Last year marked the arrival of a new ‘dark academia’ novel set in St Andrews: When We Were Killers  by C. F. Barrington. The novel found a home in bookshop window displays for months, and was even named Waterstones’ Scottish Book of the Month in May 2025. When We Were Killers  certainly received a positive marketing push, but is it actually worth your time? Window display in Topping and Company, (January 2026) The novel’s protagonist is Finn Nethercott, an ‘outcast’ first-ye

Diaries of a Dead Man by second-year student Eva Lewis is a novella exploring the importance of memories and identification with the past. Using the setting of 1960s America, Lewis discusses topics such as queerness, regret, and suffering. Charlie, who is struggling with onset dementia, is writing to his daughter about his past with a hope of preserving his memories. His writings quickly become a confession of his past and a farewell to both the present and his memories. All

Credit: Penguin Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy, simply put, is an account of the author’s relationship with her mother. What it also is, is an exercise in perspective. Fraught with tension, it is a retelling I devoured in a single sitting. Its narrative is fairly chronological, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. But what truly sets it apart from the saturated field of autobiographies and memoirs is Roy’s style. Often, it reads like a novel; sometimes, it re