Drawing on the influence of fairy tale, magic realism and echoing writers from Angela Carter to Helen Oyeyemi, Her Body and Other Parties is a startlingly inventive debut story collection from American author Carmen Maria Machado. Twisting and turning in ever more unexpected ways, these tales track new paths across women’s bodies, minds and imaginations. ‘Not stories that are easily dismissed’ writes the Independent, ‘Machado’s verve shines through in this macabre and erotic collection’.

A searing and powerful consideration of the cost and sacrifice of intimacy, First Love is a sharply honed novel from an author at the height of their powers. Pulling at the strained ties of a marriage between two brittle and embittered thirty-somethings, Riley offers a penetratingly brutal and darkly comic look at the realities of modern love. A book of ‘naked truths, of unvarnished life’, writes the Guardian, ‘a singular, devastating journey into the ungovernable reaches of the heart’.

Waterstones’s Fiction Book of the Month for March 2018, this novel is, remarked the Daily Mail, ‘the best I’ve read on what it means to be young and female right now.’ The winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Prize 2017, Sally Rooney’s novel is a shrewd, wickedly funny debut about the nature of friendship and love for the millennial generation.

‘Urban and urbane, it’s a magnificent debut’ writes the Telegraph of this immersive collection by Zambia-born poet Kayo Chingonyi. Taking its title from the Luvale tribe’s term for a boy’s ritual passage into manhood, Chingonyi’s musical, lyrically inspired poems confront ideas of masculinity and the gulf between fathers and sons, exploring race and identity through ideas of what it means to be at once both citizen and outsider.

One summer a couple, Wade and Jenny, take a trip to the forest to collect birch wood with their family, little-knowing their lives are on the brink of a life-shattering, inconceivable act whose. Told from multiple perspectives, Idaho is an extraordinary, luminescent fictional debut from American author Emily Ruskovich; a novel about memory, grief, compassion and what it takes to rebuild a life in the shadow of violence.

Growing up in Mendocino, in the wilderness of the northern California coast, 14-year-old Turtle Alveston and her father live a life honed by survival, brutality and sadistic love. As Turtle’s reaches out to a life beyond, their fragile existence is blown apart. Described by the Financial Times as ‘a Great American Novel for the increasingly isolationist, fractionalised and disenchanted contemporary era’, My Absolute Darling is is a tour-de-force debut that leaves echoes indelibly imprinted on the imagination.