Every year my librarian husband and I each decide on our top ten reads of the year. This year’s list (2025) will take us into our eleventh year, so before we announce them I thought I’d look back on my 30 favourites from the past ten years. I usually read 80 – 100 books a year, both fiction and non-fiction, and from my top ten each year I pick my top three, apart from 2016 when apparently I found it too difficult, so I have retrospectively picked three from that group.
Famous and less well-known
Some of these books you’ll no doubt have heard of: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, Lessons by Ian McEwan, but others are likely to be less well known but still deserve your attention: Halibut on the Moon by David Vann, The Hare by Melanie Finn, and Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter.
Fiction and Non-fiction and the rest of the stats
There are four non-fiction books in my list: Dadland, After the Eclipse, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and Maurice and Maralyn. There are 16 female authors and 14 male. The oldest was published in 1947: A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor. One author appears twice: Ian McEwan. There are 14 American authors, 9 British, 2 Canadian, 1 South African, 1 Italian, 1 German, and 1 New Zealand. There two books in translation. And I love them all.
The full list
Click on the year to be taken through to the page where I reviewed the books, to find out why it made my top three that year and what each is about:
This is an edited article that first appeared on my website in 2019.
Archaeology
The titles of my books have always tended to evolve, and my third novel, Bitter Orange was no exception. Usually though, the early Word files are simply called, Book 1 or Book 4, or whichever it is. But this novel had a title from the beginning: Archaeology. I thought it was going to be about people digging things up, literally and metaphorically.
I keep a writing diary and on 22nd April 2016 (the novel was started on 23rd December 2015), I thought that Archaeology was too difficult a word to write. ‘Those three bloody vowels in a row are beginning to annoy me,’ I wrote. And on 30th August of that year, I added, ‘I’m thinking of changing the title to Blood Orange’.
Blood Orange
For the rest of the time I was writing it, the novel was called Blood Orange, and this was what it was called when I sent it to my literary agent, and when it was submitted to my publishers in the UK, the US, and Canada. And they bought it with that name. Blood Orange.
The story is about Frances, a woman who is commissioned to survey the follies in the gardens of an English country house in 1969. There she meets and becomes besotted by Cara and Peter and visits the orangery alongside the house which has (or had at the time of writing) a single blood orange tree, so enormous it has broken through the glass panes. Blood oranges are sweet, and the fruit are ripe at a certain time of year. Three blood oranges are picked from the tree and squeezed to make juice – a point integral to the plot.
Then, in July 2017, after the book was sold, my editor at Penguin told me that the sale of another book, a debut thriller by Harriet Tyce had just been announced in The Bookseller (the UK trade magazine for publishing), and it was also called Blood Orange.
Titles of books, or albums or anything else aren’t copyrighted, but it was quickly agreed that publishing books with the same title around the same time was not a good idea, and Harriet’s had been announced, and mine hadn’t. It was mine that would have to change.
Bitter Orange
Changing a title I’d been happy with for months if not years was a difficult thing to accept. I was angry – at no one in particular – for quite a while.
I had lots of conversations with my editors and agents and lots of suggestions were bounced back and forth. I went through the novel with a highlighter and I wrote lists of word combinations. It was Sarah Lutyens, one of the founders of my literary agents, Lutyens and Rubinstein who came up with Bitter Orange. I think she just emailed it to me one day – two words that sounded perfect together.
Except, that a bitter orange (which is not eaten or juiced, but generally used to make marmalade), is a very different thing to a blood orange. I wrote to Patricia Oliver from Global Orange Groves who had been helping me with orange tree advice for the book. Bitter oranges fruit at different times to blood oranges, and the juice is barely drinkable. Anyone who writes will know that you make what might seem like a simple change in the text: blood to bitter, but the repercussions ripple on and on. If I needed my characters to try to drink the juice, someone needed to realise they needed sugar, then they had to get sugar, which meant someone had to go shopping, which meant someone had to leave the house when I needed them to remain there. I faced lots of niggly revising.
Bitter Orange is better
But once I’d sorted out the changes and had lived with the new title for a while, it seemed more suited than Blood Orange, which I think sounds very thriller-like, and Bitter Orange isn’t a thriller.
By the time the book was published in the UK, in the US, and Canada, I loved the title: Bitter Orange.
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What do you think about the title? Let me know
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Bitter Orange has been published in Germany, US, Canada, Greece, France, Spain, and Russia, and Turkey. It is available as a audio book and has recently been optioned for film.
“Atmospheric, psychologically vivid, and unputdownable” Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam
ARCs and Proofs
ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) and Proofs are the US and UK words for the same thing: a physical or digital version of the book which is sent out to other authors for quotes and blurbs, and to book reviewers, event organisers, and booksellers. This version usually uses the text before the final proofread because of timing, so it often includes typos and sometimes bigger issues in the story, all of which will hopefully be resolved before the hardback is printed.
“I was enthralled, rapt, utterly unable to put this book down. Claire Fuller, a master of psychic suspense, has done it again” Lindsay Hunter, author of Hot Springs Drive
Blurbs and quotes
A blurb is the US term for a quote (the UK term) provided by another author which is usually put on the cover, and sometimes inside the finished version. I get my fair share of proofs sent to me asking for a quote for the cover, and I’m nearly always happy to receive them*, but I don’t always provide a quote, and never if I don’t like the book and don’t finish it.
“Harrowing and tender…the kind of book to clear a weekend for, the kind of resonant nightmare that lingers long after its end” Hayden Casey, author of A Harvest of Furies
Do we need them?
This year (2025) the perennial debate came round again about whether the industry needs blurbs; how time-consuming they are for authors (to read the book and write the blurb), and for editors to ask agents and other editors to ask their authors for blurbs. My UK editor estimated that asking for blurbs takes up 80% of her time!
“An absolute masterpiece. Utter absorbing, genuinely unsettling” Jennie Godfrey author of The List of Suspicious Things
Lots of readers say they never pay attention to blurbs on books, and choose what they’re going to read from reviews or what the book is about. But although blurbs might still be useful to some readers, they are helpful for when the publisher is trying to get a retailer to stock the book and help promote it. Retailers like Waterstones are pitched many many books by publishers’ sales teams or sent catalogues to pick which books they are going to stock, and quotes for these books help guide them. If your book has a quote from Stephen King, say, then they are very likely to take note.
Why I think writers should say yes to ARCs and proofs
Last week I was speaking to an editor at a large publisher and I asked whether one of her high-profile authors might be interested in a proof of Hunger and Thirst. The editor seemed embarrassed to have to tell me that this author has told her editor and agent to never send her any proofs and never ask if she wants any. Although she writes contemporary fiction, she apparently doesn’t read it. The number of books we’re sent can be overwhelming, I get that, and yet that author was a debut once, trying to find her space in the world of publishing with her editor asking already published authors for quotes. I feel there should be more paying-it-forward going on. Afterall, it’s easy to say yes to receiving a proof but adding the disclaimer that they might not have time to read it. Who knows, they might find a gem.
“A gothic chiller — haunting, artful, suspenseful, complex, and cinematic” William Landay, author of All that is Mine I Carry With Me.
*Which proofs I won’t accept
I don’t like receiving unsolicited physical proofs, if someone knows my address; I’d much rather be asked via email first because there are some genres which aren’t for me: most historical fiction, most comic novels, most science fiction and fantasy. I never accept digital proofs because I work on screens enough already. And I don’t accept self-published books.
“Gothic, disturbing, and mesmerisingly well-written, Hunger and Thirst is like nothing I’ve read before” Lucy Atkins, author of Windmill Hill
Netgalley
In the UK book bloggers, booksellers, librarians, and reviewers can request a digital proof of books they’d like to read, including Hunger and Thirst. You can sign up here, but please do note that the vetting of whether you’re accepted or not is up to my publisher.
I’m really excited to share with you the UK cover of Hunger and Thirst, which will be published by Fig Tree, an imprint of Penguin, on 7th May next year. And I’m excited to know what you think of it!
Spot the difference between these two images. Answers below
This is the third part in a series about how my next book, Hunger and Thirst moves through the process of editing to arriving onto bookshop shelves. The first part covered structural and line edits with my UK and US editors at Fig Tree/ Penguin and Tin House / Zando, the second part looked at copyedits and the difference between UK and US editions, and in this part I’m going to look at the US cover. (I’ve seen the UK cover, and it’s very different, but I’m not allowed to officially show it yet.)
Readers ask me a lot about covers: how the process works, how involved I get, whether I get any say; I’ve even been asked whether I design them myself given my art background.
The process starts early with Masie Cochran, my editor at Tin House / Zando asking me to send her any book covers I’ve seen recently that I’ve loved. I don’t know how much these feed into her planning, but I like that it makes me feel like I have some influence! So, I sent her half a dozen, and then a few months later she says she has a cover, and attaches it to an email.
It is the most terrifying moment clicking open on that email. What if I don’t like it? Luckily, that’s never happened with any of my books from Tin House. They’ve all been designed by their in-house Art Director who is now Beth Steidle, and who designed this cover for Hunger and Thirst.
I showed the cover to my husband and I kept opening the email over the course of the next day and I only loved it more. But, I had some very small comments, which I fed back to Masie who passed them to Beth, and then a while later I was sent the revised version.
Did you spot the differences between the two pictures? The one on the left was the first one I was sent and the one on the right is the final cover.
I wasn’t sure about how the sculpture’s right leg lifts up on the left of the cover. It gave her a look of a mermaid, and so Beth removed that.
I wasn’t sure that the flies looked enough like flies, and I wasn’t sure about the fly in the words ‘a novel’. So Beth changed the flies, removed the fly within the words, and put another fly on the sculpture’s arm.
Beth made some changes of her own to the colours and density of the dots etc.
The cover was officially revealed on CrimeReads website, along with an extract from the beginning of the novel (which I edited to make it shorter but still work as a narrative). I also wrote a piece about why this cover works so well for the story:
The main character, Ursula is a reclusive and famous sculptor, and so while the figure on the cover might be one of her carvings, it could also be Ursula herself caught in a moment of turning away from the camera. The first line of the novel mentions a murder and a body, so I love how the red shape on the head implies this might even be the victim. One of the narrative strands is the dares teenagers set each other, and it’s very clever how the fonts bring to mind words scrawled in haste or even graffiti. Another theme is the perception of women’s bodies and in particular body hair, and I love how this striking image picks up on this, not only in the angle of the sculpture to the viewer and the beautiful heft of her, but also how the dots give a subtle indication of hair. And then finally, you see the flies, four of them perched there; an unsettling suggestion that something bad is coming.
Back in 2018 I wrote an article about haunted house novels with a list of books you might like to read. Well, this October, I’m back with my own haunted house short story being published in the anthology Unquiet Guests. Currently, the scariest of my novels is Bitter Orange, but not for long, because my sixth novel, Hunger and Thirst will be published next year. So, you have a few to choose from if you fancy a spooky read, or scroll down for some of my favourite ghostly novels. (Click on the pictures to buy.)
Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford A slippery, fever-dream of a novel. Unsettling, puckish, and brilliantly written, it’s an absolute one-off. A group of young cousins gather at Aunt Frankie’s house in upstate New York. They see something from a window moving from the treeline to a shed and Abi, only three goes outside, and the others follow. There are ‘Intermezzos’ giving some of the history of the family and Beezy the matriarch and how she died. At the end there is some kind of resolution but just enough to leave me thoroughly unsettled. Highly recommended.
The Echoes by Evie Wyld This is so beautifully written, unsettling and vivid. Max is dead but moves through the house where his girlfriend, Hannah and he lived, watching her as she grieves and time leaps on without him. We also learn about Hannah and Max when he was alive, and all the things she kept from him. And then we travel further back to when Hannah lived in Australia and the trauma her family wrought upon her. It returns full circle at the end in a very lovely way.
You Like it Darker by Stephen King Twelve creepy, weird and brilliant short stories. My favourites tended to be the longer ones: Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream (Danny dreams that he discovers a person, murdered and buried behind a gas station, and his dream is true); Rattlesnakes (a man befriends his neighbour – a mad but harmless woman who pushes a stroller around with, supposedly her dead twins in it); and Slide Inn Road (a family take a wrong turn in their car and are apprehended by two men who terrorise them). Plenty here to get your teeth into and keep you up at night.
North Woods by Daniel Mason This is ghost-light. Beginning in the 1760s, lovers flee a community to live in a New Hampshire cabin. And from there we meet the occupants of the property through the ages and even into the future. We meet an apple farmer and his two daughters who die in extraordinary ways; a man hunting for a slave; the doctor of a man with schizophrenia who lives in the house and many more. The most perfect vignettes of human life and the nature that surrounds them and how all histories leach into each other, leaving traces behind. I was sad to say goodbye to every character.
Thin Air by Michelle Paver A brilliantly chilling ‘classic’ ghost story that I loved just as much as Paver’s Dark Matter. Here, five men are climbing Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas in 1935, following in the footsteps of a doomed expedition from 1906. Stephen Pearce joins the group at the last minute as the doctor, and brother of climber, Kit. As the group climb higher, Stephen begins to experience odd apparitions which he, even as the doctor, can’t put down to altitude sickness. If you’re looking for novel in the English ghost-story tradition, this is it, and I loved it. I listened to this via XigXag, excellently read by Daniel Weyman.
Old Soul by Susan Barker Not so much ghosts but plenty of scares. After a chance meeting at an airport between Jake and Marika, they realise their loved ones died in similar and disturbing circumstances, both linked by a mysterious woman. Jake sets out to find other people who have suffered the same way, and as well as a present-day story, we read the testimonies which Jake gathers, gradually leading to the mysterious woman and an even greater force. There are many creepy ideas and moments in this novel which had my skin tingling, and the writing is great. Definitely a book to put on your list if you enjoy literary horror.
Are you looking for a personalised book recommendation? Whether you’re about to go on a trip and want a novel set in that country, or you’d like a book about a road trip, or perhaps a novel about an artist. Whatever you’re looking for, send me a message with as many details as possible and I’ll hopefully answer your request in a future newsletter.
Pre-order Hunger and Thirst from Waterstones today and get 25% off! Offer ends 17th October. Just enter OCTOBER25 at checkout. And you’ll get a sneaky preview of the UK cover, which I’m not officially revealing yet.
The book will land on your doormat in early May 2026, and you won’t pay until it’s dispatched. (And if for some reason the price goes down before then, you’ll pay the lower price.)
Pre-orders help books and authors enormously The more pre-orders, the more likely book shops are to stock Hunger & Thirst, and the more they stock, the more readers will see it and hopefully buy it. I’m hugely grateful for every pre-order.
Hunger and Thirst is about Ursula, who at sixteen accepts a dare from her best friend to kill someone and when she does, she is haunted – literally haunted – for the rest of her life.
I’m delighted to reveal the US cover of Hunger and Thirst which will be published by Tin House, an imprint of Zando, on 2nd June 2026. I love it so much: the boldness of the yellow font, the sculpture (the main character in the book is a sculptor), and the flies… I won’t tell you how the flies come into it; you’ll have to read it find out.
Yesterday, CrimeReads revealed the cover on their website, together with a piece I wrote about why this is the perfect cover – designed by Beth Steidle – for Hunger and Thirst.
They also published an excerpt from the beginning of the book, so if you’d like a taster before you pre-order, you can read it here.
And if you’re in the US here’s a list of places that you can pre-order it from, or of course you local independent bookstore.
For those in the UK and Canada, you’ll have to wait a little longer to see these covers. But let me know what you think of this one!
About the book 1987: After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, sixteen-year-old Ursula finds herself with a new job delivering mail at a local art school, a bed in a halfway house, and—delightfully— some new friends, including wild-child, Sue. When Ursula is invited to join a squat at The Underwood, a mysterious house whose owners met a terrible end, she can’t resist this hodgepodge family. But as Sue’s behavior and demands become more extreme, Ursula who has always been hungry—for food—and more importantly for love, acceptance and belonging, carries out her friend’s terrible dare. And, for this, Ursula finds herself literally haunted.
Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned, reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London when her identity is exposed by true-crime documentary-maker, Emma Zahini who is digging into an unsolved disappearance. But it is not only the filmmaker who has discovered Ursula’s whereabouts, and as her past catches up with her present, Ursula must work out whether the monsters are within her or without.
I have only lived in two places that were difficult to inhabit but both are still very vivid. The first was when I was six, and my family lived in a static caravan (or trailer in the US) for six months. I can’t claim that we were living there because of any kind of hardship, but I clearly remember the ice on the insides of the windows in the mornings, having to wash at the sink with freezing water, and a very particular smell of damp cardboard walls. The second place was a squat when I was an art student. Living there was my choice, although money was tight. This house was damp too: a 1950s bungalow with no central heating and single-pane windows. It sat in the middle of an overgrown garden, isolated, despite being near the centre of town. One of my clearest memories from that time is being told about how one night before I arrived someone outside – an unidentified stranger – moved around the perimeter of the house tapping on each of the windows in the dark.*
I am still drawn to places that don’t welcome humans; places where people have once lived and now have left. I am curious about the objects they leave behind, and the bare minimum a person needs in order to make a house a home. Or, sometimes, the maximum.
In my fourth novel, Unsettled Ground, the main characters Jeanie and Julius live in what might appear to be an idyllic home: an English thatched cottage. But the reality is very different to the vision. There are mice in the thatch and holes in the ceilings which let the rain in. When Jeanie’s and Julius’s electricity goes off they have to use oil lamps and candles, and cook on an old range. They have no central heating and an outside toilet. And the next place they try to make home is a dilapidated caravan on a piece of wasteland. But they are resourceful people and make the best of what they’ve got.
What about you? What kind of place could you tolerate if you had to? Could you make a home out of other people’s junk? Could you live in an office?
Here are seven novels I love with houses that most of us might consider uninhabitable:
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Cassandra lives in a crumbling castle with her father, sister and stepmother. At some times of the day, especially in a dusky kind of afternoon light when it can’t be seen properly, the castle appears romantic and beautiful. But in her diary Cassandra wittily records the reality of the place: the icy draughts, how her father has sold off most of the furniture, the smelly, muddy moat and how she has to take a hot brick to bed so as to keep warm at night.
The Paper House by Carlos Maria Dominguez, translated by Nick Caistor
A Cambridge academic is killed by a car while walking and reading Emily Dickinson. Her successor receives a book intended for his late colleague which is covered in cement, and intrigued, he travels to Uruguay and eventually to a remote and desolate beach. There he finds a ruined house made of books. Whose crazy idea was that, anyway? “What remained of the walls were bowed, jagged fragments, and in among the clumps of cement, tiny seashells, and dark lichens, I could make out pages of books baked in the sun then soaked, glued together like cuttlefish beaks, the type bleached and illegible.”
Burning Bright by Ron Rash
In this book of a dozen short stories, there’s just one with a house I wouldn’t want to live in, but a year after reading it, the place is still in my head. In Back of Beyond, Parson a pawnbroker, goes out to his brother’s place because he knows that his nephew, Danny, has been selling stolen items to fund his meths habit. But it’s not until Parson gets there that he discovers his brother and sister-in-law huddling in a freezing trailer and Danny living in the family home: “The room had been stripped of anything that could be sold, the only furnishing left a couch pulled up by the fireplace. Even wallpaper had been torn off a wall. The odour of meth infiltrated everything, coated the walls and floor.”
Resin by Ane Riel translated by Charlotte Barslund
Jens Horder is literally a hoarder – his house and outside yard is filled with stuff, so that it is almost impossible to move safely between the piles. Jens reports to the authorities that his six-year-old daughter, Liv is missing presumed dead, even while he knows she is hiding in a container in his yard. Liv sometimes goes inside the house to visit her bed-bound mother who has also become part of the junk and mess: “Shiny blue-green flies buzzed around open cans. Faded butterflies bashed their brown wings against the windowpanes somewhere behind all the stuff…. Small mice and much bigger mice with very long tails. Something was always scratching, grunting or squeaking somewhere. At times it would be Mum.”
Severance by Ling Ma
After a virus wipes out much of the world’s population, Candace, alone in New York but feeling she should still go to work, moves into her company’s office on the 31st floor of a skyscraper. She takes food from the employee’s vending machine and smashes her way into her boss’s office to sleep on his Mies van der Rohe sofa. It almost sounds idyllic: she sees a horse trot down Broadway and the stars in the night sky for the first time … if it weren’t of course for the plague and being all alone.
Stig of the Dump by Clive King
One day at the end of his grandmother’s garden, Barney falls into a disused chalk pit where he meets Stig, a caveman. Stig, well ahead of his time (this children’s novel was first published in 1963) reuses old junk to make his ‘cave’ house. “There were stones and bones, fossils and bottles, skins and tins, stacks of sticks and hanks of string.” Stig of the Dump is one of my earliest memories of owning a book, and I still have a copy.
Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese
Sixteen-year-old Franklin doesn’t really know his father Eldon, but when he is called to visit the dying man, and ultimately help him make a final journey to the backcountry, he goes. Eldon is living in the most evocatively described flophouse. “Clothes had been flung and were scattered every which way along with empty fast-food boxes and old newspapers… the hot plate was crusted with grease and dribbles, and a coffee can overflowed with butts and ashes and a few jelly jars stuffed full of the same.” A place not even Eldon wants to die in.
* This story became one of the inspirations for my sixth novel, Hunger and Thirst (which features this bungalow, uninhabitable for reasons you’ll have to read the book to find out) which will be published in the US in June 2026, and in the UK in May. Both available to pre-order now.
Calling all readers in Bath and beyond! On 7th October I’ll be at Mr B’s Emporium to interview Andrev Walden, the author of Bloody Awful In Different Ways. I loved this book.
This is what I had to say about it when I first read it:
Bloody Awful in Different Ways by Andrev Walden is so good. It’s already on my top ten reads of the year and I can’t imagine it getting bumped. Starting in 1983 seven-year-old Andrev has seven ‘dads’ in seven years, beginning with the one he thought was his biological father who turns out not to be, we meet all of the men that Andrev’s mother dates or moves in with, or move in with her. None of them seem to want Andrev or his half-siblings around. There is domestic violence but there is also humour, and my goodness Andrev Walden (an acclaimed Swedish journalist) can write. Andrev has told me on Instagram that even though it’s called a novel, it’s ‘a very true story’, and it certainly reads like one. Translated from Swedish by Ian Giles. Darkly funny, and comically tragic. An absolute gem. I loved it. Highly recommended.
This is what Mr B’s Emporium has to say:
Already a phenomenal international bestseller with a film adaptation in the works, Bloody Awful in Different Ways won the the 2023 August Prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award. This vivid and joyful novel follows a young boy who has seven fathers in seven years, and has already been loved by our bookseller Sue, who describes it as ‘poignant, funny and bloody brilliant in every way.’
And a bit about Andrev:
Andrev Walden is an acclaimed Swedish journalist and columnist who has worked for Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet. In 2017, he became the first columnist to be nominated for the Swedish Grand Prize for journalism, praised for his ability to ‘find the everyday drama in the big questions’, and to make us ‘laugh and see the world, the family and ourselves in a new and slightly wiser light’. He lives in Stockholm.
orange tree, so enormous it has broken through the glass panes. Blood oranges are sweet, and the fruit are ripe at a certain time of year. Three blood oranges are picked from the tree and squeezed to make juice – a point integral to the plot.
me one day – two words that sounded perfect together.
