Paperbacks to Look Out For in June 2026 Part One

June’s paperback preview begins with one I was sure would appear on the Women’s Prize for Fiction list. Set during Italy’s Years of Lead, marked by violent clashes between the extreme Left and Right, Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book follows Nicholas who’s fled London for Venice. After a chance encounter with costume and set designer, Danilo Donati, he finds himself working first on Fellini’s Casanova, then Pasolini’s Salò. When Casanova resumes, Danilo and Nicholas return to Rome where the delight of finishing the film is interrupted by news of Pasolini’s murder. A beautifully executed novel of ideas as well as an homage to Italian cinema which sounds a loud warning about our own times.

Nicola Barker’s TonyInterruptor explores the fallout from a question shouted from the audience at a jazz gig which goes viral. The interruption is inadvertently filmed by sixteen-year-old India who posts it on her Instagram, thrilled by the number of likes and followers it attracts. Alerted to this in the backroom postmortem after the gig, Sasha Keyes lets forth a diatribe, covertly filmed and posted by a band member. The usual hysteria, hateful comments and brief social media fame ensue sending fault lines through the lives of those involved. Barker smartly skewers artistic and intellectual pretensions while making her readers laugh and wince in recognition.

Natasha Brown’s debut, Assembly, was one of my books of 2021: a brief, powerful novella about a young woman of colour reassessing her place in the world. Her new one, Universality, sees a journalist solve a mystery surrounding the bludgeoning of a man on a Yorkshire farm with a solid gold bar, a solution which throws up more questions than it answers. ‘Universality is a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power. Through a voyeuristic lens, it focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean’ says the blurb promisingly. Annabel also had high expectations for this one. You can read her review here.

Inspired by real events, Heather Clark’s The Scrapbook opens in Harvard in 1996 where Anna meets and falls in love with a German student just before graduation. Visiting Christoph at his home in Germany, she tries to understand him and his country still dealing with its part in the Second World War and the horror of the Holocaust. While longing to believe in the future he promises, Anna becomes increasingly unsettled by the implications of that history. Very much like the sound of that.

I’m not at all sure about Austin Taylor’s Notes on Infinity, included because of its comparisons with Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow about which I was also highly sceptical but loved. It follows Zoe and Jack who meet at Harvard, forming a start-up which proves highly successful within two years of graduation. Their partnership, both professional and personal, seems unstoppable until an accusation is made which threatens to ruin all they’ve achieved.  ‘A captivating, deeply poignant novel about ambition, deceit, the recklessness that comes with early success and the way that love can make us feel invincible’ according to the blurb. We’ll see.

I’m in two minds about Virginia Evans’s Women’s Prize for Fiction longlisted The Correspondent too, but I do like an epistolary novel. It follows seventy-three-year-old Sybil who’s sat down every morning for thirty years to write letters to all manner of people, from her brother to her favourite authors. It’s a tactic she’s used to keep herself at a distance, and it’s worked until she begins to receive letters which prompt her to examine a past she’s been trying to escape. ‘Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be ‘a very small thing’, but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read’ says the blurb confidently.

Rowe Irvin’s Life Cycle of a Moth didn’t initially appeal, either, and I can’t now remember whose blog made me change my mind. It follows Maya and Daughter who live in an isolated forest, their routines and rituals matching the season. When Daughter is almost sixteen, a stranger appears unsettling their cloistered existence. ‘Where there was always two, suddenly there are three – and the carefully constructed world that Maya has built to keep her daughter safe may not survive it’ according to the blurb. Still unsure but whoever’s review I read persuaded me to give it a try.

That’s it for the first batch of June’s paperbacks. A click on a title will take you either to my review or to a more detailed synopsis should you want to know more. If you’d like to catch up with new fiction, it’s here and here.