There’s something a little mysterious about February – the year is still young, and yet full of possibilities. It’s the perfect time to wander into someone else’s story, explore new voices and let your curiosity roam. This month, Team Service95 is diving into releases that move across continents, generations and forms offering immersive escapes, sharp insights and unsettling reflections along the way. From haunting debuts and cult thrillers to epic family sagas and formally daring works, there’s something here for every kind of reader – and every kind of mood.
The Much-Anticipated Debut 
Qianze has not seen her father since he walked out on the night of her 14th birthday and disappeared without a trace. When he reappears 11 years later, just as suddenly as he left, he isn’t the man Qianze remembers: he is older, more fragile, and haunted by a half-forgotten prophecy. A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing explores the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the brutal Japanese occupation of Manchuria through a magical realist family saga. Expect an unflinching look at the legacy of colonialism and the effects of intergenerational trauma, with beautifully rendered folklore.
The Berlin Epic 
A riotous and raunchy novel about a woman whose search for Romy Haag, David Bowie’s Trans lover, is sidelined when she falls into a deep obsession with an enigmatic, androgynous musician – who is often compared to Bowie. In pursuit of stardom, the pair decamp to Berlin, where glorious, filthy chaos ensues. This book is a salacious romp of breathtaking self-invention and spectacular self-destruction. It’s a story of obsession and excess, doppelgängers and disassociation, fame and fandom, and the terrible things we do to feel loved.
The New Cult Read
A deliciously twisted thriller that blends culinary obsession with moral horror. Ed’s descent from desperate gambler to captive chef is depicted with slick pacing, vivid food writing, and creeping dread. Each course sharpens the tension, turning indulgence into menace and appetite into power. This novel savours excess, class, and complicity... and leaves you squirming.
The Sweeping Multi-Generational Saga
Floodlines opens in 2014 with Nizar, a British Iraqi war journalist living in London, who has recently turned to sex work in an attempt to numb his trauma. It is then the turn of Nizar’s mother, her sisters and his grandmother to tell their stories as they each wrestle with the fallout from decades of war and the horrific rise of the Islamic State in Iraq. Floodlines tackles colonialism, homeland, memory – and the role that art can play in each.
The Shape-Shifting Tapestry of Narratives
This is a formidable, daring work that reclaims history while interrogating the present. Across 59 linked stories, Canisia transforms an instrument of oppression into a prism for resistance, imagination and survival. The writing is razor-sharp, lyrical and politically urgent, moving fluidly between realism, dystopia and myth. Paired with striking visual art, the book is like an incantation. Read it.
