Right now we have an exclusive online offer on a select range of popular fiction titles! Buy any title from our fiction favourites collection, use the code 25OFF at checkout and receive a 25% discount on the eligible titles. This offer runs online only until 31 March, on select in-stock items only, while stocks last. This offer is not available in shops.

Find some of our staff’s recommendations below or discover the full selection here.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

This is a heady literary novel, full of stunning language you can immerse yourself in. Vuong is a poet and his words have action: they hit you in the gut on one page, and on another they settle like a dense quiet fog around you. At times I struggled with the thread of the story, resisting the weight of Vuong’s insistent poetic imagery. Other times, I felt like Vuong was Apollo, each sentence an arrow shot from his bow, glittering across the sky as they arch their way along a graceful parabolic curve, before disappearing across the horizon - each one taking my breath away. If you love language and you want to read something that feels new and fresh, pick this one up.

– Jackie Tang, editor of Readings Monthly

A Couple of Things Before the End: Stories by Sean O'Beirne

With a master satirist’s hand, O’Beirne exposes the failings of our perceived values of mateship, luck, and egalitarianism, writing of this land of latent homophobia and class privilege, with its strange and violent colonial traditions, and the contracting grip of a reactionary right wing. One of the key organising tropes of this collection is how we communicate with each other, and the ways in which these modes themselves impact on what we can or do say to each other … O’Beirne’s writing is precise, but also incredibly fluid and reflexive – folding itself around each of its subjects so effectively, that at times it feels like nonfiction.

– Alison Huber, head book buyer

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Set in an idyllic retirement community (formerly a nunnery, because of course it was), Richard Osman’s debut novel features an unlikely team of octogenarian super sleuths with a penchant for solving cold cases.

When a real life murder case lands in their laps they take it upon themselves to apply their very specific set of skills (many to do with being underestimated as an elderly person, having a lifetime of favours to call in, and decades-worth of experience) to solving the case. This is Cozy Crime with a capital C, and it’s absolutely charming, unexpectedly witty, and engaging as hell.

– Lian Hingee, social media manager

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

An artist who no longer makes art, she’s home every day and night with her two-year-old son, while her husband is away at work for most of the week, every week. She feels detached from old friends and at odds with the other mothers she sees ‘coping’ around her. Pushed to the limit physically and emotionally, her body, which has already undergone a massive transformation, begins another one…

Yoder’s highly inventive premise allows her narrative to travel in some weird, wild directions but it’s always grounded in something that’s honest and true, if frequently unspoken in the world. [A], bloody fairy tale of modern motherhood…

– Joanna Di Mattia, bookseller at Readings Carlton

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Within the first few pages of Swing Time I was affected, again, by Zadie Smith’s ability to make universal truths personal. The story is a complete portrait of our time – our complex relationships with social media, parents, race, politics and motivations are all exposed … Told by an unnamed narrator, a female of Jamaican decent, the story centres on the complicated friendship of two women throughout their childhood and middle age in the housing estates of London. By dividing the fortunes of these two women, Smith has been able to define a generation that is left bereft and wanting.

- Chris Gordon, programming and events manager