What we've been reading: January 2026

Welcome to our monthly reading-round-up for January 2026.

This is the place where we gather highlights from what the Lighthouse team have been reading each month. You can check out round-ups from previous months and years amongst our book lists.

January is always a quiet month for us - time to get bookseller admin done, give elaborate book recommendations to our customers and catch up will all the reading we didn't get round to during the holiday period. We have been a little lax with sharing what we've been reading with you in the last few months of 2025, but we must start the new year with renewed energy, and so...this is what we read in January!

Christina

• Content by Elias Hitschl (not available in translation yet, boo!) I loved Elias Hirschl's Salonfähig (also not translated yet) and so I was excited to read this book set in a content farm in a post-mining community where the ground is caving in on itself. It is beautiful and funny and smart and I enjoyed it!
• Middlemarch by George Eliot. I'm in a Middlemarch book club and we read part 3 in January! It was super fast-paced, had disastrous horse-based investments, KISSES, and razor-sharp observation. I'm looking forward to reading part 4 in February.

Pao

• Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino - Gorgeous, gentle musings of life as an alien. Great (unintentional) asexual rep.
• Determination by Tawseef Khan - An immigration lawyer navigates the system to support her clients. A real page-turner.
• When the Museum is Closed by Emi Yagi - A Latin interpreter falls in love with the statue she's hired to chat to. Brilliant.
• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans - I can't say much about this without spoiling it, but I LOVED IT! Highly recommended.
• Wants & Needs by Roxy Dunn - A polyamorous romcom about the fleeting nature of love...very timely, very needed!
• she will need a stable boy by Jamie Lock - What a gorgeous pamphlet to start the year with. Jamie's debut pamphlet is "full of gender" and gorgeous, descriptive language about love, non-binary identity, familial relationships and solidarity with other trans people.

Mairi

• Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe - Terrific and terrible and fascinating.
• Kill Billionaire by Anders Lustgarten - The author thinks he is very clever and can therefore be incredibly irritating. All the more so, as the book is actually a real page turner and very funny for all it being very on the nose.
• Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth - Fantastic and funny, utterly compelling character portraits.
• Yellowface by R.F Kuang - Worth all the hype, a painful satire for a moment when publishing is rolling back commitments to diverse and inclusive publishing.

Noor

• Babylon, Albion by Dalia al-Dujaili - A short but thoughtful read about the ways we connect with place, the environment and the narrative of belonging.
• Boundless by Jillian Tamaki - This was a gift from a friend and I was a bit blown away by how, firstly, I had never read short stories in graphic novel form before, and secondly, how effectively each one could be intriguing, contemplative, unnerving or strange. Jillian Tamaki is an incredible artist and storyteller.
• My Grandfather the Master Detective by Masateru Konishi - A young woman and her grandfather have shared a game of solving mysteries by thinking up "stories" that would reveal the truth. But now, she uses the game to help her grandfather to resist the progress of dementia and keep him in her life for longer. Their relationship is heartfelt and loving, and interspersed with cunning and frightening stories of intrigue, horror and crime. Didn't expect to enjoy it so much but I did!

Nic

• What's The Use by Sarah Ahmed - A powerful analysis of the way we use the notion if 'usefulness', from it's quotidian meanings to it's institutional power in higher-education and bureaucratic weaponisation.
• Philosophy & Social Hope by Richard Rorty - A series of potent essays dismantling of the dualisms and vocabulary of Western Philosophy (from the Greeks to Englightenemnt to the twenieth century Analytic movement). By clearing the metaphysical baggage of Western Philosophy - i.e. there is no fundamental human nature, fundamental 'Truths' or 'Reality' outside of ourselves and our social concerns - Rorty paves the way for a far more humble, grounded and anti-foundationalist vision of all of human inquiry: social hope and solidarity. Philosophy, in this view, comes off it's pedestal, and is re-envisioned as one more cultural activity among many, as part of a larger social and cultural project to explore new vocabularities and concepts which help us to achieve social solidary. This book has forever changed the way I think of philosophy, culture and politics!