Paperbacks to Look Out For in January 2026: Part Two

The second part of January’s paperback preview begins with two shortlisted for 2025’s Women’s Prize for fiction. In Rósín O’Donnell’s debut, Nesting, a woman flees her home with her two young daughters, convinced that’s it’s no longer safe for them to live there. Her hoped-for escape proves to be tougher than she’d thought with little money, no option but to live in a hotel room and her husband’s determination to get her back to the family home. ‘Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over’ say the publishers of a novel much praised by Sheila Armstrong and Roddy Doyle. Kim at Reading Matters was also impressed. You can read her review here.

Aria Aber’s Good Girl is set in Berlin where nineteen-year-old aspiring artist Nila, the daughter of Afghan refugees, is spending a year partying trying to escape her childhood in the city’s rundown social housing, telling those who ask that she’s Greek. Her encounter with an ageing American writer opens up a different world but ‘as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city’s cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged’ according to the blurb. I’m beginning to feel the Berlin setting is a tad overdone but Nila’s background suggests this one may be a bit different.

I read Emma Jane Unsworth’s Adults six years ago and loved it so I’m hoping for more acerbic entertainment with Slags. Sarah’s still a party girl at forty-one although the shine’s beginning to wear off. She and her sister decide to celebrate Juliette’s birthday with a campervan trip across Scotland. In between visits to whiskey distilleries, the sisters plan some hear-to-hearts, hoping to put some childhood demons to rest. Very keen to read this one which, from Kate’s review, sounds darker that Adults.

It’s some time since I read anything by Caryl Phillips and I’ve a feeling I didn’t take to his writing style very well but the premise of Another Man in the Street is very attractive. Victor ‘Lucky’ Johnson arrives in London from St Kitts in the early ‘60s, hoping for a career in journalism but eventually becoming a rent collector for a slum landlord. Phillips’s novel explores the experience of the Windrush generation through Victor’s story, following him from his arrival to the present day. ‘Another Man in the Street is an unforgettable story of loss, displacement, belonging, and the triumph of Black resilience – epic in scope and yet profoundly intimate, and a radical and timely portrait of immigrant London’ says the blurb making me keen to read it.

This is an unusual one for me but I like the sound of Laurent Binet’s Perspectives which opens in Florence on New Year’s Day 1557 with the discovery of an artist on the floor of a church stabbed through the heart beneath the paintings he’s worked on for a decade. A secret work depicting Maria de Medici as a naked Venus is found in his house. Renowned art historian, Giorgio Vasari heads the investigation which promise to be a rats’ nest of intrigue. ‘Bursting with characters and colour, Perspectives is a mystery like no other that shows us Renaissance Florence as we’ve never seen it before – a dazzling, hugely entertaining novel of court machinations, murder and art’ says the burb which sounds unmissable.

First published in 1966, Juan Marsé’s Last Evenings with Teresa is set in 1950s Barcelona where the titular, rebellious daughter of wealthy parents meets Manolo, not averse to stealing motorcycles to make ends meet, and embarks on an affair with him. ‘Juan Marsé’s masterpiece is an unforgettable portrait of post-war Barcelona – a modern classic on the power of desire and love, ambition and hope against all odds’ according to the somewhat sketchy blurb. The period and location is the lure with this one.

That’s it for January. A click on a title will take you to a more detailed synopsis should you want to know more, and if you’d like to catch up with part one it’s here. New fiction is here and here.

A very happy Christmas to those who celebrate, and a restful one to those who’ve worked hard in the run up to it. I’ll be back next week with one more look over my shoulder at 2025.