Huge Book Haul 📙💟 (20+ Fiction Books from Various Genres)

I seriously think that I have a problem; I can't control myself when I go to a bookstore. I'm hoping that this is the last book haul for a while because my bookcase is screaming with all my unread books. But don't worry because all the new additions to my bookshelf that you will see below were gathered over the course of a few months, not in one visit. Are you ready to discover some books I just couldn't resist?

Classics

1. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814)

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results. 

The different and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her. 

2. Emma by Jane Austen (1815)

Although convinced that she herself will never marry, Emma Woodhouse, a precocious twenty-year-old resident of the village of Highbury, imagines herself to be naturally gifted in conjuring love matches. After self-declared success at matchmaking between her governess and Mr. Weston, a village widower, Emma takes it upon herself to find an eligible match for her new friend, Harriet Smith. Her misplaced confidence in her abilities occasions several romantic misadventures. 

3. Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817)

What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time of the Napoleonic wars, a time of accident, adventure, the making of new fortunes and alliances. 

A woman of no importance, she manoeuvres in her restricted circumstances as her long-time love Captain Wentworth did in the wars. Even though she is nearly thirty, well past the sell-by bloom of youth, Austen makes her win out for herself, and for others like herself, in a regenerated society. 

4. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)

When an inexperienced governess goes to work at a country house to look after a young brother and sister, all manner of strange events begin to occur. The governess spots a ghostly man and woman around the grounds and it soon becomes clear that the children are inexplicably connected to these ghosts in some ways. The young governess struggles to protect the children, although from exactly what, she is not sure. Revered as one of the greatest ghost stories ever told, The Turn of the Screw is an eerie and unsettling Victorian masterpiece that explores the psychological and sexual fears of an era. 

Thrillers / Mystery

5. Into the Water by Paula Hawkins (2017)

Just days before her sister  plunged to her death, Jules ignored her call.

Now Nel is dead. They say she jumped. And Jules must return to her sister's house to care for her daughter, and to face the mystery of Nel's death. 

But Jules is afraid. Of her long-buried memories, of the old Mill House, of this small town that is drowning in secrecy...

And of knowing that Nel would never have jumped. 

6. His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

The year is 1869. A brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae. 

A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but it falls to the country's finest legal and psychiatric minds to uncover what drove him to commit such merciless acts of violence. 

Was he mad? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between Macrae and the gallows. 

Graeme Macrae Burnet tells an irresistible and original story about the provisional nature of truth, even when the facts seem clear. His Bloody Project is a mesmerising literary thriller set in an unforgiving landscape where the exercise of power is arbitrary. 

7. The Good People by Hannah Kent (2016)

It all begins with rumours: stories of unexplained misfortunes. Nora, mourning the deaths of her husband and daughter, knows the whispers are about her grandson. Four-year-old Michael can no longer speak or walk, and people are saying that he is a changeling, bringing bad luck to the valley.

In desperation Nora begs the help of two others, Mary and Nance. Together, the women will do anything to cure the little boy, but as their world of folklore and ritual tightens around them, it threatens to blur the line between mercy and murder...

Dark Academia

8. If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio (2017)

Oliver Marks has just served ten years for a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day of his release, he is greeted by the detective who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, and he wants to know what really happened a decade before. 

As a young actor at an elite conservatory, Oliver noticed that his talented classmates seem to play the same characters onstage and off —villain, hero, temptress— though he was always a supporting role. But when the teachers change the casting, a good-natured rivalry turns ugly, and the plays spill dangerously over the real life. 

When tragedy strikes, one of the seven friends is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless...

9. Bunny by Mona Awad (2019)

Samantha Heather Mackey is an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA programme at Warren University. In fact, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort —a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other 'Bunny'. But then the Bunnies issue her with an invitation and Samantha finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door, across the threshold, and down their rabbit hole. 

Blending sharp satire with fairytale horror, Bunny is a spellbinding trip of a novel from one of fiction's most original voices. 

10. The Idiot by Elif Batuman (2017)

Selin turns up at Harvard and finds herself dangerously overwhelmed by the challenges and possibilities of adulthood. How does she find friends? How will she fall in love? How does she deal with how difficult it is to be a failed writer, and how baffling love is? 

At once clever and clueless, Batuman's heroine shows us with perfect hilarity and soulful inquisitiveness just how messy it can be to forge a self. 

Romance

11. Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson (2021)

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists —he a photographer, she a dancer— trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. 

At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity. Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that seems you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years. 

12. The Prophets by Robert Jones, JR. (2021)

A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence. 

Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. 

But when a fellow slave seeks to gain favour by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the slaves begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel's love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation's harmony. 

13. Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (2021)

Alex Claremont-Diaz is handsome, charismatic, a genius —pure millennial— marketing gold for the White House ever since his mother first became President of the United States. There's only one problem. When the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an altercation between Alex and Prince Henry, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse. 

Heads of family and state devise a plan for damage control: stage a truce. But what begins as a fake, Instagrammable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon they are hurtling into a secret romance that could derail the presidential campaign and upend two nations. 

14. The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood (2021)

As a third-year PhD candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships but her best friend does, and that's what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is on her way to a happily ever after was always going to be tough; scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting woman, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees. 

That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when he agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire and Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support (and his unyielding abs), their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. 

Olive soon discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope. 

Young Adult 

15. Better than the Movies by Lynn Painter (2021)

Liz Buxbaum has always known that Wes Bennett was not boyfriend material. You would think that her next-door neighbour would be a prime candidate for her romantic comedy fantasies, but Wes has only proven himself to be a pain in the butt, ever since they were little. Wes was the kid who put a frog in her Barbie Dreamhouse, the monster who hid a lawn gnome's severed head in her little homemade neighbourhood book exchange. 

Flash forward ten years from the Great Gnome Decapitation. It's Liz's senior year, a time meant to be rife with milestones perfect for any big screen, and she needs Wes's help. See, Liz's forever crush, Michael, has just moved back to town, and —horribly, annoyingly— he's hitting it off with Wes. Meaning that if Liz wants Michael to finally notice her, and hopefully  be her prom date, she needs Wes. He's her in. 

But as Liz and Wes scheme to get Liz her magical prom moment, she's shocked to discover that she actually likes being around Wes. And as they continue to grow closer, she must reexamine everything she thought she knew about love —and rethink her own perception of what Happily Ever After should really look like. 

16. Solitaire by Alice Oseman (2014)

My name is Tori Spring. I like to sleep and I like to blog. Last year I had friends. Things were very different, I guess, but that's all over now. 

Now there's Solitaire. And Michael Holden. 

I don't know what Solitaire are trying to do. And I don't care about Michael Holden. I really don't. 

17. Heartstopper by Alice Oseman (2018)

Charlie and Nick are at the same school, but they've never met... until one day when they're made to sit together. They quickly become friends, and soon Charlie is falling hard for Nick, even though he doesn't think he has a chance. 

But love works in surprising ways, and Nick is more interested in Charlie than either of them realised. 

*I've pre-ordered Volume 5 😁

18. Radio Silence by Alice Oseman (2016)

Frances is a study machine with one goal. Nothing will stand in her way —not friends, not a guilty secret, not even the person she is on the inside. Then she meets Aled, and for the first time she's unafraid to be herself. 

So when the fragile trust between them is broken Frances is caught between who she was and who she longs to be. Now she knows that she has to confront her past. To confess why Carys disappeared...

Frances is going to need every bit of courage she has. 

19. I Was Born for This by Alice Oseman (2018)

For Angel, life is about one thing: The Ark —a pop-rock trio of teenage boys taking the world by storm. Being part of The Ark's fandom has given her everything she loves —her friend Juliet, her dreams, her place in the world. 

Jimmy owes everything to The Ark. He's their frontman —and playing in a band with his mates is all he ever dreamed of doing. 

But dreams don't always turn out the way you think, and when Jimmy and Angel are unexpectedly thrust together they find out how strange and surprising facing up to reality can be. 

20. Loveless by Alice Oseman (2020)

Georgia has never been in love, never kissed anyone, never even had a crush —but, as a fanfic—obsessed romantic, she's sure she'll find her person one day. 

As she starts university, Georgia makes a plan to find love. But when her actions wreak havoc among her friends she questions why romance seems so easy for other people yet not for her. With new terms thrown at her —asexual, aromantic— Georgia is more uncertain about her feelings than ever. 

Is she destined to remain loveless? Or has she been looking for the wrong things all along? 

Anthology

21. Earth 2.0 (2023)

The Earth is heating up. Natural disasters loom on every horizon. The spectre of extinction is ever present. Is this the end or is there hope? 

Twenty-six diverse authors from around the globe attempted to answer this question in Earth 2.0, the UK's finest collection of environmental themed short-fiction. 

💸

So, you've reached the end of this long book haul. Please don't hesitate to share your thoughts (no spoilers though!) if you have read any of the books above.