Happy Saturday, I hope you’ve got something nice planned to mark the end of January, which often feels like the longest month of the year. To cheer myself up on a bleak cold afternoon this week, I dodged the rainshowersd to take a look at what’s in the bookshops at the moment now we’ve had the first 2026 releases start to drop.
This is Foyles Charing Cross Road, and the first thing to note her is that Heated Rivalry is right there. The series based on the books has had loads of buzz and now the novels are available here in paperback. They were also in the window at Waterstones just up the street on Tottenham Court Road, but Foyles is clearly ready for the demand because they had them on the shelves and piles of them in the over flow section at the back of the romance section.
Meet the Newmans is also all over the place. It was in both windows, it’s on this the front fiction table at Waterstones and it was on one of the front pillar displays at Foyles. I also spotted it in the Waterstones in Sheffield a couple of weeks ago, so it’s cearly got a big old release. The thing that interested me in Waterstones though was how many books on this table came out this week. These include Chosen Family, which is the next novel from the author of the very buzzy Green Dot, Wants and Needs and The Old Fire. The Ten Year Affair came out on the same day as Meet the Newmans, all of which is to just hammer home how busy January has been for new books after the desert that was December for physical releases.
Apart from Meet the Newmans, the other book whch is all over the place is Jennette McCurdy’s debut novel. You may remember her memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, which was massive a couple of years ago. I read that back in 2024 and it needed all the content warnings and a resilient frame of mind to read, but it was really really powerful. Half His Age is her next project after that, and is about a seventeen year old high school student and her obssession with her creative writing teacher. From all the reviews that I have read it sounds just as unsettling as her memoir was, and I’m not sure I’m in the right headspace (am I ever?) for somethign that’s being described variously as shocking, uncomfortable and eerie, but I’m expecting it to do well.
Here are the Mysteries from Foyle’s front entrance: The Osman is obviously a pre-Christmas release as is the Adam Kay, but the new Marlow Murder Club book is here, as is the latest Tom Hindle. The Don Winslow is also a new release this week – it’s a collection of six short novels, all of which sound very Not For Verity which is also the case for the Darkrooms (another January release), Our Last Resort and What We Left Unsaid, just in different ways!
So lets end on an up note, back where we started with the piles of Heated Rivalry books, waiting for the fans to descend after watching the adaptation! Have a great weekend.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 