A sharp, unsettling exploration of beauty, control and the cost of aspiration, New Skin follows Linli as she returns to LA to find her mother, Fanny, transformed by dangerous, underground cosmetic procedures. As Fanny’s obsession with reinvention spirals into a reality-TV spectacle of bodily risk and desire, Wang’s novel delivers a haunting portrait of the American dream turned inside out, where exploitation and identity collide on the surface of the body.

Albert – the host of the Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby! podcast – brings Homer’s epic roaring to life in a vivid retelling of The Odyssey, replete with historical facts, maps, character profiles and striking illustrations. Featuring voyages across the sea, man-eating monsters, witches, gods, and goddesses, Albert’s retelling is a story of trickery and perseverance as Odysseus is tested to the limits by the Cyclops, sirens and lots of meddling, angry gods.

Urgent and eye-opening, this globe-spanning investigation explores how drugs have shifted from criminalised substances to billion-dollar commodities almost overnight. Koram traces the uneven winners and losers of this transformation, from corporate cannabis conferences to frontline activist movements, asking who benefits from “reform” and who gets left behind. The result is a deeply reported account of a system in flux, where justice, profit and harm are increasingly entangled in unsettling ways.

An epic fantasy debut rooted in Yoruba mythology, where power is harnessed from the sun. L’ore is the only one without this power – which she must conceal from everyone on pain of death. When her best friend is condemned to a deadly divine trial, she risks everything to save him – only to awaken forbidden, shadow magic of her own. Richly imagined and propulsive, this is a story of friendship and hidden strength, where the fate of an entire kingdom depends on a prohibited secret land.

Written from prison and awarded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this powerful novel follows Nur, a Palestinian man who assumes an Israeli identity and slips into a world previously closed to him. As he moves between languages, histories and borders, the boundaries of self begin to fracture. Khandaqji crafts a profound meditation on occupation, belonging and the cost of survival, where identity is both disguise and burden, and freedom remains painfully out of reach.