January new releases 2025

A panoramic novel of European history, by an internationally bestselling writer.

The whole truth, as the name implies, is the collective knowledge of all those involved. Which is why you can never really piece it together again afterwards. Because some of those who possessed a part of it will already be dead. Or they’re lying, or their memories are bad.

It’s 1989, and in a small town on the Austria–Hungary border, nobody talks about the war; the older residents pretend not to remember, and the younger ones are too busy making plans to leave. The walls are thin, the curtains twitch, there is a face at every window, and everyone knows what they are not supposed to say.

But as thousands of East German refugees mass at the border, it seems that the past is knocking on Darkenbloom’s door.

Still, though, nobody talks about the war.

Until a mysterious visitor shows up asking questions.

Until townspeople start receiving threatening letters and even disappearing.

Until a body is found.

Darkenbloom is a sweeping novel of exiled counts, Nazis-turned-Soviet-enforcers, secret marriages, mislabelled graves, remembrance, guilt, and the devastating power of silence, by one of Austria’s most significant contemporary writers.

The glittering story of April Ashley, model and trans pioneer, and the divorce case which gripped 1960s Britain and defined transgender rights for a generation.

As Britain emerged from postwar austerity in the 1960s, no one embodied its newfound spirit of hedonism and glamour like April Ashley. A fashion model and socialite who rose from poverty in Liverpool to the heights of London society via Le Carrousel nightclub in Paris, she was also one of the first Britons to undergo gender-affirming surgery.

Ashley was appointed MBE for services to transgender equality in 2012, but her journey towards acceptance was hard-won and bitterly contested. In 1961, a friend sold her story to a tabloid and she was told that she would never work in the UK again. Her brief marriage to Arthur Corbett, the son of a baron, set off a high-profile divorce battle, resulting in a landmark 1970 decision denying transgender women legal status as women — and denying Ashley her husband’s inheritance.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, award-winning biographers Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts tell the full story of April Ashley’s extraordinary life at the vanguard of the sexual revolution and the movement for trans equality.

A Nigerian Catcher in the Rye, Uchenna Awoke’s masterful debut breaks the silence about a hidden and dangerous contemporary caste system.

Fifteen-year-old Dimkpa dreams of the day his father will be made village head. He will return to school and maybe even go on to university; his mother will no longer have to break her back foraging wild food to sell at market; they will have the money to build a fine tomb for his aunt Okike; and his family’s status as ohu ma, the lowest Igbo caste, won’t matter anymore. But when his father is passed over for a younger man, breaking tradition, Dimkpa realises that he must make his own fate.

Journeying from his small village in rural Nigeria, to Lagos, Awka, and home again, Dimkpa learns that no money is easy money, that superstition runs deep, that knowledge is power, and that sometimes it is better to live in the present than always be chasing a future just out of reach.

The Liquid Eye of a Moon is by turns hilarious and poignant, capturing all the messiness of adolescence, and the difficulty of making your own way in a world that seeks to oppress you.

An urgent guide to combatting the loneliness epidemic, with 100 ways to increase connectivity right now, from the iconic therapist and Holocaust survivor appointed as New York’s first-ever loneliness ambassador.

US surgeon general Dr Vivek Murthy recently sounded the alarm that loneliness ‘represents an urgent public health concern’ — social media overuse, the effects of the pandemic, and the lack of ‘third places’ have all combined to make us more alone than we’ve ever been. Now, trusted therapist Dr Ruth K. Westheimer has made it her mission to shine a light on the problem and help us break out of the box of isolation.

We are social animals. We are not meant to live in solitude. We have a shared desire to connect and create lasting bonds with the people around us. But the heaviness of loneliness can make this feel impossible. In tackling this problem with compassion and her trademark no-nonsense approach to therapy, Dr Ruth provides practical, sincere strategies for finding companionship, community, and intimacy.

With her tips on navigating family, finding friends and lovers, and using technology in healthy ways, you will find wisdom and help here, whether you’ve been struggling with loneliness for years or only recently. The Joy of Connections isn’t just a guidebook for overcoming loneliness: it’s a vital kick in the pants we all need to start seeking — and finding — deep and lasting human connections.