Foster is a short 90 page story published in a very handsome small paperback. It's a beautifully written, finely honed story in which much of the resonance of the story takes place off the page but in the reader's imagination. It tells of a girl taken for a summer to stay with relatives in rural Ireland. She's from a poor background, and it's suggested there is violence in the family home, but she finds affection in her new, temporary home. This is a powerful little book.

Dice is a compelling novel about a criminal trial in Rotorua, told by the individual members of the jury. The trial is of a group of teenage boys who are accused of sexual assault and rape of a number of younger girls, through a dice game where each throw 'requires' each boy to carry out a different sex act on a different girl. It rings very real and true, and is shocking and disturbing, as the reader sits through all of the evidence and cross examination through the eyes of each juror in turn. You won't be able to put this book down, as unsettling as it is.

This is Lorrie Moore's first new novel for over a decade, and therefore something to greatly anticipate. I'm just not sure what to make of it. It's one of the strangest books I've read, and she doesn't make it easy for the reader to unpack what happens in it, what is real and what imagined by the characters. Finn, the main character, gets a phone call that summons him back to a troubled relationship from his past. Lily has taken her own life, and already been buried. He travels to the cemetery at night, and finds her there, apparently dead but alive, talking but decaying.

Best of Friends follows the lives of two women from Karachi, from 1988 when they are teenagers, then in London in 2019 when they are successful career women. They have been loyal if combative friends despite following very different career paths, one in finance, the other in human rights. The book's portrayal of their lives and long term friendship is powerful and profound, tender and insightful. An incident in 1988 echoes and resonates over the years, and ultimately impacts their friendship in the present.

Simon Curtis is a journalist and manchester City fan who has been following this contradictory football club for many years. In this book he chronicles the club's various failures and rare successes in European competition since 1969, and it was published on the eve of their ultimately successful campaign in 2023. It's a book for the super fan, not just the football super fan, but the City super fan.

This is probably the most comprehensive and authoritative overview of this most perplexing murder, which took place in 1970. Arthur Allen Thomas was notoriously tried twice, found guilty both times despite very shonky evidence, then finally pardoned. The murders have never been solved. This account by an investigative journalist and an associate professor of journalism, looks at the entire case, reviews all the evidence, interviews many surviving witnesses, and presents some new information. It's compellingly written, persuasive and convincing.