Paperbacks to Look Out For in June 2025: Part One

This first batch of June’s paperbacks has a distinctly Irish flavour beginning with one of my books of last year. Christine Dwyer Hickey writes beautifully crafted thoughtful novels, often from the perspective of women. Our London Lives is set against the backdrop of a vividly evoked London following Milly, eighteen and pregnant when she arrives from Ireland in 1979. She finds herself a job in a Faringdon pub, and a family of sorts, catching the eye of Pip, a promising young boxer. Nearly forty years later, Milly is still behind the bar when the pub closes its doors and Pip is struggling to stay sober, carrying around a set of letters of apology to those he’s hurt including Milly. Theirs is a story of bad timing, missed opportunities, stubbornness and bad behaviour played out against a background of a lovingly described London. I’ve enjoyed all of Hickey’s novels I’ve read, but this gorgeous, immersive love story is my favourite.

Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace returns to the setting of his debut, A Spinning Heart, and follows the same structure, telling the story through twenty-one interrelated voices. The town is dealing with a new scourge in the form of Augie Penrose’s lucrative drug business. Bobby becomes determined to do something about this menace to the town, far from the only one concerned at the damage being done. There’s a reasonable helping of dark humour to be enjoyed, not least in the novel’s resolution welcomed by Bobby’s wife, unaware of its implications for the future, and Ryan’s writing is characteristically striking but I preferred the more straightforward approach of The Queen of Dirt Island.

I’ve read and enjoyed all three of oncologist Austin Duffy’s previous novels, each of which explores a medical theme in one way or another. Cross sounds very different. Opening in 1994, the year of the ceasefire, it’s set in the eponymous Northern Irish border town where many have blood on their hands, and others are mourning their losses. ‘From its dramatic first chapter, Cross is an extraordinary evocation of the loyalties and divisions within a town governed by its own variety of law, where violence is rewarded and complicity is second nature. It is a complex tale of betrayal and brutality at the height of the Troubles, a moving, powerful and empathetic lament for a community that has lost its way in its battle for the nation’ says the blurb. I’m expecting great things of this one.

As many readers will already know, Colm Tóibín’s Long Island is the sequel to his much-loved Brooklyn, taking up the story of Eilis Lacey in the 1970s, twenty years after we left her. Eilis is living with her husband and children in their Long Island home when some shocking news takes her back to Ireland and a way of life she’d long put behind her. ‘A novel of enormous wit and profound emotional resonance from one of the world’s finest writers’ says the blurb although I’ve registered quite a lot of disappointment with this one.

Jessica Anthony’s The Most opens on a November Sunday in 1957 when Kathleen Beckett, one time tennis champion, now housewife to Virgil, an insurance salesmen and woman chaser, refuses to get out of the swimming pool of the complex where they live. The blurb describes this one as ‘A tightly wound, consuming tale about a 1950s American housewife, for fans of Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’. I like the sound of that.

Gu Byeong-Mo’s Your Neighbour’s Table is set in a government funded apartment building, a pilot project aimed at addressing South Korea’s ever-dwindling birth rate. When Yojin, Euno and six-year-old Siyul move in there are just three other families in residence, most of whom have turned out to meet their new neighbours sitting round the enormous table in the apartment’s yard. Over the next few months, group dynamics are increasingly strained, communal childcare becomes a competition, and marriages are stretched to breaking point. In this highly gendered, hierarchical society even little Siyul is expected to take the lead in looking after the younger children which made me want to put my head in my hands.

I like the premise of Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding which sees two couples living in the same Parisian apartment fifty years apart. In 2019, David works in London while Anna is trying to come to terms with a miscarriage, making friends with a younger woman who’s part of a radical feminist group. In 1972, Florence is hoping to get pregnant, but Henry is ambivalent. ‘Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space’ according to the blurb.

That’s it for June’s first batch of paperbacks. A click on a title will take you either to my review or to a more detailed synopsis should you want to know more, and if you’d like to catch up with new fiction it’s here and here. Part two soon…