04 August 2025
Congratulations to Serpent’s Tail alumni Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura on their Booker Prize longlistings!
We’re thrilled, and not at all surprised, to see Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura receive this well-deserved recognition. Both authors began their publishing journeys with Serpent’s Tail, where their brilliance was already unmistakable and has only deepened with each new work.
If you’re new to their writing or looking to explore it further, here are some standout titles to start with…
Sarah and David are in love – the obsessive, uncertain love of teenagers on the edge of adulthood. At their performing arts school, the rules are made by their magnetic drama instructor Mr Kingsley, who initiates them into a dangerous game. Two decades on we learn that the real story of these teenagers’ lives is even larger and darker than we imagined, and the consequences have lasted a lifetime.
Trust Exercise is a brilliant, unforgettable novel about what we lose, gain and never get over as we’re initiated into the mysteries of adulthood.
Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura
Set on a struggling farm in a fiercely beautiful colonial country teetering on the brink of civil war, this second novel by one of international literature’s rising young stars weaves a brilliant tale of family drama and political turmoil.
Since his mother’s death ten years earlier, Tom and his father have fashioned a strained peace on their family farm. Everything is frozen under the old man’s vicious, relentless control – even, Tom soon discovers, his own future. When a young woman named Carine enters their lives, the complex triangle of intrigue and affection escalates the tension between the two men to breaking point. After a catastrophic volcanic eruption ignites the nation’s smouldering discontent into open revolution, Tom, his father and Carine find themselves questioning their loyalties to one another and their determination to salvage their way of life.
A Separation by Katie Kitamura 
A young woman has agreed with her faithless husband: it’s time for them to separate. For the moment it’s a private matter, a secret between the two of them. As she begins her new life, alone, she gets word that her ex-husband has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged southern Peloponnese. Reluctantly she agrees to go and search for him, still keeping their split to herself. In her heart, she’s not even sure if she wants to find him. Adrift in the wild and barren landscape, she traces the failure of their relationship, and finds that she understands less than she thought about the man she used to love.
A story of intimacy, infidelity and compassion, A Separation is about the gulf that divides us from the lives of others and the narratives we create to mask our true emotions. As the narrator reflects upon her love for a man who may never have been what he appeared, Kitamura propels us into the experience of a woman on the brink of catastrophe. A Separation is a riveting masterpiece of absence and presence that will leave the reader astonished, and transfixed.
