With 2024 drawing to a close and the New Year fast approaching, we’re taking a look at some of the most exciting new releases for 2025, in partnership with Doubleday.

From the author of cult classic Bellies comes Disappoint Me.

Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. She’s living her best life! Or is she? The debris of years of dysphoria and failed relationships rattles around in her head. When Max falls down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party she is left questioning who will care for her. Enter Vincent, corporate lawyer and hobby baker. His trad friendship group may as well speak a different language to Max, and his Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. It’s uncertain terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way she’d long given up on as a foolish fantasy. But Vincent has his own history to unravel. Disappoint Me is a perfect, funny, moving and poignant book which reckons with the pressures of living the ‘right’ kind of life and making peace with the past.

From the acclaimed author of The Lost Pianos of Siberia comes an engrossing new journey, following four nineteenth-century elephants marched from the East African coast towards Congo, that tells a heartbreaking story of folly and colonial greed.

Splicing past and present, Sophy Roberts pieces together the story of this ill-conceived expedition and brings to life vivid landscapes and a compelling cast of historic characters and modern voices, from ivory dealers and powerful chiefs, to birders, missionaries and Catholic nuns. In travels that take her to Belgium, Iraq, India, Tanzania and Congo, she uncovers a poignant and long-forgotten history of Africa.

Twelve irresistible stories by the author of Romantic Comedy, American Wife and Prep, Sittenfeld is the acclaimed mistress of the short story.

Exploring female friendship, marriage, sex and celebrity, her nuanced wit and ironic eye for what makes us human are on full display. A special treat lies in the final story, in which we meet up with Lee Fiora, the original heroine of Prep, as she attends an awkward school reunion in middle age. And in ‘The Richest Babysitter in the World’, a young woman nannies for an extraordinary smart couple who have just created a small online start-up, which decades later becomes the biggest online shop in the world. Unfortunately, our heroine turned down their offer to join them many years ago. Delicious irony and tenderness, served on a plate.

An ultimatum: her or me. A gunshot. A betrayal.

This is the story of three women – one an orphan and refugee who finds a place in the studio of a famous French artist, one a wife and mother who has stood by her husband for nearly forty years. The third is his daughter, caught in the crossfire between her mother and a father she adores. Their lives are set on a collision course when they meet the enigmatic artist Henri Matisse. Based on a true story, Madame Matisse is a stunning novel about drama and betrayal, emotion and sex, glamour and tragedy, all set in the hotbed of the 1930s art movement in France. In art, as in life, there is a time when the rules were made to be broken . . .

An award-winning Korean novel translated by Chi-Young Kim, now turned into an extraordinary musical and with film rights optioned by Warner Bros., this novel is perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and Convenience Store Woman.

This is a deeply moving story of two sisters working at the canteen beside a racecourse with their mother, who decide to teach their once famous, now over-exercised and decrepit racehorse to run the slowest race of its life. Told by an unforgettable and utterly unique narrator, tears will prick your eyes as you read this extraordinary story of unusual friendship and resilience, a hymn to our earth and to animal dignity which asks every one of us to slow down in our lives so we can really experience life’s wonder. Brimming with humour, warmth and surprise, this unique Korean novel with healing fiction vibes has sold around the world and will be one to watch.

By the award-winning and number one bestselling author of The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, social historian Hallie Rubenhold offers an unputdownable, soaring, forensic and multi-layered re-examination of the infamous Edwardian murder of music hall entertainer Belle Elmore by her medical fraudster husband, Hawley Harvey Crippen.

Her murder led to an international manhunt for Crippen and his mistress, Ethel Le Neve, which gripped the world for decades, as they fled in disguise as father and son across the Atlantic on a cruise ship and were apprehended in Canada with the press and vast crowds awaiting them. Rubenhold brings the women in this true crime story to the fore, examining the role of the extraordinary music hall ladies who brought Crippen to justice, rehabilitating the reputation of Belle herself and exploring just how ‘innocent’ (as the Edwardian jury and the media believed) Crippen’s mistress, Ethel Le Neve, really was.

By the extraordinary Mizuki Tsujimura, author of the much-loved Lonely Castle in the Mirror, comes the million-copy bestselling Japanese novel, perfect for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, translated by Yuki Tejima.

Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon tells of five characters who get the chance to meet someone brought back from the afterlife for a single reunion, arranged according to strict rules and always under a full moon. Gripping and heartbreaking, we are helplessly immersed in the lives of these five as they each have an emotional reunion with someone from the dead, exploring themes of love,memory and connection, leaving the reader with a lasting feeling that they have just read something extraordinary and profound.

Former Women’s Prize judge and award-winning author Rachel Joyce returns with a gripping, devastating, deeply compassionate family drama, for readers of Ann Patchett and Maggie O’Farrell.

There is a heatwave in Europe. Goose and his three sisters gather at their family’s house by Lake Orta. Their father, a famous artist, has recently remarried and decamped with his young wife to Italy to finish his masterpiece. Now he is dead. Although the siblings have always been close, as they search for answers, all they learn – about themselves, their father and their new stepmother – will drive them apart before they can come to any understanding of what their father’s legacy truly is.

From the author of Sunday Times bestseller Tall Bones comes Our Last Wild Days, a brilliantly atmospheric and utterly compelling novel for fans of Gillian Flynn and Delia Owens.

The Labasques aren’t like other families. To the good people of Jacknife, Louisiana, they are troublemakers, outcasts, the kind of people you wouldn’t want living on your doorstep. So, when Cutter Labasque is found face down in the muddy swamp, no one seems to care, not even her two rough-cut brothers. The only person who questions the official verdict of suicide is Cutter’s childhood friend Loyal May, who has just returned home to care for her ageing mother. Loyal left town at the age of eighteen, having betrayed Cutter. Now there may be no way to find forgiveness, but there may be restitution . . .

Six university friends reunite twenty years later. This is the story of a year in their lives in which there will be one birth, one death and one marriage . . . but whose?

Births, Deaths and Marriages is the new novel from the number one bestselling author of The Versions of Us. Set over one year and told from multiple perspectives, this is an era-spanning, globe-trotting novel about love, friendship, and how to stay at least relatively sane in an ever-crazier world. It’s about a group of friends growing older, a pair of sometime lovers finding their way back to each other, about kindness and joy. It’s about births, deaths, marriages, and everything in between.

By the two-million-copy bestselling author of What You Are Looking for Is in the Library comes her enchanting brand-new novel, translated by Takami Neida.

Set in a suburban community in Tokyo, where an urban legend about the little hippo at the centre of a children’s playground has it that if you take a ride on its back and touch any part of your body to it that needs comfort, you will be healed. A highly imaginative, exquisite story of five people, humorously and warmly characterized, whose encounters with this adorable little hippo will change all of their lives. Aoyama wrote in this space before ‘healing fiction’ became a category – her books are authentic and a cut above, as she brings us profound portraits of a community we feel we might actually know.