Longlisted for The Booker Prize 2025After losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast—the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. Soon, she encounters some of the people she met last time around: John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew, Petros, an eccentric mechanic; Niko, a handsome diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk ...

**Longlisted for The Booker Prize 2025“Buckley creates a novel of quiet brilliance and sly humour, packed with mystery and indeterminacy.”—The Booker Prize judges**After losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast—the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. Soon, she encounters some of the people she met last time around: John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew; Petros, an eccentric mechan...

A stunning novel which examines our fears, prejudices and desires, from the author of Ghost MacIndoe and Invisible.On a beach in southern England, a dog returns to its owner with a human hand in its mouth. The hand belongs to a homeless eccentric named Henry, who has been wandering the south-west of England for the last thirty years. As the local policeman and his accomplice piece together Henry’s movements prior to his death, talking to those who knew and watched...

Emaciated and barely recognizable, Ivo has died in hospital. Neither his mother nor his oldest friend, Nicholas, can fathom the malnourished state he was admitted in. In the house Ivo shared with a shifting group of men and women in need – people to whom he offered unconditional refuge – there are expressions of gratitude and professions of love, but no adequate explanation. His self-denial, they insist, was deliberate.In the aftermath of Ivo's death, Nicholas carefully reconstruct...

‘I often ask myself what makes a story work,’ wrote the greatAmerican author, Flannery O’Connor. ‘I have decided that it isprobably some action, some gesture of a character... which isboth totally right and totally unexpected... one that is both incharacter and beyond character.’The five stories shortlisted for this year’s BBC NationalShort Story Award with Book Trust all feature peoplemaking just such gestures, acting in ways that reach be...

Daniel Brennan, approaching the premature end of his life, retreats to a room in his brother's suburban house. To divert himself and to entertain Ellen, his carer, he writes the journal that is Telescope, blurring truth, gossip and fiction in vignettes of his own life and the lives of those close to him. Above all he focuses on his siblings: mercurial Celia, whose life as a teacher in Italy seems to have run aground, and kindly Charlie, the entrepreneur of the family.Enric...

A woman named Naomi arrives at her sister's house, intending, it seems, to say goodbye. She is abandoning her city life for a remote Scottish retreat, which she will share with a man called Bernát, whom she considers some kind of visionary. In a sequence of stories filtered through multiple re-tellings, she illuminates the character of this elusive individual. One story seems of special significance: about Afonso, an Amazon boatman, who could be the last speaker of his mother tongue, a lan...

In the small hours of January 1st, a man begins to write, having watched Le Grand Concert de la Nuit, a film in which a former lover - Imogen - plays a major role. For the next year, he writes something every day.His journal is a ritual of commemoration and an investigation of the character of Imogen and her relationships - with himself; with her family and friends; with other lovers.Imogen is an elusive subject, and The Great Concert of the Night is an in...

Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, Tell is an exuberant, intensely fluid, and probing examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own and of other people’s livesA novel of intense, flickering intelligence, Tell is structured as a series of interviews with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide. What might be a gloomy subjec...

Jonathan Buckley’s ‘Ghost MacIndoe’ is a bold and ambitious novel that focuses on the life of Alexander MacIndoe, a self-centred man who is characterised only by his physical beauty and a complete lack of will.Jonathan Buckley’s third novel opens with Alexander MacIndoe’s earliest memory: a February morning in 1944, in the aftermath of the second wave of German air-raids. Set mainly in London and Brighton, Ghost MacIndoe is the story of the next fifty-four years of Alexander’s life...

A lyrical and beautifully realised novel about a blind man's experiences of the world around him, from the acclaimed author of Ghost MacIndoe.Edward Morton, a blind translator, arrives at the Oak, an ailing spa hotel in the west of England, intending to stay for a few days to visit his family and to work. The manager of the Oak, Malcolm Caldecott, is preparing for the closure of the hotel, and for the visit of Stephanie, the daughter he has not seen for eight years. Eloni ...

A story of remembrance, desire, and the occult by one of Britain's finest contemporary novelists.The lapping of the waves was a lesson in mortality. Sometimes the corrective would work, and his turmoil would recede. The sound secured him, as the contemplation of a skull might make a penitent secure. And sometimes it was more than a corrective: it brought elation . . . "Live," it urged, with each whisper of the water. "Live; live; live." Leaning forward, Lucas r...