World Book Day is all about celebrating the love of reading, whether that’s bringing new readers to a page-turner that they’ll be sitting up into the small hours of the morning reading or rekindling the love of ‘me-time’ with a good book. I’m a novelist so I know exactly how to spot the best books on the market that will have you switching off the TV in favour of reading.
With work and life feeling more hectic than ever, it’s difficult to carve out time to read. But think beyond the page, audiobooks can be listened to on your commute to work or when you’re doing the dishes.
This list will have you delving into worlds that range from a fictionalised ancient Greece where the characters speak in Dublin accents to the non-fictional, confessional anonymous sexual fantasies collected by Gillian Anderson.
Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell
This Irish debut has taken the book world by storm, and rightly so, it’s incredible. Recently announced as a contender for the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025, this is my favourite to take the prize at the ceremony in June.
On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe.
Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over.
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Another Women’s Prize for Fiction longlistee, The Safekeep is astoundingly brilliant, it is equal parts alluring and harrowing. A phrase I do not use lightly, this book is the definition of ‘unputdownable.’
It’s 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel’s life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season.
An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge.
Butter by Asako Yuzuki
Butter is the cult-classic winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year for 2024. It was everywhere on Bookstagram, with readers eating it up.
The cult Japanese bestseller, translated by Polly Barton, is about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story.
Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.
Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, “The Konkatsu Killer”, Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue
This fire-cracker of a novel has recently gone into production for a T.V. series, so now is the time to pick up a copy so you can say that you ‘read the book first’. It’s totally brilliant, and a sure-fire way to reignite your love of literature.
Everyone in Cork remembers the Rachel Incident. But what really happened? It’s simple. It’s complicated. It’s about love, sex and friendship. It’s definitely about betrayal. And, above all, it’s the story of Rachel and James, two twenty-somethings who met at a bookshop, became best friends, and spent one unforgettable year screwing up and growing up.
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
This ancient Greek reimagining told through a Dublin dialect is truly like no other. Funny and tender, it’s adored by readers and judging panels alike, as it has been awarded the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction while being listed for many more.
Ancient Sicily. Enter GELON: visionary, dreamer, theatre lover. Enter LAMPO: lovesick, jobless, in need of a distraction. Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads.
They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food. And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry.
It’s audacious. It might even be dangerous. But like all the best things in life – love, friendship, art itself – it will reveal the very worst, and the very best, of what humans are capable of.
What could possibly go wrong?
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
Younis is a break-out literary star of 2025. She was selected as one of The Observer’s Best Debut Novelists for 2025, and has since gone on to be longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
When academic Nadia is disowned by her puritanical mother and dumped by her lover, she decides to make a getaway – accepting a UN job in Iraq. Tasked with rehabilitating ISIS women, Nadia becomes mired in the opaque world of international aid, surrounded by bumbling colleagues.
But then Nadia meets Sara, a precocious and sweary East Londoner who joined ISIS at just fifteen, and she is struck by how similar their stories are. Both from a Muslim background, both feisty and opinionated, with a shared love of Dairy Milk and rude pick-up lines, Sara and Nadia immediately connect and a powerful friendship forms. When Sara confesses a secret, Nadia is forced to make a difficult choice.
A bitingly original, wildly funny and razor-sharp exploration of love, family, religion, radicalism, and the decisions we make in pursuit of connection and belonging, Fundamentally upends and explores a defining controversy of our age with heart, complexity and humour.
And if fiction isn’t doing it for you, here are two of the best non-fiction books to get you back into the way of reading.
Want by Gillian Anderson
Want is the book everybody is craving. In this ground-breaking book, Gillian Anderson collects and introduces the anonymous sexual fantasies of women from around the world (along with her own anonymous submission). They are all extraordinary: full of desire, fear, intimacy, shame, satisfaction and, ultimately, liberation.
When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And yet so many of us don’t talk about it at all.
From dreaming about someone off-limits to conjuring a scene with multiple partners, from sex that is gentle and tender to passionate and playful, from women who have never had sex to women who have had more sex than they can remember, these fantasies provide a window into the most secret part of our minds.
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coate
You may have seen the car-crash interview on CBS News, where Coate’s was accosted by presenter Tony Dokoupi, as he compared his book to ‘extremist writings’ for its opinion on Gaza. The interview was met with international backlash. This is an urgent, important book written at a dramatic moment in American and global history, this work from one of our most important writers is about the urgent need to embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
The renowned author returns with a timely book about his journeys to three sites of conflict – Dakar, South Carolina, and Palestine – exploring how the stories we tell, and the ones we don’t, shape our realities.
Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, but soon found himself grappling with deeper questions about the destructive myths that shape our world.
Have you read any of the book recommendations above? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.