Books to Look Out For in July 2026: Part One

With much of new fiction aimed at the holiday reading market, July’s often a patchy month for me but not so this year beginning with a novel by an author whose debut I loved. Chloé Ashby’s Family Friends is set over a fortnight in a crumbling chateau where two couples have holidayed for almost two decades. It’s been a difficult year for some, with secrets kept by others, setting us up nicely for some simmering tensions. Revelations are made, secrets divulged, relationships strained, none of it helped by the sweltering heat which keeps them indoors and in each other’s hair. I enjoyed this story of early midlife but found it a little disappointing after the freshness of Wet Paint. Review soon…

Alex Hyde’s Exhibition follows photographer Rabble Stone who rents a room in an artist’s Brixton home, immersing herself in a world of gallery openings and seedy glamour. As she becomes obsessed with the artist, not least her intimate self-portraits, capturing them in her own work, Rabble seems in danger of losing herself and her grip on reality. ‘Travelling from London to Algiers, to Berlin and New York, Exhibition is a story of love, ego and destruction, and the dark relationship between authenticity and celebrity, artist and muse’ according to the blurb which sounds right up my street.

Opening in Berlin just as Hitler’s rise has begun, art historian Rebecca Birrell’s Venus Vanishing, follows Hannah Sherman, determined to become an artist rather than marry into a life of domestic drudgery. Using her sewing skills to pay her rent, Hannah establishes a life for herself: mornings sketching at the museum; an hour in Saul’s bed; nights visiting Berlin’s clubs leading to an affair with Charlotte, a brilliant dancer. As she falls under her patron’s spell, she’s asked to practice an uncomfortable deception and discovers her work is being used in ways she would never have countenanced. Full of evocative descriptions, Birrell’s debut is a gorgeous, immersive novel which wears its meticulous research lightly. Review shortly…

Andrew Cunning’s debut, Clara and Christina, instantly appealed with its premise of a friendship which grows between a young academic and the author whose first novel entranced her when she was a first-year undergraduate. Christina is in her seventies, a reclusive who has, surprisingly, agreed to be interviewed for Clara’s monograph. They meet over several months at a coffee shop on Sunday mornings. Conversation flows well, Christina’s discursive replies to Clara’s questions rarely answer them, leading instead to wide and far-ranging debate. I loved this quiet literary treat of a novel which came out of Cunning’s own work on Marilynne Robinson who allowed him a rare interview. Review to come…

In Amit Chaudhuri’s Château Rouge, a writer is invited to Paris but finds that where he’s living doesn’t match the ideas he had of this much fabled city. As time passes, he realises that there are ways to see it other than through a romantic lens. Chaudhuri’s brief novel ‘takes its time, exploring tangents, diversions, side-streets, creeping into new spaces and remote angles, to open up fresh ground and appraise the city, the experience of travel, otherness – and the novel itself – anew’ according to the blurb. I’m not sure about that but having visited Paris recently I suspect I’ll read it.

Set over five months, Lucia Odoom’s Cosmos is an epistolary novella in which the eponymous Ghanian refugee living in Copenhagen writes to those he left behind about his new life. Sleeping in the city’s parks, Cosmos is a bottle collector who falls in love with Elizabeth, and she with him, changing his view of home and its significance for him. ‘Cosmos questions what it means to belong to a person, as much as to a place – it is a deeply moving story of diaspora and the invisible lives we pass every day, lives reduced to something temporary, precarious, abstract, painting a confronting and rich portrait of both love and loss in the margins’ says the blog making me want to read it.

That’s it for July’s first batch of new fiction. As ever, a click on a title will take you to a more detailed synopsis for any that take you fancy. Part two soon…