Last year was a great one for readers and 2025 looks just as promising, thanks to plenty of books from old reliables and lots of promising débuts from at home and abroad. Here’s a peek at what to look forward to in January and February.
The first week in January usually sees the appearance of a new crime thriller from Sam Blake (aka Vanessa Fox-O’Loughlin, literary agent and founder of the marvellous writing.ie website). Her latest, due to be released this coming Thursday, is The Killing Sense (Corvus €15.99) and involves a special prize of a five-day trip to Paris to learn about perfume, where single mother Kate Wilde is delighted to be the winner. But there’s a serial killer on the loose in the City of Light, and his victims are exclusively red-headed women who look just like Kate. Can she keep herself safe on the streets of a beautiful but unfamiliar city?
Also in January, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is updated and reimagined in Layne Fargo’s The Favourites (Vintage €14.99), not with Kathy and Heathcliff but with Kat and Heath, a figure-skating duo taking the national and international competitions by storm. An incident at the Olympic Games will change everything, however, and 10 years afterwards, Kat is approached by a TV documentary team to speak out about her audacious, salacious relationship with Heath. While it lasted. She has not spoken about it in public before, letting the headlines make of her what they did (they didn’t like her!) but the truth about their relationship is even more horrendous than any amount of wild speculation.
If it’s a bit of sunshine your after in the darkest days of winter, Jill Mansell’s An Almost Perfect Summer (Headline Review €23.20) should help you while away the hours. Nella and Nick are long-distance friends, and she kind of fancies him. When she loses her job, she successfully applies for another one but it’s in a holiday retreat in the Cotswolds. And guess who’s the boss there? Right. Nick. And besides, a Hollywood star has found refuge in that same holiday retreat, and she’s got her eye on Nick! Mansell comes heartily endorsed by our own Marian Keyes although her novels are not as funny as Keyes’ novels. But they’re full of warmth, of the vagaries of friendship and family and of the power – and perils – of love.
If you’ve over-indulged a little and would like to shed some post-Christmas pounds, Ben Carpenter’s Fat Loss Habits (Short Books €24.65) might be just the ticket. Low carb, keto and intermittent fasting work as short-term solutions but Carpenter insists that that is all they are; short-term solutions. To lose weight and maintain that loss, it’s all about kicking old habits and developing new ones. He promises that everyone can do it, even the weak-willed, if they follow his simple, no-nonsense and anti-fad advice.
And if it’s drink rather than food that you’re hoping to give up in the new year, Millie Mackintosh’s Bad Drunk (Piatkus €27.55) is her story of giving up alcohol for good. It is full of advice on how to do it, warnings about the pitfalls to watch for, and it outlines some of the joys one can look forward to in a life without hangovers.
Róisín O’Donnell has a new book out in January, too. Nesting (Scribner €15.99) tells the story of Ciara Fay, who makes a snap decision to leave home with her two young daughters and drive away, because her home is no longer a safe place. But she soon finds herself adrift, with no work and little money and depending on a public housing system that’s non-existent. There is a huge cost to be paid for running away, not least the continuing control of her husband, even at a distance. Endorsed by the likes of Roddy Doyle, Jan Carson and Una Mannion, this will be one of the big novels of 2025.
Pádraig Ó Tuama, poetry curator extraordinaire, is the editor of a new anthology of poetry, 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (Canongate €29.00), a collection of works by mostly contemporary poets, loosely tied together through the theme of human connection, its joys and sorrows and all of the colours in between. Illuminating the various aspects of being inextricably linked together, it’s a refreshing volume that will delight readers for years, just as his poetry podcast has done for millions around the world.
Andrew Ridker’s Hope (Farago €14.99) tells the story of the Greenspan family, a prosperous and prominent New England clan. Father, Scott, is a successful cardiologist, his wife a well-known socialite and pillar of society, his daughter works in a frontline publishing house and his son is in medical school, following in his father’s footsteps. But Scott is caught faking blood-test results, and the resulting scandal sends this high-profile family into a tailspin. Ridker has been hailed as one of the most astute and funny writers working in America today and there are, um… high hopes (sorry!) for this novel.
Fiona Scarlett’s May All Your Skies be Blue (Faber €15.99) is a story of young love between teenagers Dean and Shauna, both bearing their own scars. Their relationship is to remain a secret but it’s hard to keep a secret in school classrooms, and hard to keep the noise down both inside and outside of their heads. From the author of Boy’s Don’t Cry, this is a novel set among the working class, but a working class that’s as diverse and various as it really is, rather than as it’s often depicted.
Amy Jordan’s The Dark Hours (HQ €15.99) is a dual timeline thriller that will keep your pulse racing to the end. It’s 2024 and retired copper Julia Harte has left Cork city behind for the pleasures of a small cottage in the rural west. But she gets a call from her former Superintendent informing her that two women have just been murdered in Cork, their bodies staged just like in one of her earliest cases in the city, in 1994. Is this copycat killing or something even more sinister? And why does Julia know in her bones that there’s now a serial killer out there, coming to look for her?
AL Kennedy’s Alive in the Merciful Country (Saraband €27.55) takes the reader back to the darkest days of Covid confinement, when Anna McCormick is struggling with school classes over Zoom, a teenage child is unable to leave the house and a long-distance relationship is failing, thanks to lockdown. Then an unstamped envelope is dropped through her letterbox, and a past she has not reckoned with begins to influence her present circumstances. A novel about abuse of power by police, by an apathetic and utterly inept UK government, and by sources much closer to home than she initially suspects, it’s a page turner with all the elegance of literary fiction.
In Patricia Gibney’s The Guilty Girl (Sphere €16.99), 17-year-old Lucy is found murdered after a party she secretly hosted in her home while her parents were away. Detective Lottie Parker is first on the scene. She is to discover that Lucy betrayed a terrible secret about her friend Hannah. And Lucy’s bloodstained clothes are later found in Hannah’s bedroom. But Hannah has no memory of what happened on the night of the party, and it transpires that Lottie’s own son Sean was at the same party. Why did he lie? Is he a suspect, or is he in line for the killer to strike again? Another heart-stopper from Gibney, this is superb.
June O’Sullivan’s The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife (Poolbeg €16.99), published on February 3, gets the month off to a great start with a story about Eliza Carthy, wife of lighthouse keeper James, working and living on Skellig Michael. Life in that extreme location is far from easy but Eliza is proud of her husband’s promotion to principal lighthouse keeper, and even happier when assistant keeper Edmund and his wife Ruth arrive to live on the island. But they transpire not to be the friendly neighbours and allies Eliza had hoped for, with their strange moods, and they seem to want Eliza and her family to leave. Is it her or is it them? Is she right to feel protective of her family or is she losing her mind? First-rate historical fiction from an author endorsed by Joseph O’Connor.
The much-loved Roisin Meaney has a new novel out in early February, simply titled Moving On (Hachette €16.99) and spanning two timelines, the early 1980s and the 2020s. Ellen looks back at a life punctuated by three great loves: Leo, the charming city banker in London; Ben, the bookseller in Galway city; and her childhood friend, Danny, who’s never around for a meetup at the right time. Home may be where the heart is, but Helen’s not sure where her own heart will lead her next. A warm and clever story from one of our country’s biggest selling authors.
Gareth Carr’s The Boy from the Sea (Picador €15.99) tells the story of Brendan, named by fisherman Ambrose who found him as a baby, abandoned on the beach in a remote west of Ireland village. Ambrose takes the baby home and rears Brendan as his own, with his wife Christine and their son, Declan. But for Declan, the arrival of Brendan will be the start of a lifelong rivalry between them. Spanning two decades, this novel is about a boy attempting to find his place in the world, about a family trying to hold themselves together and about the times that were a-changing in our country’s recent history.
In The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra (Penguin €29), the dire and seemingly hopeless situation in the territory is put under the Mishra’s microscope, revealing the inequity of balance of power between a white minority in the western world and that of the ‘darker peoples’ as the author calls them. Mishra asks the difficult questions: why some lives matter more than others, why politics born of suffering is so widely embraced, and why racial antagonisms are intensifying as the far-right surges in popularity, threatening a global conflagration. This book is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future.
In A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World by Tom Phillips (Wildfire €17.99), we learn that we are on the cusp of the Apocalypse. As if we didn’t know it. But, he argues, we’ve always been on the cusp of the Apocalypse! And he can quote the history books to prove it. Across thousands of years, we’ll meet weird cults, failed prophets and mass panics, holy warriors leading revolts in anticipation of the last days, and suburbanites waiting for aliens to rescue them from a doomed Earth. Which is not to say that we’re wrong about it this time around. Our obsession with doomsday, Phillips says, is really about change: our fear of it, and our desire for it, and how, ultimately, we can find hope in it. Funny and intelligent, this is an engaging read.
Jojo Moyes will publish her latest novel just before Valentine’s Day, titled We All Live Here (Michael Joseph €16.99). It is the story of the Kennedy family. Lila wrote a book on how to have a good marriage and then discovered her own was far from good. Bill, her stepdad, lives with her since her mother died. Lila’s teenage daughter has stopped going to school, her younger one raps age-inappropriate rants, and just to put the tin lid on it, her estranged father, whom she hasn’t seen since childhood, turns up on her doorstep. Nobody can do family comedy quite like Moyes and this is one to look out for.
Finally, Seán Farrell’s Frogs for Watchdogs (New Island €16.95) is a much-anticipated debut that has the likes of Donal Ryan and Louise Kennedy practically screaming from the rooftops about how good it is. A wild child with an equally wild imagination will stop at nothing to protect his family – his single mother and his big sister. The family have finally landed, after much moving around, in an isolated house in the countryside. Local farmer Jerry is stealing hay from the barn but that doesn’t stop Mum falling for him. They are receiving nasty anonymous phone calls at night and this family’s world appears to be closing in around them. An imaginative and funny take on childhood, it’s a beauty and I’ll quote from the mighty John Banville, who observes in the blurb; "Seán Farrell is a magical writer."