Read This: Books under the Radar is a weekly post written by a guest author – often a friend of mine, someone I’ve met on my writerly travels, or an author I admire – who recommends three books they think deserve more recognition. If you’re interested in buying any of the books, please click on the covers and give these hidden gems some love. You can see the full list of books which have been selected, as well as the author’s latest book on Bookshop.org, where you can have a browse and buy any that take your fancy. Happy reading!

Read This: Cate Baum

Cate Baum and I met a few times in person when I mentored her for her first (unpublished) novel which she wrote on her Creative Writing MA course – and I loved it. Land of Hope is the novel that got her an agent and a publishing deal (which I’m very much looking forward to) it will be published in May 2025, and is available to pre-order now. Here’s what she has to say about herself:

Cate Baum was born in Cambridge to a magician and a big band singer. She grew up in the East Anglian countryside, spending summers roaming the wilds of the UK. She attended UCLA to study Screenwriting, and then City University, London, gaining a Masters with Distinction in Creative Writing. There, she was mentored by Claire Fuller (The Memory of Animals), Clare Allan (Poppy Shakespeare) and Jonathan Myerson (Nuremberg). She now lives in Spain. Her debut novel, Land of Hope, will be published in 2025.

Find her on Instagram @catebaumwriter

Read on to find out which three books Cate recommends.

Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam

LAMB rides the line between tenderness and horror. A woman, Tommie, remembers being abducted by a man, Lamb, at 11. It’s as horribly intricate as Lolita, as Lamb understands his predilections but justifies his actions, believing destiny lies with Tommie. How is this book romantic? It manages, using the characters’ projections of their dreams as justification, shame, guilt. When I wrote my novel, there was difficult research. I was writing about men who hunt children, women who help them. It must be beautiful and engrossing; the reader must feel sympathy for the predator. Nadzam frames this as a story about trauma, exploring the obscene idea of romance between the characters, hiding the truth inside shared moments. It’s a feat to pull off. The language is exquisite, written with an eye to fairy stories and princesses being rescued, but of course, he’s abusing her. It’s a masterclass in how to tread that line keeping the reader engrossed until the last words. And then it kicks so hard. You question what you’ve just read, your complicity. It’s a special book that nobody I know has read. It’s in the guts of how we live now, in the thick of the trauma of women. 

Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

We know Atwood for The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace. Her second novel, set in the Canadian wilds was written at a time when Canada had a surge of nationalism. It’s raw, she’s finding her voice. And it’s spectacular. A woman who grew up in nature moves to the city. But when her father goes missing, she knows she’s the one to find him, arriving to the rundown family cabin with her flighty boyfriend and a snobby couple who want to make an ‘art film’ in the wild. The story is as expected: the boyfriend’s annoying, the friends hate everything, soon abandoning her. She goes out in her canoe to track her father, discovering an entity in the trees she calls the beast spirit. What follows is a psychedelic journey into the land’s sentience, a transformation. It’s a strange, dark book. I’ll compare it to White Tears by Hari Kunzru, where the fabric collapses into the mind of the character and the spirit of the blues legend he seeks, becoming more alive than the writing itself. This idea of the land as all-knowing is very much a theme in my novel.

The Theoretical Foot

This book is messy, arrogant, and written with carelessness. MFK Fisher has the devil-may-care of Patricia Highsmith or Shirley Jackson. A renowned Californian food writer, Fisher’s carnal descriptions were legendary, and here, it’s a fiction of young rich Americans lounging in Switzerland eating like pigs and being careless between wars, with the pious Lucy aghast at the sheer hedonism – and the trauma of young men returning from war. Fisher dares to dream. In her previous book, How To Cook a Wolf, we’ve a fantasy recipe: how far can we go with imagination and food? With boundaries of pleasure? With chapters, “How to Make a Pigeon Cry,” “How to Lure a Wolf”, and “How to Have a Sleek Pelt”, it’s bonkers. Here, characters cook ridiculous sauces, waste huge amounts of food. But Fisher isn’t Lucy. She unapologetically loves the decadence. It’s autofiction before it existed. Fisher’s lover lost his foot in the war and still felt it every day. After staying in Switzerland, he killed himself. Hence the title. The prose is hit and miss, but glorious. It doesn’t adhere to the norms of women’s writing at the time.

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I haven’t read any of these, but they all sound interesting. Any of these three catch your eye? And if you’d like to be told about future Read This recommendations, you can follow me on Instagram, or subscribe to my newsletter.

More Read This: Books Under the Radar

Lou Morrish author of Women of War
Francesca Ramsay author of Pinch Me
Sarah Leipciger author of Moon Road
Tim Chapman university librarian
Juliet West author of The Faithful
Lindsay Hunter author of Hot Springs Drive
Gina Chung author of Sea Change
Susmita Bhattacharya author of Table Manners
Vanessa Harbour author of Safe
Freya North author of The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne
Judith Heneghan author of Birdeye
Clare Mackintosh author of I Promise it won’t always Hurt like This
Barney Norris author of Undercurrent
Jo Leevers author of The Last Time I saw You
Alice Winn author of In Memmoriam
Anna Mazzola author of The House of Secrets
Alice Peterson author of The Saturday Place
Jenna Smith bookblogger
Lucy Atkins author of Windmill Hill
LV Matthews author of To Love a Liar
Jo Furniss author of Dead Mile
Ruth Thomas author of The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line
Clare Pollard author of The Modern Fairies
Nina Stibbe author of Went to London, Took the Dog
Nassaibah Younis author of Fundamentally
Cara Hunter author of Making a Killing
Leena Norms author of Half-Arse Human
Cate Baum author of Land of Hope