4: You Can See the End of the World from Here by Kate Peckham
Peckham’s debut novel is an outstanding story about mental health, especially focusing on anxiety and how difficult it can be to be a parent. She wraps all of that in beautiful prose and serves a plot twist that gets you thinking about where we find our place in the world.
The scenes by the ocean, the fossil findings, and how they reflect the main character’s feelings were especially beautiful. It is a wonderful work of writing, a celebration of troubled souls finding a path out of the darkness.
3: Odd Girl Out by Tasneem Abdur-Rashid
This is Abdur-Rashid’s first young adult novel, and in this one she clearly levels up her game. Hurt, change, love, family, betrayal, and friendship are just a few of the many difficult topics arising in her novel.
It is about racism and Islamophobia in the UK and the reader follows a young girl who deals with all of that. All of that makes the story a gripping read and shows the reader what it is like to be an outsider in a hostile world. However, it also shows what it means to find true friends and trust in your family.
The themes in this novel are more topical than ever before. It is a brilliant young adult book!
2: Human Acts by Han Kang
Human Acts features devastatingly gorgeous prose and a traumatising plot. It tells the story of student uprisings in South Korea being violently put down, shown from the perspectives of individual characters who try to find their friends and family as the horrific massacres unfold around them.
The scenes of fighting, recovering, and identifying the dead are haunting. Kang shows the injustices and brutal realities of how humans in power enact their violent and deadly forces on the weak. In this way, she reminds the reader of similar wars and genocides currently happening in the world.
At the same time, the prose is very poetic and raw, touching readers and unravelling human nature at its best and absolute worst.
1: Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
This ecocritical novel leans into speculative science fiction, but it very much describes the state of our world a few decades from now. Politicians and the general public did not care and did not do enough about climate change, the destruction and pollution of nature as well as the extinction of species.
In the story, one woman follows some of the last birds across the entire globe to find the very last fish. No one knows where these birds feed, they only know that they feed somewhere far away. But as all oceans are empty due to overfishing, it is a riddle that needs solving.
Will they find nature’s last untouched place? And should humans even find it? It is a realistic and depressing read. It is raw and emotional. It is terrifying and beautiful. It is a story closer to reality than we might think.
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