Paperbacks to get hyped about

I buy the newspaper every Sunday almost entirely for the culture pages. I’m not ashamed to admit that the main paper goes straight in the wood basket, for later scrunching and use as firelighters. Within the culture pages, I’m mainly in it for the books.

I inch my way through the reviews, noting the ones that sound interesting to me, and I read the author interviews about what they eat for breakfast and the books that inspire them. I love a bit of book hype—it is an important part of the publishing process from conception, to written, to read. It’s what encourages people to buy books. And I’m nothing if not an advocate for people buying books and supporting authors financially.

Hype’s not always real though. At the beginning of every year a publisher will look at their schedule and highlight a small selection of their top-tier books. The ones that will get a £30,000+ marketing budget and be all over social media and in the press for a few months. One would assume that these books have been deemed particularly note worthy by those shepherding them into the world, but sometimes they are not exceptional, they are simply tapping up a trend or have an author attached with a big name. These books come out in hardback—big, bulky and, these days, often touching £20. I read the reviews, I follow the hashtags, I listen to the author interviews on all the books podcasts I’m subscribed to, and (if I can) I resist buying the book. I’m currently desperately trying to resist buying the new Kiley Reid novel.

Firstly, I hate hardbacks. They don’t fit into my idealistic image of what reading is—soft, worn, held aloft in bed or on the beach. They don’t fit in my bag. The dust jacket is annoying. And if the book is long, they are unmanageably big. Like trying to read the top of broadsheet newspaper over a bowl of cornflakes.

But also—they just might not be good. Just because the publisher, a load of book bloggers and the book’s publicist (I am one, I know…) are shouting about them online. Just because Waterstones have ordered a shit tonne of copies and piled them up on the entrance table of all their shops doesn’t mean that they’re actually any good. All of those things are the case because of money, and I’d rather not part with £20 for a hardback that hurts my wrists when I could reach for a paperback that was shortlisted for a load of awards, hailed by critics as a book that will stick around after the marketing budget has dried up, or—even more importantly—has been recommended by those whose taste I trust or reflects my own.

At the beginning of the year I made a list of all the books that caught my eye last year and then stuck around. The books that critics and readers alike are obsessing over, and the ones that flew under the radar but I fortuitously came across via one post on someone’s Instagram stories and noted down.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the paperbacks coming out this year that I, for one, am very excited to finally read—

Wifedom by Anna Funder

On Marriage by Devorah Baum

Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan

Lazy City by Rachel Connelly

A Thread of Violence by Mark O’Connell

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

I Have Some Questions for you by Rebecca Makkai

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

A House for Alice by Diana Evans

Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

The Vegan by Andrew Lipstein

Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo

Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson