Books on Our Radar
The new year is here, and with it comes an incredible lineup of books to inspire, challenge, and delight with January’s Books on Our Radar. January’s picks offer a rich mix of perspectives, from probing feminist philosophy to tales of reinvention, resilience, and relationships. Whether you're looking for a profound exploration of the human condition, an absorbing novel, or a thought-provoking piece of nonfiction, this month's selections are sure to captivate your imagination and ignite meaningful conversations.
From Miranda July’s daring and absurdly entertaining All Fours to Minna Salami’s incisive exploration of African feminist thought in Can Feminism Be African?, these books are journeys of discovery—about identity, power, and selfhood. Han Kang’s haunting We Do Not Part brings the weight of history into stark focus, while Darian Leader’s Is It Ever Just Sex? unravels the complex emotions intertwined with desire. Meanwhile, Giulia Enders’ updated Gut sheds light on the miraculous ecosystem within us, and Kate Manne’s Unshrinking makes an urgent call to confront size-based discrimination in all its forms.
January’s selections remind us that the stories we tell — and the stories we read — shape how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Dive into these unforgettable narratives and let them challenge your assumptions, expand your horizons, and fill your reading list with unmissable treasures.
All Fours
Out Now
A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.
Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic and domestic life of a 45-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectations while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.
But the Girl
Out Now
I used to have this line I saved and brought out for grant applications and writers festivals - that having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me.
Irreverent, witty and wise, But the Girl is a coming-of-age story about not wanting to leave your family behind
Girl was born on the very day her parents and grandmother immigrated from Malaysia to Australia. The story goes that her mother held on tight to her pelvic muscles in an effort to gift her the privilege of an Australian passport. But it's hard to be the embodiment of all your family's hopes and dreams, especially in a country that's hostile to your very existence.
When Girl receives a scholarship to travel to the UK, she is finally free for the first time. In London and then Scotland she is meant to be working on a PhD on Sylvia Plath and writing a postcolonial novel. But Girl can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of the people who raised her. How can she reconcile their expectations with her reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a 'postcolonial novel'? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity, but learning to understand the people who made you who you are?
Can Feminism Be African?
Released: 13/02/2025
What happens when we consider Africa through a feminist lens and feminism through an African one? And what does it mean to centre selfhood in this journey?
In this shining, wide-ranging inquiry, Minna Salami explores these questions through an unhesitating and incisive vision of African feminist political philosophy.
Drawing from feminist thought, postcolonial theory, historical insights, and African knowledge systems, Salami combines personal reflection with cultural criticism to offer a vivid and cohesive discussion about power, identity, patriarchy, imagination, and the human condition. Grounded in Africa’s enduring visions of agency and autonomy, Can Feminism Be African? opens new paths for rethinking the narratives that shape our world.
This is a timely and thought-provoking read, calling us to rethink the past, present, and future through new perspectives.
The Story of a Heart is a testament to compassion for the dying, the many ways we honour our loved ones, and the tenacity of love.
Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ
Out Now
A Sunday Times bestseller — now with revised and expanded content on the exciting new science about the gut-brain link.
Our gut is as important as our brain or heart, yet we know very little about how it works and many of us are too embarrassed to ask questions.
In Gut, Giulia Enders breaks this taboo, revealing the latest science on how much our digestive system has to offer.
From our miraculous gut bacteria — which can play a part in obesity, allergies, depression and even Alzheimer’s — to the best position to poo, this entertaining and informative health handbook shows that we can all benefit from getting to know the wondrous world of our inner workings.
Is It Ever Just Sex?
Out Now
‘It was just sex.’
It’s a familiar claim. But it’s also an impossibility, as Darian Leader shows in this delightfully thought-provoking study.
Our bodies aren’t just sticks that make fire when you rub them together, and our minds don’t simply stand by – as we can see from the pain, heartache and regret that so often accompany the highs of sexual excitement.
As acclaimed psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues, with his trademark clarity, energy and wit, sex is always about so much more than itself – it’s about phantasy, anxiety, guilt, revenge, violence, love. Drawing on his long analytic experience, historical research and case studies to explore their importance to every aspect of our sexual lives, Leader brilliantly reveals what we are really thinking about when we think about sex – and what we are really doing when we do it.
Sweat
Released: 30/01/2025
All Liam ever wanted was to help Cassie reach her full potential; to push her body to new extremes. Exercise, determination, being the optimum versions of themselves together forever. And Liam always knew what was best.
Nothing could break their intense love for one another, not Liam’s obsessive desire for physical perfection or his relentless control of every aspect of Cassie’s life. Until the day he pushes Cassie far beyond her limits, and she walks out of their flat and away from their toxic relationship for good.
Two years on and Cassie is stronger, fitter, healthier than ever before. And then she sees him – Liam – those green eyes, those stirring muscles. Something inside her flips.
But she holds the power now.
It’s Liam’s turn to sweat.
We Do Not Part
Released: 06/02/2025
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2024
Like a long winter’s dream, this haunting and visionary new novel from 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang takes us on a journey from contemporary South Korea into its painful history
‘One of the most profound and skilled writers working on the contemporary world stage’ Deborah Levy
Beginning one morning in December, We Do Not Part traces the path of Kyungha as she travels from the city of Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island, to the home of her old friend Inseon. Hospitalized following an accident, Inseon has begged Kyungha to hasten there to feed her beloved pet bird, who will otherwise die.
Kyungha takes the first plane to Jeju, but a snowstorm hits the island the moment she arrives, plunging her into a world of white. Beset by icy wind and snow squalls, she wonders if she will arrive in time to save the bird – or even survive the terrible cold which envelops her with every step. As night falls, she struggles her way to Inseon’s house, unaware as yet of the descent into darkness which awaits her.
There, the long-buried story of Inseon’s family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in a painstakingly assembled archive documenting a terrible massacre on the island seventy years before.
We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination and above all an indictment against forgetting.
Unshrinking
Out Now
Size discrimination harms everyone. Acclaimed philosopher Kate Manne shows how to combat it.
For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not.
Blending intimate stories with trenchant analysis, Manne shows why fatphobia matters, now more than ever. Over the last decades, bias has waned in every category except one: body size. Here she examines how anti-fatness operates – how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person's attractiveness, fortitude and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect and poor educational outcomes. It is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential. Fatphobia is a social justice issue.
In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of ‘body reflexivity’ -- a radical re-evaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.
Tender
Out Now
Catherine and James are as close as two friends could ever be. They meet in Dublin in the late 1990s, she a college student, he a fledgling artist - both recent arrivals from rural communities, coming of age in a city which is teeming - or so they are told - with new freedoms, new possibilities.
Catherine has never met anyone quite like James. Talented, quick-witted, adventurous and charismatic, he helps Catherine to open her eyes, to take on life with more gusto than she has ever before known how to do.
But while Catherine's horizons are expanding, James's own life is becoming a prison: as changed as the new Ireland may be, it is still not a place in which he feels able to be himself. Catherine desperately wants to help, but as life begins to take the friends in different directions, she discovers that there is a perilously fine line between helping someone and hurting them further. And when crisis hits, Catherine must face difficult truths not just about her closest bond - but about herself.
