s way: lean, nasty and engineered for you to read “just one more chapter”…

Vulture, Phoebe Greenwood (Jonathan Ball)

Greenwood worked as a journalist in the Middle East – and it shows in this razor-edged debut set during the 2012 Gaza war. The novel follows Sara Byrne, a British freelancer desperate to make her name, holed up in the Beach Hotel with a pack of correspondents who are as venal, jaded and after a scoop. Chasing stories between waiters keeping them fed and watered, they’re driven by ambition and ego while people’s lives fall apart around them. Greenwood skewers the war-reporting machine with insider precision: satire so sharp it makes you wince (and laugh darkly too).

Hell of a Country, David Cornwell (NB Publishers)

Cornwell revisits the notorious “Scissors Murder” in 1970s Cape Town, spinning fiction from fact. Told through the first-person voices of a young woman infatuated with her married boss, the wife standing in her way, and a homeless coloured amputee pulled into the chaos and forced to navigate the brutal inequalities of the system, it’s less whodunnit than slow-motion tragedy. What emerges is a searing portrait of apartheid suburbia – brittle, stratified and quietly violent. Bleak as JM Coetzee, but with the lurid compulsion of true crime.

Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros (Jonathan Ball)

Dragons, battles, smut and death! This is the book that broke TikTok, and for once the hype might be justified. Set in a battle-dragon academy (Hogwarts-like but crazier) where survival is anything but guaranteed, the novel mixes romance, politics and danger in equal measure. Yes, the love story is hot enough to steam up your screen, but there’s also a world of intrigue and rebellion simmering in the background. It’s escapist, propulsive and surprisingly addictive – the kind of book you have to keep reading even while you’re eyerolling at some of the more clichéd or daft bits.

Red Bones, Ann Cleeves (Pan Macmillan)

On the Shetland Islands, an archaeological dig unearths a skull – and then someone turns up murdered. For detective Jimmy Perez, the challenge isn’t just solving the crime but navigating a community so small that everyone is connected, and secrets are never really buried. Cleeves is a master at weaving place into plot: the peat bogs, the sea mist, the way silence hangs heavy in the air. The irony is delicious – in a place with so few people, there’s still so much to hide.

The Illusionist: The True Story of the Man Who Fooled Hitler, Robert Hutton (Jonathan Ball)

This is a rollicking slice of real history. Hutton digs into the life of colonel Dudley Clarke, the eccentric British officer who perfected the art of military deception in World War II. From dressing up in drag in Madrid to masterminding the fake armies that misled the Nazis, Clarke turned mischief into a weapon of war. Hutton tells it with pace and wit, reminding us that the outcome of battles often hinged on smoke and mirrors amid many messes. Read it alongside Olivia Manning’s Levant Trilogy for two very different – but oddly complementary – takes on the chaos of the Levant in wartime.

Nightshade, Michael Connelly (Jonathan Ball)

Connelly’s latest kicks off with a grim discovery: a body in the harbour, drifting ominously in the dark. From there, the story unspools into a world of poaching, jurisdictions, and the blurred lines between law enforcers and the criminals they chase. Connelly’s style is as lean and relentless as ever and it looks like we’ve got a new crime-solver to follow in detective Stilwell.

The Levant Trilogy, Olivia Manning (Penguin Random House)

First published in the 1970s but newly reissued, Manning’s Levant Trilogy continues the story begun in The Balkan Trilogy, following Guy and Harriet Pringle as World War II drives them into Egypt and beyond. It’s sprawling, erudite, and rich with period detail: colonial society in decline, armies on the move, relationships fraying under pressure. Often compared to Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, Manning deserves to be read for her scalpel-sharp observation and the sweep of her storytelling. This is historical fiction at its most human.

Fundamentally, Nussaibah Younis (Penguin Random House)

A sharp and funny debut novel that flips the usual “war-zone expat” story on its head. It follows a heartbroken academic with a saviour complex who accepts a UN posting in Iraq, charged with rehabilitating Isis women. What could read as grim is instead laced with humour, awkwardness and cultural collision. Younis has a keen eye for the absurd in tragedy, and for the way good intentions unravel. As a first novel, it’s also helluva impressive. We laughed from the first page.

The River Is Waiting, Wally Lamb (Jonathan Ball)

The veteran American storyteller delivers one of his most wrenching novels yet. It follows Corby Ledbetter, a man struggling with job loss, addiction and new fatherhood whose life takes an unspeakably tragic turn (we shan’t spoil any more of the plot). Lamb’s gift has always been emotional honesty, familiar from She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, and here it cuts even deeper: grief and resilience are woven into every page. Be warned: it’s heartbreaking, but unforgettable – the kind of book that keeps you up all night, wrung out and grateful.

With thanks to our fav readers Maryam Adams, Shakti Pillay and Jenny Buitendach for input.

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