The poet Sam Riviere introduces his debut novel, Dead Souls, about poets, plagiarism, love, technology, feuds and affairs, cancellation and revenge, and how writing really does alter reality. It follows the course of a single night, most of which is spent in the bar at the Travelodge just off Waterloo Bridge. There the unnamed narrator meets Solomon Wiese, a poet who has been ostracized by the community but plans to return to the capital through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social media accounts – plans in which the narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated.

Acts of Desperation is a darkly funny debut novel by Megan Nolan, about a toxic relationship and secret female desire: "He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. None of it mattered in the end; what he looked like, who he was, the things he would do to me. To make a beautiful man love and live with me had seemed – obviously, intuitively – the entire point of life...How could it be true that a woman like me could need a man's love to feel like a person, to feel that I was worthy of life? And what would happen when I finally wore him down and took it?"