Serpent’s Tail Summer Reading Guide 2023
Sun's out, books out! Which books will you be diving into this summer?
The Incredible Events of Women’s Cell No.3 – Read an extract
Read an extract of this explosive and timely debut
New releases
Alison
Lizzy Stewart
A visually stunning and beautifully written debut graphic novel of love, life and art
Bliss & Blunder
Victoria Gosling
A breathtakingly fresh retelling of the King Arthur legend for the 21st century.
Queen K
Sarah Thomas
A suspenseful and Ripleyesque debut about a private tutor who discovers the dark world behind Russian wealth
Sanderson’s Isle
James Clarke
A man searches for a stolen child through swinging London and the Lake District in the psychedelic 1960s
One Good Deed
David Jackson
The new standalone thriller from the bestselling author of Cry Baby and The Resident
Chorus
Rebecca Kauffman
Chorus follows seven siblings through the decades after their mother's untimely death, a shocking bereavement which shapes the course of their li…
The Geometer Lobachevsky
Adrian Duncan
An inventive and original Irish writer arrives at the Tuskar Rock list on a wave of prize listings and critical prestige
The Way It Is Now
Garry Disher
A disgraced cop hunts for his mother's killer in this gripping slice of outback noir from Australia's King of Crime
The Cherry Robbers
Sarai Walker
'First they get married, then they get buried' … you can run from a family curse, but you can't hide forever
The Incredible Events in Women's Cell Number 3
Kira Yarmysh
A powerful prison story that renews a grand Russian tradition of fabulist existential uncertainty
An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life
Paul Dalla Rosa
A story collection that perfectly captures life in the internet age
Wish I Was Here
M. John Harrison
One of our greatest and most original living writers sets out the perils of the writing life with joyful provocation
Prostitute Laundry
Charlotte Shane
A taboo-breaking and radically honest account of love, friendship and sex work
Fyneshade
Kate Griffin
Jane Eyre meets Amy Dunne in this dark and twisted gothic thriller from the author of the Kitty Peck Mysteries
Verge
Nadia Attia
A deadly curse, two young strangers thrown together by fate, and a road trip through a disunited Kingdom.
The Long Answer
Anna Hogeland
A young woman gathers intimate stories about pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships, in this profound and provocative novel
Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors
Aravind Jayan
A scandalous video.A humiliated family.And a brother stuck in the middle.
Featured authors
Bestsellers and Classics
Detransition, Baby
Torrey Peters
A uniquely trans take on love, motherhood, and those exes who you just can't quit
The Last House on Needless Street
Catriona Ward
Immersive, gripping, and delivering twist after twist: this is the must-read gothic thriller of 2021. It's so good you'll read it twice…
The Appeal
Janice Hallett
Described by The Sunday Times as 'A modern Christie', this is an extraordinarily inventive crime debut in which the reader is challenged to…
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Karen Joy Fowler
You can't choose your family, but they make choices for you.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Saidiya Hartman
Revolution in a minor key: how young black women invented freedom
In the Dream House
Carmen Maria Machado
A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties
Eat Up
Ruby Tandoh
Ruby Tandoh's radical manifesto takes the guilt out of eating and puts the pleasure back in.
African Psycho
Alain Mabanckou
Alain Mabanckou's uproarious, fleet-footed English-language debut, reissued as a Serpent's Tail Classic to coincide with the publication of…
Seiobo There Below
Laszlo Krasznahorkai
One of László Krasznahorkai's finest novels available in stunning redesigned paperback
I Love Dick
Chris Kraus
The cult novel – now a major TV series by Jill Soloway, the creator of TRANSPARENT, starring Kevin Bacon and Kathryn Hahn
Serpent's Tail Classics
Pedro Páramo
Juan Rulfo
A new translation of the legendary Mexican classic of magic realism which went on to inspire the works of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario V…
Cold Nights of Childhood
Tezer Özlü
A lyrical autofictional account of the author's fight to survive depression and carve out her own path in 1950s and 60s Istanbul
Haruko/Love Poems
June Jordan
Searingly beautiful poems about compassion, resistance and desire by an iconic Black American activist and writer
The Impostor
Silvina Ocampo
Fantastical, unnerving short stories from a Surrealist master of the form
Passing
Nella Larsen
A classic of the Harlem Renaissance reissued to coincide with the major Netflix adaptation of Passing (2021)
To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
Hervé Guibert
The cult classic that describes with devastating, darkly comic clarity the experience of living with and dying from AIDS
Man Enough to Be a Woman
Jayne County
The true story of trans punk performance art sensation Jayne County's wild and daring life
And the Band Played On
Randy Shilts
A masterpiece of investigative reporting on the AIDS crisis in the USA
Mysteries
Knut Hamsun
Serpent's Tail Classics edition of a wild masterpiece by a Nobel prize winner championed by influential writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and D…
Devil in a Blue Dress
Walter Mosley
The bestselling, award-winning first novel by the internationally acclaimed crime writer Walter Mosley introduces his most famous character – Easy Raw…
Selected Poems
Langston Hughes
Classics edition with new introduction by Kayo Chingonyi of the essential poems of 'the poet laureate of black America' New Yorker.
Eat My Heart Out
Zoe Pilger
Zoe Pilger's wildly funny debut novel, reissued as a Serpent's Tail Classic
Jakob von Gunten
Robert Walser
Robert Walser's great masterpiece, reissued with a foreword by J. M. Coetzee
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
Alix Kates Shulman
The cult classic that defined a generation – over a million copies sold
Red Riding Nineteen Eighty Three
David Peace
Volume four in David Peace's newly reissued crime masterpiece The Red Riding Quartet